old, older, 'oldst' ;)

hello again my dear minifriends, I'm so glad you're here! It's pretty quiet here isn't it? But not in my head, where lots of old and new (mini)ideas are always floating around, giving a nice ring to my mind and something fun to focus on. And since a couple of weeks I can even do a little here and there and I'm hoping to finish and show some items soon, can't wait!

what I like to show you now and I'm very excited about is some old stuff; really, REALLY old. I've had them a while now and wanted to show them when I had been able to make simple displays for them, but that might take a while because I want to do the other things first, so here they are!

getting to own these great old relics got started with Pinterest where I came across something from Tony's great blog Miniature Treasures. Tony uses treasures, hence his blog name, he finds in the ground like old coins and other beautiful stuff for most of his miniatures. Which make them beyond special I think. I wouldn't want to (or could) copy what he does, but the idea of using old small relics in miniatures appealed to me.

out of curiosity and not expecting to find anything, I did a quick search for artefacts on our Dutch online marketplace, comparable to Ebay and Craigslist. To my surprise I found a seller of some great ones that wouldn't leave my mind... From a bunch of other wonderful excavated ministuff I choose the 3 I couldn't choose between, weren't too expensive and also fitted the 1:12th scale best. I asked them from my boyfriend for my birthday that was coming up. Well, sort of, it was only 6 weeks away :D. Not something I usually do, but wanted to make the exception. And lucky for me, he thought it was a great idea!

not sure if pieces such as these would be more likely to be found in a miniature museum as opposed to a miniature antique&old stuff-store, but if not: hey, that's the great thing about this mini world, we can do things the way we like!

there's just nothing like natural aging, there's no way I could distress anything like this!

the bronze 2000 year (!) old horse (3cm's or 1 and 3/16th inch) has been used as a cloak pin or a woman's stole in ancient Rome, called a fibula (yes, like the bone). Because of it's purpose it's flat on the back and has things on that back that once held the actual pin. It looks like a miniature table statue and is what I wanted it for, but statues don't have flat backs with thingies on it. After some thinking however I decided I liked it so much I didn't mind that and it would still work great as a small statue. I'm all for as realistic as possible, but sometimes I don't mind to compromise, especially not with a piece this unique and special.

I've been thinking who this was made for: maybe a little Roman girl as a gift from her parents, or maybe from a guy to his girlfriend or a husband to his wife? Or just bought by a person needing a cloak pin ;) . And would she (I'm guessing it was a she, but maybe men liked and wore horses on their clothing too) have worn it daily or just on special occasions? And I can only guess it must have been someone with money or a metalworker who could make it himself? I just can't imagine ordinairy people could afford to have a shaped fibula if at all, but maybe they did? Not so familiar with Roman times, especially not those kind of details :D

the religious kind of object is a medieval pilgrim badge of tin from around the year 1500, that I think will make a great antique wallsculpture.

the dish is a 10-12th century Byzantine dish-coin that comes from a big treasurefind in Turkey acoording to the seller. This little piece started out as money, became useless and degraded to just being soilfiller for ages. To now becoming an item to be 'sold' in my miniature Oldtique Store, how cool is that? The story to go with that might be it was used in those times as a servingdish for regionally famous chickenhearts on Sundays by the rich and wealthy? I really don't know, my knowledge of the miniature upper class Byzantine foodserving habits is not that great, but sounds like a possibility, right?

prehistoric

then I've got even older stuff to put in the Oldtiquestore-to-be that I came across online while looking for the artefacts: fossils! Two that are 65-112 million years old, and another one about less than half that age, but still a whopping 35 million years old. The fun part: they were nicely cheap (less than a euro each, probably because they're so common and the light one not being in the best shape (as compared to other same kind of fossils, that are often a lot better preserved or nicer formed). The pink shell I added for colour, it's very small for such a nice kind I think.

the oldest fossils are ammonites. These are of a prehistoric squidspecies related to our present day squid, but with the shell on the outside. The species have gone extinct around the same time the dinosaurs did.

source image: Polihierax, DeviantArt

according to Wikipedia (Dutch), ammonites are found in various sizes, ranging from less than a centimeter up to 2,5 meters! (more than 8 feet) So a great item to display as a miniature, it will always be to scale (as long as you'll never want to use one of over 20 cm's (7,87 inches) ;)

the second kind is the fossilized tooth of a ray (flatfish). Which at first I thought I could use as a 1:12th scale dinosaurtooth or something. Figuring they could be different, like this one, from teeth we know. But the teeth I can find of dinosaurs online have no ridges like the raytooth has or the shape, so I'm not sure there would have been any dinosaur with teeth resembling this one (but it was a quick online search, not a study ;) ). So I decided it to be a fossil of undetermined origine, because I really like the shape, texture and colour!

there, that was a little bit of history for ya, like it or not. But, if you got to here, you probably weren't too bored I guess :D