This week my mind is all over the place, so I've grouped some random thoughts under C to share with you. C is for comfort food, crochet cat, curated collection, and Chaco. C is also for covetous creeps who consume my time. Those are covered under Curate.
Do you have a special comfort food? When I'm feeling out of sorts, a slice of bread spread with peanut butter goes a long way to smoothing things out. It's even healthy. The cute dolly tableware is manufactured at
Ceramix, where I sometimes work. Here in South Africa we have a brand of peanut butter called Black Cat. It's my favourite.
I haven't had time to crochet anything this year, so I made this little cross looking cat. I found the pattern
HERE. Hitty likes cats, I think I will let her keep it.
People sometimes contact me when they want to sell their collection of teddy bears, dolls, or related items.
But is it really a collection? If someone has a box filled with a hundred teddy bears, and the box includes mass produced synthetic Valentines, hand-me-downs with no provenance, and little bears in traditional costume they bought to remind them of their holiday in far flung places, it's a sentimental hoard, not a collection. Unless the boyfriend forked out for a limited edition bear, or the tatty one eyed bear inherited from a great aunt turns out to be an early Steiff, probably nothing in that box has any monetary value. In a collection, it's not quantity that counts, it's quality.
If you want to make sure that your collection becomes worth money, here are some tips to
curate it
.
What is a curated collection? It's easy.
- Items in a collection have a unifying theme. It can be as broad as 'teddy bears' or 'dolls' or 'dollhouse', or as specific as 'late Victorian 1/12 scale artisan made English dollhouse furniture'. If your collection grows too large, you might consider specializing.
- Items are organized and looked after. Not just a jumble in a box. Make sure every item in your collection is clean, dusted, well maintained, correctly stored or displayed.
- Trade up. Don't be afraid to sell or swap in order to improve the
quality of your collection. If you find a better example of an item
you have, trade or sell it, and add on a little extra money to get the
better one. That way your collection will grow better without growing
bigger. Museums do it all the time.
- Weed your collection. We all have the problem that our collections tend to outgrow available space. From time to time, go through your collection and look for items that don't fit in anymore. Maybe you found a better specimen and now you have a duplicate. There's that piece that isn't quite the right scale. Your taste has changed, or these days you can afford something better, or your field of interest has narrowed. Get rid of a few things. A small collection with good quality items is worth more than a large discordant collection. It's also much more pleasing to look at and display. If your surplus items have no value, donate them to someone who's just starting a collection. If you think you can get money for it, visit eBay or sell it at a show. You can use the money to add a quality item to your collection.
- Collections are documented. Keep a little book and write down where and when you acquired an item, how much you paid for it, who made it and when they made it, and any other information you might have. You can even add a picture. If some day your collection needs to be sold, or passes on to someone else as a legacy, documentation to back up the provenance and value of items will be of utmost importance.
Even my spider collection is curated and well documented. Each tarantula has a fact sheet where I write down when I bought/traded it, their size, sex, date last molted etc.
Meet Ms Chaco. She's big as a house, ha ha. That's a 1/144 scale dollhouse made by my friend Frieda la Grange in 2017. Ms Chaco is a
Grammostola pulchripes aka Chaco golden knee tarantula. Chacos are native to Argentina, this one was captive bred. She's 12cm (4 1/2 inches) long. This young lady will grow to 22cm (8 1/2 inches) over her lifetime of about 15 years. Because of poor record keeping by her previous owner, I don't know her exact age or how many times she has molted, but we think she's about four years old. She was a rescue purchase from an owner who had lost interest and sold her entire 'collection'. When Chaco came to us she was badly dehydrated and looking very sorry for herself. The first day, she sat with her face in her water bowl for hours. It made me cry. Over the next few days she ate voraciously, then went into premolt and just rested and didn't move around much for several weeks. She moulted two weeks ago. I took her out of her terrarium today to give it a good clean. Her new exoskeleton is beautiful and sleek, none of the bald patches and scars she had before. Now that she's settled in, she's a very calm and docile girl. Because of their hardiness and friendly nature, Chacos are recommended tarantulas for beginner collectors.
