As we told you in the previous post, it has been more than a year since we started working on the Tánata’s little house. It was November 2020 and very recently we had discovered, on Instagram, a miniature universe that we couldn’t stop looking at.
We wanted one!, so we created our own, although it took much longer than we thought, of course, the things of the palace…
At the beginning of everything, it was four tanatile pieces, the smallest we could make. Modeled in clay, irregular and disproportionate. We painted them with acrylics and varnished them with nail polish: they were perfect. We had to find a suitable home for them, and as on so many occasions, we had it right under our noses.
The little house itself, made of wood, was more than 40 years old, Ana’s father made it to be a doll’s house. She was forgotten in the workshop, out in the open, a little damaged by the humidity, but no one had ever considered getting rid of her. As it was very well made, we only had to change the base and the wood of the ceiling and repaint it so that it would look like it did in its best times. It was time to revive her inside as well.
For the first time, we had the opportunity to completely design a space and we wanted to do it with things that we really liked. We made drawings and models on cardboard, to decide the proportions and the furniture that we would undoubtedly need: upstairs, a good bookcase, a desk, a bed… downstairs, a kitchen unit, a dining table, a sofa… For many things, we asked for help from the beginning: Énola, made us the bookcase, Batlló, the desk, Silvia Ceñal, the dining table, and Hamabi, sewed us a blanket. Every thing we received seemed precious to us.
El resto de los muebles, los hicimos nosotras con cartón y madera finita, pero a medida que avanzábamos y pasaban las semanas, queríamos añadir más cosas y, por primera vez, tampoco el tiempo, ni el presupuesto, eran un problema. 🌈
For the floor, we chose our favorite from El Mosaista pfor the top floor, which we printed to scale, the Abe the Ape paper for Cordonné (although we had a hard time deciding between the black background and the raw one because we liked black better, but was too dark for the kitchenette), a combination of Todobarro tiles (at first we tried green tones, but we stayed with the terracotta and white checkerboard), the chairs, the kitchen furniture… Also, we put the house some stairs, which before there was only a small ramp, and we added a low wall in the living room that allowed us to put pictures, but that did not cover the light of the stairs.
The months went by and the little house, little by little, was filled with things: Amara Montes‘ mobile, Degerónimo‘s basket, a bunch of favorite books, Peseta‘s notebook, Casita de Wendy‘s tray…Olga made us all the menus and a basket of wool for knitting, also the rug in the living room; Babastudio, sent us their scale mirror and Diana, made us some cushions. The little house was already home.
Then we framed illustrations we liked and our own tiny pictures (and those of the family animals: Gota, Eddie, Pipi, and Timon). We dressed the bed with the scrap of a skirt that was a favorite and that, although torn, no one was going to throw away either, and we made a cardboard alarm clock (we are very early risers) and a jar of pencils with colored toothpicks.
To make the booklets, we used bits of magazine, which were then covered, and we also made the miniature magazines themselves. We print the covers of many beloved books that accompany us in the real world: the French dictionary, the Rebeldes de S.E. Hinton, in the red edition of The Steamboat, our fat artist books…
And little by little, we also completed the tanatil trousseau: all our pieces, or almost all of them, reproduced on a microscopic scale with polymer clay and ceramics. Polymer clay is quick and can be made at home, although it is a pain to paint and it models much worse than clay, which in turn has the drawback that it has to be fired in the ceramic oven…so we interspersed, and we were making slugs, teapots, Abundio, ELLOS, Botebot, Bichos bola, Expri, Saltimbanquis, Botits, Ballenota….our trousseau was getting fatter.
Until, almost a year after starting the project, when we already had all the ingredients, the day of the video recording arrived (which had to be postponed several times before because it always rained). With the help of Marta, we took everything to the Parque del Oeste, an orchard in the center of Madrid. It was a cold November afternoon, it was sunny and we chose a site with a waterfall in the background and an orange tree. The park was spectacular.
We had already chosen the Oba Tenga song, “En la cama”, a tribute to Gota the cat and the wardrobe: Pablo would go in his pajamas and slippers, but since it was cold, we let him keep his clothes underneath (after all, it was our video, we didn’t want to suffer losses in our ranks and he had to keep his voice).
We had a good time and it took us several hours (the day got cloudy as soon as the musician arrived, things fall all the time in the mini world and when you go to put them up, you throw away others that have to be put back up, the air moved the little lamps, we had to improvise the plants from vases and pots, we were laughing…) A bird flew out in the last take we did, marking the end of the recording, and we returned home frozen, but happy with the result.
All that remained was to edit the video and Javi, also from Oba Tenga, helped us to make it sound good and not forget any collaborator (which was very important).
As a final touch, we chose the best photos of the house and designed our first calendar. There is only one left, and maybe we will draw it, what do you think of the idea?
We hope you liked the story of the house, which may have been a bit long for us, but we wanted to tell it well. Now it is happy and covered, and we are looking forward to expanding it, completing it or showing it, but we will tell you about that another time.
Thanks for being on the other side and have a nice day!
Ana and Natalia
PS: We lost the pencil pot in Parque del Oeste at Madrid, and we were very sorry. If someone has it in their possession, return it to us, please. We miss it.
