Miniature Monday #38: Cast Iron Goodies

Bambola Daisy doll, Antheea-Kai,
in front of a miniature replica stove from the early 1900's

Ever gone antiquing?  If you're like me with a fascination for old things or you like adding those unique miniature pieces to your doll dioramas, I highly recommend it.  You may not always find old stuff.  Surprisingly, I saw a never-removed-from-box Pop Life Christie doll at one of the antique malls and she's only roughly three years old.  However, you will find a lot of interesting things that your big box retail outlets don't and will never offer.

At the One-Of-A-Kind antique mall in Woodstock, ON, I found the cast iron stove pictured above.  I'd been eyeing cast iron miniatures for years but never took the plunge.  Last Thursday, towards the end of my one week vacation from work, I decided to finally purchase one.  It's not perfect by any means.  That's part of the charm of old things.  It came with the pot, pan, round bucket, coal bucket with shovel, three stove plates and one skillet plate.  I believe I am missing a stove plate with handle.  The two side extenders are removable and the oven door opens and closes.  All of them came in dirty conditions.  The pieces had very thick coats of dust all over them that they looked grey rather than black.  I used a damp cloth to wipe off the dirt, dried them, and gave all the pieces back their shine using a little bit of cooking oil on a dry cloth.  Any excess grease on the pieces were wiped off with a clean cloth.  And voila, they look decent again!  Luckily, they weren't rusty as that would have complicated the cleaning process.  I painted the embossed brand name marking on the oven door with gold paint, the way it would have originally looked like and added gold paint on the back shelves, just so it's not all black.

This sucker is a heavy toy and I love it!  From what I've gathered, it has its origins from salesmen who used to do door-to-door sales and carried around miniature samples of the real products they sold.  As far as I can tell, my stove and its pieces, old though they may be, are just reproductions of the salesman samples.  Still cool in my books!  In fact, I'm so loving these cast iron toys that I picked up two more from two different antique malls the next day: a floor coffee grinder from the 400 Market in Innisfil, ON and a water bucket with pump at Southworks Antiques in Cambridge, ON.

So, if you've never gone antiquing, try it sometime.  You never know what you'll discover from ye olden days!

Happy Monday!