• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

Inexplicable Ephemera (Miscellaneous Stuff / Items Found)

Oh, that's a great idea; I can't believe I never thought of that! (the taking moulds not the smashing with the hammer/screaming part ;) )

Make a couple of limb reverse molds using brush-on latex, creating a 'pull' copy, ensuring it's thinner than usual, then (unconventionally) pop it inside-out.

I don't quite understand what you mean by this though... what's a 'pull copy', and why turn it inside out? And why would that be unconventional?

I've worked a lot with Fimo/Scupley, and I've had a play with resin casting, but I've never tried making my own moulds :)
 
My only idea so far to preserve it is to carefully varnish it with hairspray but if anyone can point me in the direction of a more professional and patient approach then thanks in advance ..

Before trying anything physical, photograph it! Modern digital cameras are good at macro work. For belt and braces, foto it in sections, and at least twice.
 
Before trying anything physical, photograph it! Modern digital cameras are good at macro work. For belt and braces, foto it in sections, and at least twice.
Actually, getting a professional photographer to make a very good copy of it might be the only way to save it for posterity. Limited edition prints and giclees* are only good photos or scans of the original artwork after all.

*posh French word for what is essentially an overpriced computer printout
 
Yeah ... the hairspray could work but then afterwards I have to put this paper down onto something which will cause it to stick onto whatever I place it on ... the museum angle is my first idea, I've taken stuff into the local museum before, it's just finding the time to be honest. I'd prefer to conserve it myself but if I'm not 100% certain that I can do it myself, I'm not going to risk wrecking it ..
Mr Plankton is correct - hold off with using hairspray.
The problem with that stuff is that it may acidify the paper further.
I think UV exposure may be making it acidify - have you got it under UV filtering glass?
Sadly, my knowledge of picture conservation doesn't stretch to newsprint conservation, so I agree with the others - take it to a museum.
 
I don't quite understand what you mean by this though... what's a 'pull copy', and why turn it inside out? And why would that be unconventional?
So: normally the procedure is: once you've applied a suitable release agent to an original (assuming a non-porous substance), you then paint-on the liquid latex, either with or without curing additive, and as either one single mold or multipiece if it's big (in which case you can add stop-dams and gutters made from plasticine or blutack). You then layer it up, ideally minimising bubbles, and if it's a truly massive mold you can add-in 'rebar' wire mesh or backing/non-definition rubber. But all of the above assumes that your pull is of a positive mold.

To replicate the missing limbs, I'm suggesting that there's a one-off skin mold taken, that retains internal detail on the inside, but is flipped inside-out, so, a left leg becomes a right-legged mold. This is like if you've got two right-handed gloves and need to emulate a pair.

Sculpy...haven't seen that for years. Have you ever tried Sugru, incidently?

ps I've done limited resin work, mainly plaster work. And years ago, some lost-wax displacement casting in lead/tin...
 
Last edited:
Ah! I see what you mean now :)

I've just dug them out of the drawer, and they're not in a left or right; even the little hand! They're very small too; barely an inch in length. It must have been a very cheap doll, as you would expect coming from the garden of what was originally a two up, two down.

I've seen Sugru for sale, but never had a project that needed anything like that. A quick Google suggests that it might be the ideal thing for taking the moulds though, as I'm only going to need a small amount.

Thanks very much for the tips :D
 
Before trying anything physical, photograph it! Modern digital cameras are good at macro work. For belt and braces, foto it in sections, and at least twice.

The front side of what's left of the broadsheet is all advertising which is interesting in itself, the reverse is more regional news which I don't want to be responsible for destroying .. I won't rush into any decision on this find ...
 
Before trying anything physical, photograph it! Modern digital cameras are good at macro work. For belt and braces, foto it in sections, and at least twice.
Sorry to double post but yes, that was my first idea although the printing company were too frightened to take it out of its temporary frame ..they were supposed to do that for me instead of just giving me a bottle of wine instead. I'll probably have to try to do that myself now I've got a flashy camera .. or loan it to Cromer Museum to see if they'll do the leg work for me ! ..
 
I'll probably have to try to do that myself now I've got a flashy camera...
I assume you mean a high-tech camera...

Try to use natural light rather than flash, though.
 
I assume you mean a high-tech camera...

Try to use natural light rather than flash, though.
Yep .. high tech and when I get around to bloody working out how to hook it up to the internet !
 
Yep .. high tech and when I get around to bloody working out how to hook it up to the internet !
1. Ignore the instructions/cables/etc
2. Buy a cheap USB media card reader for £20 and connect to PC
3. Remove the SD/MMC from your digi camera, insert into your new media card reader
4. Look under "My Computer" for the new temporary drive-letter, double-click open, see pictures. Drag/copy/singular or multiple/delete, anything.
5. Sorted. No software/leads/Bluetooth/incantations. Works perfectly....only fiddle is getting card out/in. Do it once, then, subsequently wearing a blindfold and handcuffs- it's just as easy.....
 
