Coins, fossils, toys, shells? Make your own museum!

Make your own museum

from your own small treasures

Over these weeks, in conjunction with Buxton Museum and Art Gallery and Stone and Water, I have been working on a series of posts inviting people to “Make Your own Museum” at home.

 

• Do you collect small treasures?
• Do you find fossils or stones or shells on walks
• Do you pick up feathers and snail shells in your garden
• Do you find old coins, toys, cogwheels, ribbons and shoelaces?
• People collect all sorts of things!
• Perhaps you have a collection of treasures that you cherish. Why not turn them into your own museum: store them, display them, write about them?

 

Recognising that many of us collect things: from the small and delicate (cowries, groatie buckies), to the living (are you a cat man, a dog woman, a rabbit boy? A runaway hamster girl? All of the above? Or just into unicorns?) to the large, the bulky, the awkward and the exciting; for those smaller bits that fall off the back of the bookcase and are never seen again, we are inviting you to create your own sort-of organised displays

 

Sort-of, because this will be your museum, personal, idiosyncratic, distinctive and as organised or disorganised as you want it to be (look at PittRivers Museum in Oxford for “the only sort-of organised personal collection that grew”. If you are a young person, don’t show your parents. They might panic)

 

Rather than doing all the posts again, this blog will be a signpost to point you to the different elements of the Museum for you to go adventuring in

 

a) Part 1: making display trays from old greetings cards

Blog of activity: https://buxtonmuseumandartgallery.wordpress.com/2020/06/02/make-your-own-museums-at-home-part-1-boxes-for-small-treasure/

Youtube link: make your own museum part 1

 

b) Cabinets of Curiosity: gathering trays together into exciting cases:

Activity description: https://creepingtoad.blogspot.com/2018/09/a-museum-in-box-activity.html

There will be a museum blog and a youtube film

 

c) Guiding people through your wonders: labels, guidebooks and maps

 an activity post to follow, links will be posted here

 

d) Looking at your whole house as a museum? Try looking at this lovely blog for ideas: A New Direction

 

 

Buxton Festival Fringe

This Make Your own Museum sequence is also part of Buxton Festival Fringe’s 2020 online activities. As we cannot deliver hands-on, face-to-face activities in the Museum during this year’s Festival, this set of activities become part of our distanced gift to you all.

If you would like to explore what other gems the Fringe has to offer and to explore the socially distanced activities and performances that we are managing to deliver, visit the Fringe programme

 

Buxton Museum in the Fringe

We have another Buxton Museum/Creeping Toad event online: Lost Castles will help you create your own strange, wonderful, marvellous, storyful palace, castle, landscape, storyworld...in miniature and you could follow the activity in a film here

And yourselves?

If you make something, devise something, shape something, laugh a lot, why not tell us: send us a photo of your collected Cabinet or of the horror/delight/disgust of visitors to your museum, make a 1 minute tour of your museum on a phone and send that in as well if you want to

We cannot promise to publish everything but we would love to see hear and delight in your own creativity

 

Send photos etc to toadwords@btinternet.com

Lost Beasts, masks and hats event

the Lost Beasts of Buxton

Saturday 29th June

1 - 4pm

Buxton Museum and Art Gallery

Making carnival masks and hats inspired by our very own 

scimitar-tooth cats, cave lions, wild horses and mammoths.

Once upon a time and not so long ago there were wolves in the Peak District hills, wild boars in the woods and beavers in the rivers. Once there were wild ponies here, and cave lions, reindeer and bears. There were scimitar-toothed cats and straight-tusked elephants. 

Before that, long and longer ago there were strange sharks swimming in ancient limestone seas.

What wonderful animal would you celebrate?

Join us at the Museum to make animal masks and hats to wear in Buxton Carnival - or just to wear and enjoy and relish the animals that lived here once (or, for unicorns, maybe "should have lived here once").

