Trays for treasures activity

Trays for treasures

 make your own box for bits, 

for wonders and curiosities

 

Following up our Cabinets workshops (make your own, here, and see some examples, here), here is an easy way of making your own open-topped boxes to go in a Cabinet of Curiosity (or any other place that needs them!)

What you will need:

• A piece of card – our examples are done with old Christmas cards
• Ruler
• Pen
• Scissors
• Glue (PVA is better than glue stick here)
• Paper clips or maybe a stapler

1. If you are using a greetings card, cut your card in half along the fold

2. Measure and mark  3 cm from each corner on each side. Join these up so you have a smaller shape within the main card. Our cards were square – it does not matter what shape you start with (squares and rectangles are easiest!). 

3. Cut along along every other line from the edge of the card to the edge of the new box

4. Fold along the lines, folding the sides up to make a box. The cut sections will stick out. – a ruler may help but greetings cards often fold readily into straight lines

5. Use the cut to fold a short tab and tuck this either inside the new box or fold it round the outside. Either way this reinforces the corners. Glue or staple (or do both) to hold the tab in place. If you glue your tab, a paperclip can hold it in place while the glue dries

6. If you use greetings cards, you could fold them so that the picture forms either the inside or outside of the box

inside or outside?

More boxes: change the initial measure to make deeper boxes

  

This is a blog to support activities that are part of the BM125 project celebrating Buxton Museum and Art Gallery's 125th Birthday. You can find out more about the project here

A museum in a box activity

"A box for sea glass from wide, windy beach"

Make your own Cabinet of Curiosity

 

would you keep our mermaid in a cupboard?

In Victorian times a Cabinet of Curiosity might have had drawers and more drawers, shelves and secret compartments. It might be small but probably large. It might be a glass fronted cabinet full of dried butterflies or stuffed birds. It might be a beautiful case for your preserved mermaid. The Collectors and Curiosities: Buxton and beyond exhibition at Buxton Museum and Art Gallery (runs to 6^th October, follow link for details) is full of small treasures and larger curiosities

At the Museum, and other places, I do a lot of Cabinets workshops. Most recently, as part of our BM125 celebrations we had a lively afternoon with 80 visitors making nearly 40 Cabinets between them. Follow the links below to find some of the Cabinets we made and the poems that grew out of our excitements. You do not need to wait for another event – try making your own cabinet, a portable museum for your own home, a treasure chest for summer finds…

Examples of our Cabinets are here

Our Cabinets poem can be heard here

Making a cabinet at home could be as simple as filling a cupboard with treasures (do check with someone vaguely responsible before tipping plates all over the floor). I like making my own so here is a guide to making your own Museum Box for small delights and strangenesses

You will need:

·      a cardboard box – with a hinged lid or a loose one

·      a cutting mat

·      a craft knife

·      ruler

·      felt pen

·      colourful magazine

·      scissors

·      glue: you could use a glue stick but white glue/PVA is stronger

·      paintbrush for PVA

·      a small sheet of acetate: clear plastic film: hunt around, maybe a file cover from a stationery shop, maybe a window from some other box

·      small boxes (see stage….)

1. Have a look at your box and draw a window in the lid: rectangular, oval, wobbly, as long as it is not bigger than your piece of acetate. Cut out the window: use a craft knife on a cutting mat and BE CAREFUL!

2. Decorate your box: we usually use magazine pictures but have done lovely Cabinets with old maps, wrapping paper..whatever takes our fancy. Neat cutting? Rough tearing? What do you prefer?

3. Inside the box as well? Just make sure you don’t glue the box shut by mistake?

4. All done? Add your small boxes…we often do this activity with large groups of people so use small carboard museum trays used for tiny specimens. Rummage around your house and see what you can find. Matchboxes? Packing box? A box jewellery came in? Tiny tins for spice or tea. Origami? Make your own: easy to do. A quick suggestion will follow in the next blog

5. Add the boxes to your Cabinet? Do you want to glue them down – make sure the main Cabinet can still close. Keep them loose?