Last edited:
G'day Swifty. I'm just thinking here, and wonder if laminating it would work?
 
Before trying anything physical, photograph it! Modern digital cameras are good at macro work. For belt and braces, foto it in sections, and at least twice.

Good idea Ryn, then, with a little post processing, e.g.,colour adjust, lightening through mid range levels, contrast, and finally unsharp mask, it would come to an approximate in definition of the day of printing.
 
Back on page one of this thread I mentioned some of the stuff - including laudanum addicted frogs (okay, using my imagination a bit there) - that I found under the floorboards in my home while I was in the process of renovating it. I didn't however mention the plastic carrier bag.

One winter evening I was routing electrical cable under the floorboards when I found a blockage between two joists. The object causing the blockage was almost out of reach - literally at my outstretched fingertips. It was also quite heavy...and about head sized. It wasn't a head: when I managed to pull it out I found an old Boots carrier bag (I'd guess, by the design, circa early 70's), full of used sanitary towels. (And boy, were they not discrete back in the day.)

I suppose I'm supposed to say how gross it was, but my immediate reaction was one of pity - that some poor girl (I assume) was so ashamed/confused/shocked by the natural processes of her body that she had to go to such lengths to regularly hide the evidence - possibly as much from herself as anyone else. Chances are she's still around - I hope it didn't take her too long to realise it was all okay.

To me the thing about finds like that is that the act of finding dissolves the effects of time on the object in question - the act of discovery creates a jolt of immediacy. It's kind of hard to explain, but when I realised what was in the bag I found that I was not looking at what someone did - but what someone does; the act of finding and the act of putting away are barely separate - the space in between emotionally irrelevant. I don't know if that makes sense at all.

A couple of years back I was doing renovation work in a very old meeting house in the Old Town area of Edinburgh. (Three winter weeks, on my own, with temperamental lighting and only Stevie the roofer for occasional chats - and if someone told me he wasn't really there, I'm not sure I'd be taken completely by surprise.) You always find bits and pieces of other peoples lives on those jobs; hidden away - literally - between the cracks. The one that got me on this job was a small, cheap Woolworths notebook with a flowery cover - full of figures and dates from the mid to late 1960's, and written throughout in the same slightly shaky hand (which became shakier as the years passed).

After studying it for a while I realised it was someone's tea fund accounts - tea, milk, and sometimes biscuits, all assiduously accounted for in that increasingly shaky handwriting. Whoever wrote this took their apparently meagre responsibilities very seriously and the misplacing of that tiny little notebook must have represented quite a loss for someone who took such care - either that, or the notebook was free to roam because its author was gone and there was no-one to feel its loss any more.

Whatever the story, I'd like to think that wee wifey is now being served tea and bourbon creams in paradise by the preachers.
 
Last edited:
Thanks for the suggestions everyone, I'm going to take the paper to the local museum and see if I can get an expert to restore it or at least take pictures of it as Rynner has suggested ... laminating it could damage it IMO because I didn't think about the factor that it had been outside for over 100 years so it dried out too quickly in our dining room. I'll hand it over to the pros ..
 
I found the unglazed clay arm from a small Victorian (I'm guessing) doll in my parent's garden when we were digging a pond. A few years later, I found a leg, with a glazed brown shoe in a flowerbed!

As they were the same size, I'm guessing they were from the same doll; probably thrown out when the head broke, as the heads were usually hollow. The body would have been leather or cloth, so that's obviously rotted away; the clay parts have a ridge at the top where the material would have been gathered around them.

I intended to dig over the rest of the garden, bit by bit, to find the other arm and leg, but I never got around to it, and my parents moved a few years ago, so I will never find them now :(
Oh heck that's reminded me of another. Also doll related.

As I posted elsewhere on here, my friend died recently. We did living history events together - our interest being the 1750s, and she loved all things eighteenth century. She also collected historical dolls for that period.

A week or two after she died, we were tidying the back garden and my husband comes sprinting towards me with a little plastic 18thC shoe in his hand, bigger than Barbie sized. We both say "WTF" - both have the same thought it's our friend, who just died. Just the sort of trick she'd play. I have lived in this house 13 years or so and all my kids had was Action Man. Then I remember, one of them had a Dr Who figure that was that automaton in 18thC costume... Must be his shoe! Just a coincidence maybe but my husband has kept it as a good luck thingy and takes it everywhere with him in his pocket. SHould say our garden is over 100 ft long and just been churned over by a mini digger on that side. (Had to dig old Leylandi roots out). So a lot of stuff has been churned up and it's wrong time of year to re-seed the grass... This was lying on the surface.
 
