Blue Cavern

Maureen,

when I checked your website I noticed that you had a question regarding the garden accessories. The question was in which box the green ladder and the green wheelbarrow should be.

The thing is that it is not that easy. Because instead of looking at colours you also have to look at shape and markings. I have not checked my boxes, but I give you a short version of my opinion.

First you have the pretty obvious colourversions of the accessories. Like on this picture. These I believe are all early versions of accessories before Schleich changed them to the common colours.

Like yellow flowerbox and windows, green key, yellow roofparts and green and orange roof with a hole beside the flowerbox on the large houses. Mushroom, gate and flowers in different colours. The early version flowers are softer and often goes with darkgreen steam.

And if you look at these parts most of them goes with darkgreen colours. Like base on grey gate, posts for the early fence, grass etc.

Now to the gardenquestion.

Instead of looking at the colours you should look at the shape.

For example if you look at the table and chairs on the gardenset-box they don´t have straight legs.

So you can have both green and brown tablesets which are very early versions.

These tables look like the ones on the pictures on the boxes. These types of tables also are the hardest ones to find.

After this they changed the legs on the tables to be more straight.

But I believe they still kept the chairlegs like they were for a while longer before also changing them to be straight.

So the early tables are harder to find than the early chairs.

I didn´t have any brown chair with straight legs displayed so it is not on the picture. But I have shown it earlier on other pictures and I think you all know how it looks( like the chairs in the polkadotbox gardenset).

Regarding the green ladder and wheelbarrow. If you look at Dyars page he has a Smurfland-poster. On this you can see the green ladder. So my guess is that you can find these green items in many different boxes, both early and later boxes. I have green wheelbarrows with both CE and not CE and in different colourshades.

As always...many thanks, Andre for your thorough and detailed explanations.