Celebrate the ancient animals of the Peaks and join Two Left Hands in the Buxton Carnival Parade. A BM125 workshop as part of the celebrations for the Museum’s 125th anniversary

 

 This event is free, no booking or tickets needed. Children under 7 should bring a grown-up with them and you need to allow 45 minutes to make an animal hat

 

Limestone and mermaids

Talking Stones!

richly fossiliferous limestone

Derwent Stories and BM125 at Altitude 2018

First there were rocks. And some lovely stones. And fossils. Chalk and limestone, granite and gabbro. Rocks to hold and think about. Trilobites, goniatites, crinoids and teeth.  We hoped these would feed into lovely puppet and word activities inspiring quiet conversation around mineral stories and the arguments of crystals.

Then it rained.

The Altitude Youth Arts Festival at the Mt Cook AdventureCentre where we were working was a lovely afternoon. There was some excellent music to keep us entertained. Songs from young musicians, dance from another young group, some quiet storytelling from others. There was a cap fire in the woods and bushcraft activities to try. And us making pebble puppets on a field while people sailed, shrikeining, down a zip wire overhead.

great fun - and he seems happy!

Great fun!

Our carefully planned activity dissolved a bit in the rain but we made some wonderful puppets all the same. We got people holding rocks. Talking about what they might find in their gardens at home or out on a walk. And they went home with some wonderfully crazy little characters….

Make your own pebble puppet: instructions will follow shortly

BM125: setting out to take the Buxton museum and Art Gallery . Follow the link above to find out more about BM125

collections out into the Peak District landscapes as part of the celebrations for the Museum's 125th birthday, Altitude gave us the chance to talk to people, show them rocks from local places, comapre these with not so local rocks, take that rocks and fossil knowledge and build characters inspired by that knowledge

DERWENT STORIES

For all our DS events, we post a "where did we go" note with advice and experience that might help people decide if they would like to go themselves on another occasion

Visiting Altitude

When: Altitude is a Youth Arts Festival within the bigger Wirksworth Festival. As such it happens once a year - watch for dates for next September

Access: activities happen at different sites. Mt Cook Adventure Centre has parking, easy access for wheelchairs and good toilets. Activities were free. The music was great. On a good day it would have been a lovely afternoon to sit on the grass with a picnic, do a bit of making, enjoy the music, and generally relax. At the Eco Centre next door there was more acoustic music

Useful links

Mt Cook Adventure Centre

Eco Centre

Altitude

Make your own ancient rockpool

Make your own prehistoric rockpool

We have used this easy technique many times.We designed it for public events where we would have to make a lot of rockpools with visitors in a short space of time but it is very versatile and you could adapt to suit your situation. While this was set up as an Ancient Landscape event you could of course make a modern rockpool, or perhaps a pond!

I produce a blog for the project Ancient Landscapes. That project is winding down now (or at least its tide has gone out for a bit - it might come in again!) but we are still posting actvities for people to make a mess with on their own. We have just posted this one. 

This activity guide uses the materials we used with notes about why we chose this or that

You will need

• a dish - we used waxed card pie dishes (buy in packs from discount stores and supermarkets). Most of our dishes were white but the occasional blakc ones that we found worked well, too!
• acrylic paint - to paint on the waxed card - we use large bottles but you could get some small tubes, or try mixing some poster or redimix paint with PVA glue and see if that works
• paint brushes or sponges
• Plastic plate to squirt the paint onto (easy to clean)
• small sheets of card
• coloured pens or pencils
• sharp scissors
• a small stapler (the smaller the better)
• PVA glue
• scraps of stuff: sponge, wool, carrier bag, felt, glitter, sand.....

Thinking about fossils

some of our inspirations

Our aim was to make a rockpool that you might have found if you could have gone walking along a Carboniferous seashore 300 million years ago. You might want to find pictures of some of the animals of the time to help you. Or maybe you have some fossils to look at? Or some plastic ancient sea creatures? Could you visit your local museum and do some drawings...Perhaps if you printed out this page and waved it at them, they would set up an event for all you ancient rockpoolers?

