I plan to furnish the Mansard Victorian with as much Bauder-Pine and Cassidy Creations furniture as possible. This means keeping a close eye on eBay, Etsy, and other places where thirty- to forty-year-old half scale miniatures might show up.
(I’ve previously posted about Bauder-Pine furniture here and here, and you can read up on the Cassidy Creations kits I’ve built so far here. I will be building a lot more of them for this house!)
Bauder-Pine produced the Cassidy Creations kits and also sold finished versions. When buying these now, you can tell if it’s a Bauder-Pine piece or a kit finished by someone else from the signature.
I think the part before the year on this one is J McC — Jayne McCormick, who was the main person finishing Bauder-Pine’s kits in the nineties.
A few weeks before Christmas I stumbled across this little cabinet on eBay. Bauder-Pine wasn’t mentioned in the description, but I recognized it as a Cassidy Creations wall cabinet. (I have one set aside for the Mansard Victorian’s bathroom.)
The handwriting on the back of the cabinet doesn’t look like the signatures on my other Bauder-Pine pieces. I showed it to Cathy Miller-Vaughn (Bauder Pine’s current owner) and she said it’s Pat Bauder’s signature. Score!
(Fun story: when the cabinet was shipped out, I kept an eye on the tracking number, and a week later it hadn’t moved from its original location. I was about to contact the seller when she messaged me to say that she’d accidentally sent it to the wrong person! She asked if I wanted to refund the order and forget about it. Not a chance. She sent a shipping label to the person who had received it by mistake, and they sent it on. Thank you, mystery person!)
These days, Bauder Pine mostly sells items that Cathy buys in estates, as well as a small line of new kits. (The Cassidy Creations line was sold off to Kathy Moore, who has since retired.) For several months, I had my eye on this nursery set in the Bauder Pine Etsy store.
I have these same pieces in kit form and was planning to build them, along with a crib, for the Mansard Victorian. But I really liked how these were finished and almost hit the buy button several times.
Then they were gone, as all nice things we don’t buy when we have the chance eventually are, and I asked Cathy if she’d sold them. She wrote back:
The nursery set did sell, about a month ago. It was a set done by Cass Harkins. Cass was a down to earth, funny, sweet woman who cut all the Cassidy kits. I really don’t know how she did it. I would spend time with her at her workshop (the second floor of her home). She was so knowledgeable and could work a scroll saw like no one. She created every jig she needed to mass produce these kits. She would make a gross at a time. She was one of Pat’s workers who stayed in the background and didn’t think anything about what she did for miniatures.
After learning the history, I was disappointed that I hadn’t pulled the trigger — this set would have been perfect in my Bauder-Pine shrine. And then, in an amazing stroke of cosmic synergy, look what showed up on eBay…
Emily is a freelance writer, miniaturist, and adventure game enthusiast.