6. Fit the plastic window to its space: glue or sticky tape the sheet into place on the inside of the lid

Add some treasures! Treasures might not all fit in your small boxes: there might be bags or bundles as well. You might make a miniature guidebook

Next BM125 public event: we’ll be at Apple Day at the Dove Valley Centre on Sunday 14th October. Detals will follow on this blog and on the Creeping Toad facebook page Here we will be celebrating the heritage of orchards and old fruit varieties – a reminder that museums hold memories as much as objects and those objects belonged to lives lived in our wider landscapes. Join us and make your own apple-puppet to tell your own orchard stories

A box of memories and leftovers

Treasures and Boxes

 a cupboard full of wonders

Buxton Museum and Art Gallery

there was a lot of debris

As part of the BM125 activities, on Sunday 26th, Buxton Museum and Art Gallery hosted a Cabinets of Curiosity workshop. The current exhibition in Gallery 2 is Collectors and Curiosities, looking back at some of the  exhibits from the Museum's early days that are not often displayed today. Leather bottles and beautiful paintings stand next to a few Victorian marvels – butterfly cabinets and massed birds that were good for getting us all talking about what we valued and what was appropriate to collects (sibling’s skeletons, as you will see, are clearly exempt, as are large mammals - if perhaps tricky to accommodate).

Some 90 people joined us to make their own, small, portable cabinets – instructions for making your own will follow shortly!

For now, let’s celebrate the richness of a rainy Sunday in the summer with people’s memories full of holiday treasures to value…

We asked “What are your treasures? What will you keep in your Cabinet of Curiosity?” …shaken, sieved and stirred, the answers follow…. Try reading it aloud

smiles!

Shells and gems and dried cicadas,

Stick insects if they ever stayed still long enough,

Or maybe just sticks.

Leaves and sticks and stones,

And rocks,

And sticks again sometimes.

Rocks and feathers,

And fossils.

Shells,

And sea glass from a wide, windy beach.

Cows, obviously,

And horses, maybe.

Pottery, Lego, coins,

Shells again,

Holiday treasures,

With sand from sunny places.

Cars and squishies and rubbers,

Because a special collection needs a special box.

Crystals,
And cryestels

And sharks teeth and other bones.

I collect shark’s teeth you see.

I have a lot of them.

There will be feathers and bones,

In my cupboard,

And my brother's bones

And my sister's skull.

I have fossils from Robin Hood’s Bay,

And Lyme Regis where I found an ammonite,

Lots of tiny ammonites,

And one big one that will be too big for this.

This Cabinet will be full of memories.

This Cabinet will be full of leftovers.

This Cabinet will be a Museum for Bears,

This Cabinet will hold Treasures and Taonga*.

This Cabinet will hold inspiration for my own creativity

There will be more BM125 events coming up and work from our group of new artists to explore as well, so keep an eye on the Museum facebook page , the Creeping Toad fb page, this blog and the Museum blog

*Taonga: a Maori word for a treasure: "an object or natural resource that is highly prized"

With many thanks to all our Cabinet-makers - we hope your cabinets fill with treasures and curiosities and feed conversations, imaginations and wild speculations - and apologies for not managing to display ALL the Cabinets here!

A collection of curiosities - event

Treasures and boxes

what do you keep?

Sunday 26th August, 2018
Buxton Museum and Art Gallery

 12 - 4

 

Are you a treasure hunter?
a fossil finder? 
beach comber?  
gem forager?
leaf hoarder?
pebble picker?

From old bones to fossils, careful drawing to wonderful sculpture, take some inspiration from Buxton Museum and Art Gallery’s Collectors and Curiosities exhibition and make your own Cabinet of Curiosity.  Small boxes will turn into portable museums where you can display your own treasures or that might send you out exploring the Peaks to find some new ones

An event to coincide with BM125, Buxton Museum’s 125th birthday celebrations

a box of small wonders

• Free
• Materials provided
• No booking needed
• Allow an hour for the activity
• Buxton Museum, Terrace Rd, Buxton, SK17 6DA
• 01629 533540

or do you collect the ephemeral?