Prepare the pool

Cover your work surface with a sheet of paper - acrylic paint can be hard to clean off. Cover yourself as well if you are a messy worker. You might want an old shirt rather than another sheet of paper

Select your rockpool colours: blue, green turquoise and raw ochre are often good. Smear them round the inside of your pool (paintbrush or painting sponge). You do not need to be too precise here. It is  background and more a sense of sand, rock and water that is needed rather than detailed painting

Set of one side to dry

Prepare the wildlife

Ok. Now it’s up to you......

In this pool we have:

• drawings or a trilobite and an ammonite (should we have coloured these in?)
• drawing of a horseshoe crab that has been cut, folded and stapled to give it a more 3-D effect
• drawing of a coral
• fragments of one of my painting sponges have given us some rock
• green wool and a shredded green carrier bag have give us some seaweed
• Fingertip coral: this is another technique - we’ll post a “How-to” guide to that in a week or so

Fitting the wildlife

You could glue everything straight onto the dish, or make little brackets to lift things up off the floor and wall a little

Brackets might be small bits of foam or thin strips of card either folded or zig-zagged into a spring

Carefully glue them in place.  A matchstick can be helpful in applying glue

Let it all dry, sit back and admire. Then go and tell someone about the day you found a trilobite.....or take and print a photo and send it as a psotcard to someone else?

Or send us that photo and we’ll have a gallery of rockpools!

rockpool in a mixing bowl

a delightful belemnite pool

Summer events, 2013

Stone and Water, the community group I am deeply involved with here in Buxton are lining up some summer holiday events as part of our ongoing Ancient Landscapes project

They are all designed as lively family events but stray grown-ups are welcomed in their own right too! So why not come along and enjoy a fossil and a bit ofcreativity for your own sake!

The Ancient Landscapes Project is supported by the Peak District National Park's Sustainable Development Fund

Event summaries: details follow

All events are free (car parking charges may apply in some places). Family events suitable for children from 4 years and over

1. Tuesday 30th July: Life in ancient seas, at the Moorland Discovery centre, National Trust Longshaw nr Hathersage

- make your own prehistoric rockpool model! Sessions 11 - 1 and 2 -4, no booking needed

2. Thursday 1st August: Monsters from the Limestone, Buxton Museum and Art Gallery: SK17 6DA, making large puppet fossil animals from the depths of the ancient Peak District seas!, 10-30 -12.30, 1.30 - 3.30

3. Tuesday 6th August: Winnat's Pass Walk: exploring the millstone grits of the Dark Peak. Meet: Castleton Visitor Centre Car Park, S33 8WP, at 2pm. Walk 2 - 4pm, some steep slopes and off paved footpaths

4. Wednesday 7th August: Life in Ancient Seas at Leek PlayDay

Brough Park, Leek, 11 - 3: meet the Ancient Landscape team and make your own finger-puppet fossils or ancient seascape

Events in detail

I found this image on line
 - apologies to original artist!

1. Life in ancient seas

Date: Tuesday 30th July 2013

Venue: Moorland Discovery Centre, National Trust Longshaw, nr Hathersage

Times: 11 - 1 and 2 - 4

Booking: no booking needed just drop by and join in

Cost: free: materials provided (donations welcomed)- car parking charges may apply

Organisers and more information: this is part of the Ancient Landscapes project organised by Stone and Water (http://ancientlandscapes.blogspot.co.uk/).

What's happening?

Come and paddle in a prehistoric sea! Explore life in the Carboniferous Seas of 300 million years ago that eventually gave us the limestone, shale and gritstones of the Peak District. We'll look at fossils to understand the animals of the times, draw those animals and the corals and seaweeds they lived in. Then visitors can make their own model rockpool as a piece of ancient seaside to take home

2. Monsters from the Limestone

Date: Thursday 1st August 2013

Venue: Buxton Museum and Art Gallery, terrace Rd, Buxton SK17 6DA

Times: 10.30 - 12.30 and 1.30 - 3.30

Booking: no booking needed just drop by and join in

Cost: free: materials provided (donations welcomed) - car parking charges may apply

Organisers and more information: this is part of the Ancient Landscapes project organised by Stone and Water (http://ancientlandscapes.blogspot.co.uk/).

