Sometimes I devise a Toylocked picture when watching an episode (for the umpteenth time) and suddenly work out how to create a scene. Sometimes, however, I see a prop and work out how to use it to illustrate an episode.

Browsing in a craft shop near my home, I found a tiny pair of wire spectacle frames, designed for doll-making. My mind running on Sherlock, I instantly thought of the scene in His Last Vow where he looks through Magnussen’s glasses in the cafe.

The rest of the picture just followed on: the tiled floor is wrapping paper, the crockery is from my supply of dollshouse accessories, and the drip is made from a small plastic bag full of water, an allen key from a flat-pack furniture kit, the lead from an old pair of headphones… and Sherlock is wearing a piece of an old white handkerchief!

Another picture was inspired by seeing on a dollshouse supplier website a bed which looked just liked Sherlock’s.

This was quite an expensive prop, but it came with all the bedding and I managed to use it in more than one picture. Anyone who has watched the extras on the Sherlock DVDs will have seen how the crew working on A Scandal in Belgravia rigged up a real bed with a mechanical lift so that Sherlock appeared to fall into a bed in a field. In this case, he went to bed in my garden!

Seeing tiny boxes of chips (“fries” for American readers!) available online started me thinking about Sherlock’s apparent return from the dead in The Empty Hearse and the scene in a takeaway with John and Mary. I found online a tiny fish poster, another advertising “frying times”, and a perfect little gingham table. It made me wonder how many other people are out there creating tiny fish and chip shops.

Representing blood is complicated. The obvious answer would appear to be ketchup, but it shows up brown and smeary in a photo. The blood on Sherlock’s napkin is just ink. The blood on his face is writing icing from a supermarket.

Trawling through eBay for tiny crockery, I found a set of tiny Oriental teapots. Oh joy – an instant scene from The Blind Banker!

In that episode, Sherlock looks at the museum’s teapots in a glass case with glass shelves. I improvised with a glass shelf from a TV cabinet so that I could get the reflection. I haven’t been able to bring myself to give away the teapots since taking this – they are too perfect!

For many years I have had in my bathroom a soap-dish in the shape of an old-fashioned bath. It suddenly occurred to me that it was the perfect size for a Funko toy. Of course, they don’t make a version of Sherlock with no clothes on (shame!), so I had to make a lot of bubbles in order to cover up his coat and scarf. This scene doesn’t appear on screen – it’s my imagination of a scene behind the scenes of His Last Vow.  It took a surprising number of shots to get this right, because of the mirrors on the bathroom unit; I don’t want people to see me or the iPhone in the picture!

The bathroom unit and all the tiny props (toothbrush, toothpaste, loo rolls, razors) came in handy, though: they enabled me to create another picture which attracted a lot of positive feedback:

This time I used real shaving foam to create the right sort of bubbles for John as he desperately tries to convince himself and Mary, in The Empty Hearse, that he isn’t influenced by Sherlock. We all know better…

Finally in today’s blog, a a tiny wooden chest of drawers which I have have owned since I was a child took on a new life for Toylocked.  Some carefully folded and sewn strips of ribbon served as pairs of socks, and behold, Sherlock can check the sock index he mentions in A Scandal in Belgravia:

This was also a great opportunity to display the tiny iPad and laptop which I’ve used in a couple of pictures. Details fans will be interested to know that the book on top of the chest of drawers is a very small copy of Bradshaw’s Railway Guide, referred to by Sherlock Holmes in the original stories and by Victorian travellers in real life.  Toylocked: bringing you the authentic Sherlock Holmes experience in miniature!

John Watson is a long-suffering man. John’s Funko toy has also been through a lot in the Toylocked cause. If you are one of those people who keeps Funko Pops in their boxes all the time so that they don’t lose value, look away now!

The day John’s Funko toy took the bus on which he first met Eurus in The Six Thatchers was relatively pleasant for him. The indignity of having a plasticine flower stuck to his head was bearable, and he did get a ride in the wooden bus I borrowed from my youngest relative! It was a quiet suburban street in North London, so I didn’t get too many funny looks taking this one.

I tried positioning John at the side of the bus, which would be more realistic, but the picture didn’t seem to work as well – showing the front of the bus made the context clearer. Here you can also see the full size of the bus, made for a small child to ride on.

As we know, John had a particularly hard time at the Baskerville laboratory. I wanted to capture this and spent ages thinking through how to make the cage in which John hid in the dark, terrified because he believed the hound was loose in the lab with him (naughty Sherlock!).