Last edited:
Back on page one of this thread I mentioned some of the stuff - including laudanum addicted frogs (okay, using my imagination a bit there) - that I found under the floorboards in my home while I was in the process of renovating it. I didn't however mention the plastic carrier bag.

One winter evening I was routing electrical cable under the floorboards when I found a blockage between two joists. The object causing the blockage was almost out of reach - literally at my outstretched fingertips. It was also quite heavy...and about head sized. It wasn't a head: when I managed to pull it out I found an old Boots carrier bag (I'd guess, by the design, circa early 70's), full of used sanitary towels. (And boy, were they not discrete back in the day.)

I suppose I'm supposed to say how gross it was, but my immediate reaction was one of pity - that some poor girl (I assume) was so ashamed/confused/shocked by the natural processes of her body that she had to go to such lengths to regularly hide the evidence - possibly as much from herself as anyone else. Chances are she's still around - I hope it didn't take her too long to realise it was all okay.

To me the thing about finds like that is that the act of finding dissolves the effects of time on the object in question - the act of discovery creates a jolt of immediacy. It's kind of hard to explain, but when I realised what was in the bag I found that I was not looking at what someone did - but what someone does; the act of finding and the act of putting away are barely separate - the space in between emotionally irrelevant. I don't know if that makes sense at all.

A couple of years back I was doing renovation work in a very old meeting house in the Old Town area of Edinburgh. (Three winter weeks, on my own, with temperamental lighting and only Stevie the roofer for occasional chats - and if someone told me he wasn't really there, I'm not sure I'd be taken completely by surprise.) You always find bits and pieces of other peoples lives on those jobs; hidden away - literally - between the cracks. The one that got me on this job was a small, cheap Woolworths notebook with a flowery cover - full of figures and dates from the mid to late 1960's, and written throughout in the same slightly shaky hand (which became shakier as the years passed).

After studying it for a while I realised it was someone's tea fund accounts - tea, milk, and sometimes biscuits, all assiduously accounted for in that increasingly shaky handwriting. Whoever wrote this took their apparently meagre responsibilities very seriously and the misplacing of that tiny little notebook must have represented quite a loss for someone who took such care - either that, or the notebook was free to roam because its author was gone and there was no-one to feel its loss any more.

Whatever the story, I'd like to think that wee wifey is now being served tea and bourbon creams in paradise by the preachers.
That can be cultural, too. An old lady in Birmingham once told me a family from another culture moved into the house opposite her's and when the house was sold, they found plastic carrier bags full of used sanitary towels under the floorboards of an upstairs room. Apparently, that was how they disposed of them in the old country and no-one had explained about flushing em down the loo. That would be the 1970s, too. She wasn't a racist - had quite a liberal, Quaker-ish upbringing despite being in her 80s.... I knew her quite well and had no reason to disbelieve her. This may also be one of them urban myths, of course?
 
That can be cultural, too. An old lady in Birmingham once told me a family from another culture moved into the house opposite her's and when the house was sold, they found plastic carrier bags full of used sanitary towels under the floorboards of an upstairs room. Apparently, that was how they disposed of them in the old country and no-one had explained about flushing em down the loo. That would be the 1970s, too. She wasn't a racist - had quite a liberal, Quaker-ish upbringing despite being in her 80s.... I knew her quite well and had no reason to disbelieve her. This may also be one of them urban myths, of course?

Back when I was living in my flat (in a large neglected Victorian building, although my flat was nice), a young Brazilian couple and their baby moved in down my corridor ... they were nice enough but they kept the kid's used nappies in a bin liner. There wasn't room for a bin outside the building so we all had to chuck our rubbish in a disused room next to the building's front door. The smell was atrocious to the point where me and the missus had to rub Vic ointment under our noses just to leave and enter the building.

Before it got that bad, one day I was taking a rubbish bag downstairs, got to the room, saw that I needed more space so made the mistake of pushing the Brazilian family's bin bag down while leaning over it. The result was one of the worst smells ever being directly blasted into my face. Anyone who's ever caught a wiff of just one stinky nappy will sympathise ...
 
Ah we have new-ish well been here 2 years now but round here that's 'new') neighbours whohave a used nappy/lager can/takeaway box garden feature. The smell was fantastic. The rats are epic.
 
I found a small stone 'hula hoop' a few years back in some gravel next to Sheringham beach. It was coated on the inside with glazing of some sort so I though it might be some kind of boat's rope lead. I took it to the local museum and after a few months they returned it surmising that it was once the seal on a ginger beer bottle,
 
Oh heck that's reminded me of another. Also doll related.

