It had pans, table and chairs, even Joey’s Thanksgiving turkey. I’ve also done Harry Potter sets and the store from Schitt’s Creek
‘People are drawn to something so tiny, yet perfectly complete’: Nora Chavez at home in El Paso, Texas.‘People are drawn to something so tiny, yet perfectly complete’: Nora Chavez at home in El Paso, Texas.did not grow up with an art background. I was born in the small city of Parral, in Chihuahua, northern Mexico and, as a child, my mind was drawn more to maths and science.
When I decorated the house for the holidays, our centrepiece was a Christmas village made from miniature houses. It started out as a couple of snow-topped houses set on a side table, but over the years it grew. The children sought out miniatures at garage sales. Often, they were broken and I’d restore them. Eventually, every Christmas, the hallway in our house transformed into an intricate village of tiny homes and festive figures.
At one garage sale, when Nora was 12, she saw an old wooden doll’s house. She had always wanted one of the elaborate ones she saw in movies, but they were too expensive. This one was $20, with a few pieces of Victorian-style furniture, so we bought it. For a month, we’d work on it together at weekends. I took out the old carpets and floral wallpaper, and created little accessories. I made pillows, sewn by hand, and tiny books printed on paper, cut and bound.
Nora loved that doll’s house, but she outgrew it and our interest in miniatures disappeared. Around 2010, we moved to Texas and I gained a master’s in maths, then taught middle schoolers. I found crossovers between what I was teaching and my work on the doll’s house – scale, geometry. Five years ago, during a shopping trip with Nora, now at graduate school, we came across a “construct your own” doll’s house kit and bought it as a summer project. She dug out her old accessories and I spent afternoons making miniatures for it in the garage. I watched YouTube tutorials and collected household items: plastic tags from new clothes became bottle dispensers, milk bottle caps were turned into plates and matchboxes into drawers.
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