In the end I found the perfect cage: a wire basket designed for keeping cupboards tidy.

Since these were sold in multipacks, my food cupboard is now much tidier than it was! The covers were made from unbleached cotton, sewn to fit the baskets but with a handy opening cut at one corner for John to peep out in terror.  The rest of the effect was created by taking the photo in a darkened room with a torch shining on the toys. I will explore the use of light in another edition of this blog.

The day John found himself at the bottom of a well at Musgrave Hall, during the events of The Final Problem, was particularly trying for him – and his Funko had to suffer too.  The well is a small black bucket. The stonework is actually paper bought from a dolls-house supplier; I discovered that it is possible to buy incredibly realistic wallpaper, fencing and floors at 1/12 scale. And yes, John is propped up against the side of the bucket in a few centimetres of muddy water (it just didn’t show up so well if the water was clean). To get the angle right I had to hold the phone upside down inside the bucket and try very hard not to drop it. I took the photo out of doors to get natural light, because indoor light was too yellow. If you look closely, you can see drops of water on John’s face where I had been moving him around with wet hands.

Finally, the greatest sacrifice that John’s Funko has made for Toylocked’s art: John in a bonfire on 5th November, as seen in The Empty Hearse. I decided to do this properly, which meant real fire.

First of all, to protect John, I wrapped his head in a wet sock.

Then I built a little bonfire round him on a paved part of the garden, with a piece of firelighter inside quite near the top, and placed a bucket of water nearby in case of accidents. When it got dark I took practice photos, with a torch some distance away providing a little extra light.

Finally, I set light to the firelighter. It was a bit breezy and the flames waved around quite alarmingly.

As soon as I’d got the shot I wanted, John was whisked to safety and given a strong cup of tea, while I chose the shot I would eventually use:

Let’s talk about hats…

Some of the Sherlock Funko Pops (the toys which appear in most of the Toylocked images) already have headgear – there is a Sherlock figure wearing a deerstalker hat, and a Moriarty wearing a crown. This wasn’t quite enough for Toylocked, so hats had to be improvised.  The first time I added a hat was simply because my daughter found a hat on an Innocent Smoothie bottle and noticed that it might fit on a Funko. I took advantage of a snowy day in December to send the toys outside to play snowballs. (By the way, if you look closely at this scene, you will see that I managed to position the toys between two sets of bird tracks in the snow, as if the two teams had walked to the spot!)

It then occurred to me that I could try to recreate the scene from The Empty Hearse where Sherlock and Mycroft attempt to outwit each other in a game of deductions around the hat left by the train enthusiast. I found another Innocent Smoothie hat on eBay, trailed round craft shops to find matching wool, and made the strings and bobbles needed to turn the hat into the Icelandic headgear in the scene. At the first attempt the strings were so long that they buckled; I love the way they still nearly reach the floor!

A more complicated hat to make was the bearskin worn by Sherlock in The Sign of Three, when he marches with the soldiers at the Wellington Barracks in London. I found the black fur material on eBay, took a piece of chain from an old necklace, and sewed it all together.  The chain wasn’t long enough to go right round his face, so the picture had to be taken from the side. The hat still didn’t quite work, being a bit floppy, so I had to fill the top with tissue paper. Funkos aren’t very stable at the best of times, because of their big heads. With the paper-filled hat on, Sherlock became very top-heavy:  even Blu-Tak on his feet didn’t stop him from falling over several times as I was taking the photographs.

I did finally get him to stand up for long enough to create the picture I wanted.

Making a pirate hat was relatively simple: two pieces of black card, stuck together at the sides, and a skull and crossbones cut out of white paper. I even made an eye-patch to go with them, on thin black elastic thread. The complication in this scene from The Final Problem was the setting. Sherlock being a pirate on a boat meant floating him on water (a kind neighbour’s goldfish pond, in fact). The wind caught the hat, Sherlock fell over, and the hat fell in the water. This doesn’t really show in the final photograph, but I eventually had to make another version of the hat for another scene (to be covered in a future blog). Meanwhile, here is Sherlock and a very tiny fisherman (who thankfully arrived with his own hat!).

The most complicated hat, and the one which caused the most swearing in the construction, was the security guard’s hat which Sherlock wears in The Great Game.

I spent a long time thinking this one through before I started making it. Funko heads are not round, but elliptical. The top is therefore a large oval of shiny black card. The brim is made of the same card, very carefully measured. The band round the head is made of black paper, and the soft part of the hat is black tissue. The band round the head is then bound together with black Japanese masking tape from an art supplies shop. Getting it all to work was very fiddly, but the hat did fit Sherlock at the end!

