Wednesday 10 September 2014

A Little Special WW1 Creation With A Story Attached



 I have been away up north for a couple of days folks, so my apologies if you have been trying to get hold of me by email or phone! Am now in the process of catching up on the backlog of emails. However, if a lady in Australia called Leila is reading this...sorry but my emails to you are bouncing back with the message "domain has no valid mail exchangers". I have no idea what that means as I have not come across that before but the only immediate solution that I can think of is if you could please contact me via a different email address?

Ok...now for something inspirational!

A delightful email with a photo from a customer called Sue Passmore popped into my inbox the other day, which utterly bowled me over!!! Sue, an author of several local history books, has been a customer of KT Miniatures for so long now that I simply cannot remember exactly when we first met! She has very kindly allowed me to share her photo and story on here so the following text is in Sue's own words.....

"This August our village - New Quay in Cardiganshire, staged an exhibition to commemorate those who served and died during the First World War. 

In a KT Miniatures newsletter I had seen advance notice of the dugout designed by Celia and Robin, in Dolls House & Miniature Scene magazine, and simply had to make it for the exhibition. The instructions were very easy to follow, I had to adapt it a little as we were planning for ours to be a dugout during the war, rather than revisited later. How accurate Celia and Robin's dugout proved to be, as was demonstrated by the discovery among the artefacts lent to us of a postcard showing King George V outside an identical dugout! 

So we displayed the two together. 

Everyone found the exhibition deeply moving. We are a small community, and the relatives and descendants of all the people named were known to us. My father and four of his 5 brothers served in the war and so we were able to include more than just photographs with items like his diary, and there were personal stories from many others too. Touches like the dugout helped the children to understand and in the prisoner of war section, we also had some real live lettuce as the prisoners struggled to grow their own food in biscuit tins for want of decent ground, which also impressed. Our visitors' book was full of appreciative comments from strangers as well. And several children said to me that they wanted to have a go at making their own dugout, so I told them where to find it." 

A big thank you to Sue for taking the time to send me this photo and story, and for letting me show it on here. If anyone else out there has been inspired by our WW1 project and gone on to make the dugout, do please get in touch....both Robin and I would love to hear from you. 

3 comments:

Giac said...

Hello Celia,
That was a beautiful post. I am so happy your hard work, research, attention to detail and accuracy was recognized and appreciated.
Big hug,
Giac

Robin said...

Well - I'm just overwhelmed!! What a superb 're-creation' - so very poignant along with the personal stories. It's both flattering and encouraging that you found our work helpful and inspiring. Thank you so much Sue for allowing us to share it.
As Celia says - we should be delighted to hear from anyone else who would consider allowing us to see their scene.
Rx

KT Miniatures said...

Aww...thanks Giac. We shall start blushing at this rate!

Robin and I have been greatly touched and encouraged to have received so many comments privately from readers of the DH&MS magazine saying how inspiring they have found this particular project...it seems to have grabbed people's imagination...which is really nice. Celia