Our collection of tiny art began years ago. Today, paintings on two- or three-inch canvases, a pottery vase the size of a fig, a statue three inches tall (and more curios) pose in our tiny gallery on a shelf in a nook in our family room. I wonder about installing small art lighting and labels to our pieces—and maybe building different floors and rooms for them too—to complete the gallery look. The idea makes me smile.
My love of miniature things has expanded. Instagram first lured me in with its tiny cooking accounts—or accounts of tiny cooking, rather, because there’s nothing little about the accounts themselves or their massive followings.
I watch normal-size fingers prepare teeny ingredients with little kitchen utensils, turning them into minuscule dishes in miniature kitchens. I slip outside of my body for these videos, and when they end, I note my softened expression, slowed breathing, and peace humming throughout my being.
Instagram tracks my movements and offers me similar accounts of possible interest—and I indulge. How can someone print and bind full novels in the size of a matchbook? Or knit a sweater as small as a nickel?
The magnetism of the minuscule draws me toward more, but a story about a friend from the past sparks in my mind.
One day years ago, over cups of coffee, my friend proposed an idea.
“What if I had a place in my yard—like a place where I could sit and read or whatever—that I put a roof on? And what if I added sides to it and maybe windows? That would be amazing,” she said, the look of inspiration blushing her cheeks. “Like a shelter but with walls and electricity.”
“You mean, like a little house?” I said. “Or enclosed gazebo?”
The light fled from my friend’s eyes, but she laughed. “Oh, yeah.”
Her revelation—her reframing of thought—told her the truth. Her fresh-to-her idea was as old as time.
And so it is with me today. I reframe my thoughts of all things tiny, and a touch of queasiness comes.
“Am I a dollhouse person?” I say aloud to myself, a pit forming in my stomach. Flicka hears me. “I can’t be a dollhouse person. I don’t like knickknacks, and dollhouses are tacky.”
My girl laughs but says nothing. I cringe.
I plan to add more to my teeny gallery—maybe a petite tapestry or other woven textile to grace my gallery’s walls. Or an empty spool of thread as a pedestal for a micro teapot. And I’ll throw the little white lie that I’m not a dollhouse person into my art exhibition too.
It’ll be cute there.
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*Names in this blog have been changed to protect my family, neighbors, and friends in the neighborhood, and in a nod of appreciation to the beloved Swedish author Maj Lindman, I’ve renamed my three blondies Flicka, Ricka, and Dicka.