Incidentally, this picture contains quite a number of other technical details. The railings are made of black drinking straws stuck in plasticine, with tiny screw-in eyelets held in the top with more plasticine, and red embroidery silk as the rope. The frame is from a dolls-house supplier, and the picture of the Lost Vermeer from the episode is taken from the internet. The really geeky detail, though, is that if you could read the writing on the notice next to it, which I printed up in a tiny font, what it actually says is:

The Lost Vermeer

This really is a real painting by Vermeer and anyone who thinks otherwise is fooling themselves. We are hoping that lots of you will come in to see it and that one of you will then pay millions of pounds to buy it.

What we are not prepared for, of course, is for a smart-arse like Sherlock Holmes to notice that a supernova which appears in the night sky in the painting wasn’t actually visible in the time of Vermeer.

Of course that pesky security guard, Alex, noticed it, but we sorted him out pretty quickly. That’s what contract killers are for. Oh, and that professor who works at the Planetarium. Curses on them all.

Finally, the most ambitious hat of all, although it wasn’t quite as difficult as I’d expected. I wanted to portray Moriarty at the Tower of London, and to do that I needed a baseball cap as worn by tourists:

 (image from Sherlockology.com)

This was quite difficult to do, because there are quite a lot of panels which have to meet at the top, and the end result was not entirely symmetrical, but it more or less worked with a little tissue paper inside. I embroidered the flag and wording freehand. Then we had a walk around the Tower of London – I tried several angles with the Tower in the background, while bemused tourists watched me balance Jim on walls and bollards. In photos like this, if the toy is in focus the background will always be fuzzy, but I think it’s clear where it is!

At the end, I was left with a collection of hats which my Funkos still wear about the house. I think there may be some role-playing games going on that I’d rather not know about, but they let me bring them all together for a collective photo:

I thought I’d write a little about the locations I used for the pictures taken in London. Some of them were obvious and relatively easy. My first photo, which was taken very early on before I was even sure how I was going to use the pictures, simply involved a short walk from Euston Station to North Gower Street, the location of Baker Street in the BBC series. Luckily there was a gap in the parked cars, so apart from the mild indignity of having to get down on my knees in the street, it was a relatively easy picture to take.

Later on, I decided I wanted another shot of Speedy’s cafe and the entrance to 221B Baker Street. This meant getting a lot closer.

Thankfully, no Speedy’s customers were sitting outside, so I got a clear shot without any humans in it, and didn’t make too much of a fool of myself. I was very pleased with the shot, and went into Speedy’s for breakfast to celebrate!

(Speedy’s from the inside, for those who’ve never seen it!)

Luckily I live quite near London and have family there, so it’s easy to fit in a quick photoshoot when I’m visiting.  Some of them were easy to locate, using the guidance in the Sherlockology site (I’m having trouble getting this to open and am wondering if it’s been shut down). This led me to Eaton Square in Belgravia, which is so smart and expensive I thought I might get arrested for photographing people’s houses. However, I found Irene Adler’s house, crouched down on the pavement and got the shot I wanted, despite the Irene toy being very unsteady on her feet! Here she is, having just received pictures on her phone of Sherlock in a sheet going to Buckingham Palace…

The Diogenes Club, Mycroft’s home from home, was actually the British Academy. This is a very central location just off Pall Mall, which is right for the Diogenes Club in the books. I had some trouble getting the perspective right on this one.

In the end, I stood him on a bicycle parking meter and managed to get enough of the building in for it to be recognisable from the TV series. This isn’t a scene from the series, just my imagining of Mycroft after John had been to see him and upset everybody in the club by talking to them:

In The Blind Banker, Sherlock takes John to the head offices of Shad Sanderson, an imaginary bank in the City of London. In fact he takes him to Tower 42 in Old Broad Street, once the headquarters of the National Westminster Bank and now the site of offices and restaurants. This is right in the heart of the financial quarter, and not generally full of people taking photographs of toys, but I decided to brave it out.

This one, of John and Sherlock leaving the building, was quite easy, apart from the complication of balancing the toys on the rounded top of a bollard and hoping they didn’t fall off:

But I wanted a photo to show just how tall the building really is. I take all these photos with an iPhone, so there is a lot of screen-tapping to get the focus on the right part of the picture and the lighting right. It took an awful lot of shots to get the toys in focus but the tower clear enough to be appreciated.

I will explore other location shots in other editions of this blog. I’m just very lucky that Sherlock is set in London and I was able to get to the actual locations so easily!