Miniatura

Suzy Riley is the creative lady behind Life of Riley, making a wide range of food and plants in 1/12^th and 1/24^th scale and delicate handmade lace items. Her website has an online shop, and here Suzy’s wares are set out for you to browse and buy.

There’s a wide range of sweet treats to make your mouth water: cherry bakewells, cherry pie, a basket of Easter eggs, wedding cakes, birthday cakes, chocolate curl cake – the choice goes on. Savoury foods too: cheese board, bread and pies, chopping board full of veg, box of peppers; and lots of plants – geraniums, daffodils in terracotta pots, trays of seedlings, gardening gloves. Perfect accessories for any dolls house kitchen, dining room, café or shop.

Her husband Alan helps out with making the wooden seed trays, vegetable crates and very importantly, her display stand.

Suzy is expanding her range of 1/24^th scale miniatures all the time, and they are proving very popular. She commented, “I don’t think there are many people out there making 1/24^th scale food. It’s a fiddly business!”

She learned the skills for making miniatures through many years of practice – and by working from a real example or a really good picture, which she says is very important.  But she says she is certainly not a baker in real life. “Far too healthy for that I’m afraid! But miniature cakes are one of my favourite things to make. Make of that what you will! We do a lot of gardening though.”

As for the beautiful lace items that she makes, Suzy joined a local lacemaking group about 20 years ago and learned to make lace, mainly because she wanted to see if she could make it in miniature. “It is Torchon bobbin lace, all my own designs.”

It’s not surprising that Suzy got into miniatures. As a child she always played with plasticine and then Fimo, making food and things for her toys. She said: “My mum used to take me to our local dolls house fair in Farnham as she planned to get a dolls house one day and used to buy bits and pieces for it. I would try and replicate the things I’d seen at the fair. Later I had a corner of the table when my family did car boot sales, selling miniature food and Fimo fridge magnets and badges. My mum finally got her ’proper’ dolls house around the time I left home, we did a lot of the decorating together.”

Suzy’s own dolls house which Alan bought her about 10 years ago as a birthday present is still a ‘work in progress’. She said, “It’s still in about a thousand pieces! We just never have the time! Hopefully one day it will be a bakery and tea rooms with house upstairs.”