Featured Artist : Tine Krijnen of Miniatuur Boekbinden
Tine Helps LDF Celebrate the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee
Every year we ask one of our exhibitors to make a special, limited edition gift for our 50 LDF Members. We always like to pick something that is relevant to the time & will be suitable for dolls houses from all periods.
This year was the Queens Platinum Jubilee. In the past we have created souvenir plates & mugs etc, so we wanted to have something a little more unusual. I always try to pick a different medium for the gift & thought it maybe good to have a souvenir magazine including photos of the Queen.
There was one person that sprang to mind.. Tine Krijnen. Tine has been attending the show for over 20 years & is always wanting to help out with our ideas. I mentioned this to her & she came up with the great idea of a royal photo album, with photos of the Queen & her parents over the last 100 years or so, this way the photo album could fit into many different eras. Perfect!
Tine discovered the world of miniature books when she attending a tourist market demonstrating ‘old crafts’. She was a bookbinder. A passerby asked if she could make a book for her dolls house. Tine was intrigued, what skills would she need to work in a smaller scale? A lot of patience for sure, working with such tiny sizes takes more time than in full scale. She also realised she would need to be creative about finding specialist tools & materials that would work when downsizing.
Tine’s mother taught her the basic bookbinding techniques then she also took a course, as she wanted to be able to re-bind her favourite children’s magazines. After that she realised bookbinding was ‘it’.
The most important thing to capture in miniature is the atmosphere that the miniature should evoke. I like to work as realistically as possible. Preferably as authentically as possible too, within the limitation of the scale.
The tools she uses are not that unusual, a 9mm Stanley knife, various glasses of different strengths & her favourite, a Linex ruler. She works in her house but will move around depending on the season & where the light is best.
“When I work on my miniature books I get into a Zen mode. I can shut myself off from the rest of the world, just like I do when I read a good book.”
Both her full time job & her hobby, there are parts of the work that are painstaking & frustrating. Decorating the covers of her tiny books with gold is a delicate job that cannot be repaired if you make a mistake, but working on new things is her biggest joy. She is currently working on a limited edition of Psalm 23 in three versions. A kind of illuminated handwriting, calligraphy by A. van den Berg and illustrations by Tine. She colours each book individually with watercolour and gold details.
So yes, her Platinum Jubilee photo album was, unsurprisingly, a huge success with our members & if you are lucky enough to own one, keep it safe & we did actually make 55 of these special photo albums & will be giving you the chance of winning one throughout the showcase, so keep your eyes peeled!
CLICK HERE to see more of Tine’s work.