Bones, bits and boxes

Bones, bits and boxes

Pop-up museum and activities

Summer 2017

finished tiles from the July workshop

 As part of Buxton Museum’s Collections in the Landscape project, I’ve been doing events using museum themes (local history, geology, ancient history) outside of the museum - taking the collection out into the landscapes it came from

tiles ready for firing

Summer events began a few weeks ago with a lovely Tile-making workshop at the Dove Valley Centre. Here, inspired by the patterns of 18^th and 19^th Ashford Black Marble and flowers and trees of the Upper Dove Valley, our group worked with local potter Sue Blatherwick to make their own tiles

This summer we have a pop-up museum popping up in various places

my own cabinets tend towards the natural history end of things

25^th July:

Craftbarn, Hadfield nr Glossop. Indoors here, space is limited and the event might be fully booked by now. Check in with Julia at the Barn to see. The handling collection will be there and we’ll be making Cabinets of Curiosity to take away*

2^nd August

Castleton Visitor Centre. After a major refit, the Centre is open again and we’re there to celebrate the new with some very old bits and pieces. Castleton was also the home of one whole element within our collection: pieces from Randolf Douglas’ (Randini the escapologist) House of Wonders

The House of Wonders in Castleton featured a fascinating collection of, well, stuff. From relics of Houdini's (and Randini's) careers as escapologists to models of miniature buildings and cabinets of strange curiosities, it was a treasure trove of marvels
With that tradition of being involved with the little things and leftovers, we will be there with flint tools to hold, geological treasures, ancient metalwork, fossils and bones to handle. Again there will be the chance to make your own Cabinet of Curiosity: an opportunity to make your own portable museum to give your wanderings and rummagings new purpose and structure*

16^th August

what treasures would you choose?

Bogtastic at the National Trust’s Longshaw Estate. We’ll be there among this celebration of all things boggy: from bog-bouncing and wildlife spotting to face-painting (I really hope you can be painted as a bog body!)

We’ll be there, providing an oasis of fossilised calm with pieces from the eastern moors: fossils, flints, bones and bits. We’ll be making our own cabinets again: a chance to create miniature portable museums to assemble your own bog-collection in*

We provide materials and guidance: you have to find the treasures yourselves!

boxes of delights

House of Wonders, 

boxes of delights

Between 1926 and 1978, the Douglas House of Wonders in Castleton offered visitors a wonderful collection of curiosities from a motor that could fit into a thimble to the Lords’ Prayer written on a thread thin enough to pass through the eye of a needle. There were minerals, native spears, and a selection of locks and keys that were featured in the BBC’s A History of the World in 100 Objects. Randolph Douglas was also an accomplished escapologist who worked with Houdini but we’re not going to ask you to go down that path on this workshop!

an Insect Cabinet

Inspired by the original Douglas House of Wonders, we invited visitors to the Castleton Visitor Centre on Wednesday 6^th April to make their own Cabinets of Curiosity. Part of Buxton Museum’s Collections in the Landscape project, with events like these we aim to inform people about the links between the Museum Collection and the places in the Peaks where that collection comes from

Next event in this series: Up your street on June 2^nd: looking at old panoramic photos of Buxton streets and making our own streets (or other places) as pop-up landscapes: more details here  and on this blog soon

Victorian and Edwardian Cabinets of Curiosity were personal museums with collections that ranged from local fossils and shells to exotic trade beads and even shrunken heads from distant travels. In size, these Cabinets could be free standing glass display units or small glass-fronted cupboards mounted on a wall. In effect anything could become a “Cabinet” if it offered a space that could hold a selection of items. While at one level being simply collections of odd bits and pieces, Cabinets are also reflections of an individual’s interests and travels, offering glimpses into the interests and fascinations of Victorian society and the personal lives of their owners.

optimism

Starting with flat-pack cardboard boxes, we cut windows, added pictures (old copies of wildlife magazines mostly), chose compartments and generally got carried away. Some people pursued themes: there were a couple of seasonal Spring boxes, an insect cabinet an owl box and someone wanted one for his collection of teeth*.

Searching for Pizza, Pirates sailed the Seven Seas braving storms, giant waves and even the legendary Kraken. From Tortuga to the wild Malagasy shores, their pizza search carried the pirates to far, strange lands and in the end there was no pizza. Shipwrecked on Candy Island, they stayed there until their teeth fell out and they were rescued by some children on a school trip in a Boat-bus

 …and all that evolved during the making of a Pirate Cabinet

Find out more:

About Randolf Douglas and the Douglas Collection:

“Randini, the man who helped Houdini” by Ann Beedham, Youbooks, 2009

ISBN 9781905278299

About Cabinets of Curiosity: "Cabinet of Curiosities: collecting and understanding the wonders of the natural world" by Gordon Grice , Workman 2015 ISBN 978-0-7611-6927-7

* We did not enquire too deeply about just whose teeth these originally were