The effects of aging don’t scare her a bit

While people generally pay premiums for new houses filled with stylish draperies and impeccable carpets, 44-year-old Jennifer Small earns a living making these things look old. Credited as the petites mains or “little hands,” Small lends her talents to set decorators, who charge her with tasks such as placing cobwebs in corners, distressing curtains with a cheese grater and sanding scuff marks onto leather briefcases. “I like the fact when you see something that it’s had a life,” she says. “I love the color of worn leather. I like cemeteries a lot. I just like the craftsmanship in the Victorian era.”

A graduate of Concordia University’s graphic design program, Small held a variety of jobs before becoming one of Montreal’s go-to little hands. She painted dog portraits, worked in an old folks’ home and a museum, and made animated films about her native country for the National Film Board of Canada. When computers came to dominate animation, Small longed to get her hands dirty again and began working as a decorator on movie sets. After having identical twins in 2001, she took two years off before returning to work as a little hands, a job that allowed for more flexible hours.

Since then, she has made pond scum for “The Fountain,” banged up shields for “300” and decorated a 100-foot suspension bridge with ropes and vines for the upcoming “The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor.” Recently, she lent a patina of neglect to the abandoned Victorian mansion in “The Spiderwick Chronicles,” which will hit theaters Feb. 14. “I do have small hands, by the way,” she says. “Sometimes it’s tiny little work, so they don’t want a clumsy scenic technician trying to do it.”

Scum of the Earth: When handcrafting hard-to-find items, Small often rummages through her pantry. “For the pond scum [in ‘The Fountain’], I was trying to find something that would float,” she says. “I was trying things like dryer lint. I tried beaten egg whites. But the pond scum ended up being a hydrogenated baby oil and powdered foam that they use for doing model train landscapes.”

I can’t get it for you wholesale: For little hands, the job is in the details, such as applying the Victorian-era food labels for “The Spiderwick Chronicles.” “There was a kitchen cupboard, and they needed to have period labels put on all these tin cans,” she says. “Someone had to line them all up and apply them and do little dressings like that. . . . And a lot of the time you don’t see the detail that we do, but if it wasn’t there, you’d know it.”

The gilded cage: When Small was commissioned to decorate the cages that “Spiderwick’s” goblins used for their prey, she had to get into a monstrous mind-set. “The cages were already made,” she says. “They were steel, but [that] had to be covered, because goblins don’t weld. They would have made these cages from what they had around them. I was working a lot with liquid latex and peat moss and things like that. We had this red carpet that was pulled out of a car, and on every cage, we used some of that. So it’s just having an eye for texture and trying to think like a goblin. They’re not really that smart.”

The bone collector: One man’s trash is a little hands’ treasure. “I don’t throw anything out . . . until the film’s in the can,” says Small. “And then, depending, I drag it home with me too because when I find something I really like, I think I’m never going to be able to find this again. I have little bits of bones and wasps’ nests and wrinkled liver, rawhide skins and hair. This is going to sound sick, but I have a mummified cat that someone found for me on ‘Death Race,’ so that’s in my backyard. It’s really cool, but I think I might just get rid of it. That is pushing just a little bit outside my realm of [things I’d be] wanting to have around the house.”