Miniatura

​If you’ve ever wondered about the secret lives of miniaturists, you’ll be fascinated to know that Angela, the woman behind Valerie Claire Miniatures leads a very different life when she’s not busy making attractive and delicate dolls house items. Then you will find her in the iron foundry surrounded by noise, fierce heat and massive heavy machinery. Although Angela works in Admin at her husband’s foundry, she very often has to venture deep into the foundry itself.

Yet another little quirk is the name of her miniature business – Valerie Claire Miniatures when her name is Angela. She explained, “Originally, this was to be a joint venture with my mum. Her name is Valerie and my middle name is Claire.”

Although she studied art, Angela actually trained as a beauty therapist and this shines through when you look at her miniatures: chemist and perfume items, beautiful filigree trays full of perfumes; a selection of perfume labels; perfume bottle tops and pretty bottles in various colours. There’s lots of haberdashery items: sewing shop displays and kits, knitting and scissors, tape measures; and then there are shoe box kits and high heeled shoes, and a host of other items for providing that final unique touch to any dolls house or shop.

“I hand-make things which I think of as a sympathetic range. Things which provide the finishing touches and fine detail to a room. I also make kits for people who want to build things themselves and I make the finished product for those who don’t.

 “I don’t work in metal, but I sell a lot of brass miniatures and metal trays which I buy in. And I do a lot of Christmas miniatures. I’m fascinated with all the sparkly Christmas baubles and they are very popular.”

Angela also has a new website making browsing the categories of her miniatures very easy to access. These include: Boutique, Bridal, Cameos and Mounts, Chemist – Shop and Bathrooms, Christmas packs, Christmas trees and Sparkly baubles. She has general shop items too, such as tins of Horlicks, Carnation milk, Hermes toilet rolls and much more.

She started doing miniatures back in 1993, working alongside her mum with two small children. “I’ve always loved doing craft, I’ve always made things and always enjoyed being creative.” With miniatures, she says she learned from the ground up. At the time she was also into modern technology and computers. “I was also interested in collecting ephemera and I yearned to be able to scan a photo into the computer and then be able to do things with it. But at the time scanners hadn’t been invented. Once they were, I got myself one, scanned in things I had collected, shrank them right down to 1/12^th scale and have never looked back.”