As I posted elsewhere on here, my friend died recently. We did living history events together - our interest being the 1750s, and she loved all things eighteenth century. She also collected historical dolls for that period.

A week or two after she died, we were tidying the back garden and my husband comes sprinting towards me with a little plastic 18thC shoe in his hand, bigger than Barbie sized. We both say "WTF" - both have the same thought it's our friend, who just died. Just the sort of trick she'd play. I have lived in this house 13 years or so and all my kids had was Action Man. Then I remember, one of them had a Dr Who figure that was that automaton in 18thC costume... Must be his shoe! Just a coincidence maybe but my husband has kept it as a good luck thingy and takes it everywhere with him in his pocket. SHould say our garden is over 100 ft long and just been churned over by a mini digger on that side. (Had to dig old Leylandi roots out). So a lot of stuff has been churned up and it's wrong time of year to re-seed the grass... This was lying on the surface.

Metal Detector Time GITM!...backyards are amazing places for discoveries - especially under the clothes line - I found an 1877 QV shilling in the next door neighbours yard after they demolished the house (Circa 1880) - it was suggested by an old builder that they most probably placed the shilling on one of the piers at the time it was being built (an old custom, it seems), to grant whoever lived there abundance and prosperity in their lives there.
 
That can be cultural, too. An old lady in Birmingham once told me a family from another culture moved into the house opposite her's and when the house was sold, they found plastic carrier bags full of used sanitary towels under the floorboards of an upstairs room. Apparently, that was how they disposed of them in the old country and no-one had explained about flushing em down the loo. That would be the 1970s, too. She wasn't a racist - had quite a liberal, Quaker-ish upbringing despite being in her 80s.... I knew her quite well and had no reason to disbelieve her. This may also be one of them urban myths, of course?
That's quite interesting. One of my friends was in hospital once sharing a room with a lady of another culture and that lady kept all her used sanitary towels in the cabinet beside her bed, much to my friend's disgust.
 
I'm enjoying that this discussion has lately turned toward being an Urban Archaeology thread. Spookdaddy's compassionate musings can move us all toward and beyond the old cliche "one man's trash is another man's treasure," not that the actual find is a museum piece; more of a think piece.
We had a (barely) working metal detector when we first moved to our place. Found what looked like a battered back of a brush for a silver-backed toilette set and the leg of a c. 1900 stove. Would love to get a really good detector and find something thought-provoking, spooky, or, of course, worth millions.
 
Yes - a good Viking hoard was found not far from here - they are vague about precisely where but it's in an area where we walk the dog. I often wish I had a metal detector!

I found a huge lump of blue glass - the size of a big piece of coal - in the ploughed field behind our house, about ten years ago. I was telling someone who makes repro Viking/Roman glass beads about it - I'd thought it was nothing important; just a bit of industrial waste (often the night soil from nearby York was carted out here and dumped on the fields, so amongst the crap was other stuff and that's why the finds seem so random). But he said it was a really rare find. Next show he traded at, I gave him it. He was going to melt it down to make beads but I understand he kept it and takes it when he does talks. I wasn't getting any use out of it so wanted someone who'd love it, to have it.
 
This is a very interesting read I must say. I have in my time found a few interesting things here and there.

Once, when renovating a house in South Africa with my dad we moved a shelf off the wall (in what was the garage) to find an arrow behind it. Must have been there for at least 30 years or so as the elderly people who lived there before us didn't seem the archery type.
Also, same house, when ripping up the carpet in the lounge we found (apart from some very lovely parquet flooring) old new papers as well as an old 1/2 penny.

In later years. When digging my vegetable patch in a house I found a whole mishmash of things (apparently the area I was digging was where the builders dumped all their waste). So part from a LOT of glass (much of it weirdly not even close to the glass installed in the house), bricks, stones I also found some bizarre things. Like 1 knitted baby bootie. No other baby stuff... just that one knitted baby shoe.
 
I'm enjoying that this discussion has lately turned toward being an Urban Archaeology thread. Spookdaddy's compassionate musings can move us all toward and beyond the old cliche "one man's trash is another man's treasure," not that the actual find is a museum piece; more of a think piece.
We had a (barely) working metal detector when we first moved to our place. Found what looked like a battered back of a brush for a silver-backed toilette set and the leg of a c. 1900 stove. Would love to get a really good detector and find something thought-provoking, spooky, or, of course, worth millions.

Gerda, Aldi's sometimes sells detectors and while they are cheap, as metal detectors go, they have a rather good reputation.
 
I found an abandoned paperback Koran recently. It was oddly fortuitous as I'd just started to listen to a a free audiobook version of it.
 
Let us know if you make any sense of it. :bananas::D
 
Back
Top