What's happening?

Exploring life in the Carboniferous Seas that eventually gave us the limestone, shale and gritstones of the Peak District. We'll look at fossils to understand the animals of those times, and build our own limestone creatures as puppets and masks - make a pet trilobite, wear a giant brachiopod, or have a tame crinoid or nautiloid to ripple home with you….

Basic activity is straightforward with lots of options for people to experiment with

we cna only hope the Pass will
be this bright in August -
it was blocked with snow in March!

3. Winnat's Pass Walk

Date: Tuesday 6th August 2013

Meeting point: Castleton Visitor Centre Car Park, Castleton, Hope Valley S33 8WP

Times: 2 - 4pm

Booking: no booking needed just drop by and join in

Cost: free: materials provided (donations welcomed) - car parking charges may apply

Organisers and more information: this is part of the Ancient Landscapes project organised by Stone and Water (http://ancientlandscapes.blogspot.co.uk/).

What's happening?

With National Trust Rangers, we will explore the geology of this dramatic gorge, meeting the millstone grit that eventually covered the limestone of the White Peak. A Stone and Water will help the group explore creatively: drawing rocks and shapes, composing instant poems, making up wild stories about the cliffs and caves of the Pass.

This walk will last 2 hours, has some steep slopes and will not remain on paved surfaces. Strong footwear essential and clothing to suit the weather

4. Life in Ancient Seas at Leek PlayDay

Date: Wednesday 7th  August 2013

Venue: Brough Park, Leek (beside the Leek Leisure Centre)

Times: 11 - 3

Booking: no booking needed just drop by and join in

Cost: free: materials provided (donations welcomed) - car parking charges may apply

Organisers and more information: this is part of the Ancient Landscapes project organised by Stone and Water (http://ancientlandscapes.blogspot.co.uk/).

What's happening?

Come and paddle in a prehistoric sea! Explore life in the Carboniferous Seas of 300 million years ago that eventually gave us the limestone, shale and gritstones of the Peak District. We'll be making personal finger-puppet trilobites and pet ammonites and models of ancient seasides…

Hopping around in June!

Events where you just might find this Toad over the next month

 

telling stories at Dove Valley Centre

Sunday June 9th

The Big Bird, Beast, Bug and Botany Hunt

When: 11.00 - 16.00

Where: Dove Valley Centre

Under Whitle Farm

(between Sheen and Longnor)

SK17 0PR

www.dovevalleycentre.co.uk

Our Ancient Landscapes project will be there among the Birds, Beasts, Bugs and Botanicals. We'll be there with fossils to look at and draw, models to handle, people to talk to, a wall to stare at (just in case we can find anything!) and our usual exciting, messy, colourful and engaging creative activities

I'll be there helping on the Landscapes stall but mostly to tell stories of farms and fields and the plants and animals and stranger inhabitants of the Dales and Moorlands

setting up for last year's Big B day

Sunday June 16th

Father's Day at Ilam Park

puppets for parents?

Father's Day BBQ and Games

When: 11.00 - 16.00

Where: Ilam Park, Postcode: DE6 2AZ. Ordnance Survey grid reference SK132507.

I'll be on the Ancient Landscapes team will be at this National Trust event at Ilam Park

Tempting as it is, we won't be "fossilizing fathers" but we may well invite you to look at some of the fossils we find in the limestone of the area, to make printed fossil cards for Dads, cast your own fossils (for anyone), make trilobite puppets and personal nautiloids….

Our activities are free but car parking charges apply. There are lots of other activities on at Ilam that day - but come and hunt us out!

ancient animal fingerpuppet

Hoorah for the small and wriggly!

When the tide runs out: life in ancient rockpools

a finger-crinoid rests on our Ancient Landscape

We've just had a lovely day at Castleton Visitor Centre in the Hope Valley in Derbyshire. After snow a couple of weeks ago closed the centre, and the roads, and dramatic Winnatt's Pass, and froze our first "ancient rockpools" day out, today really counted as the start of public workshops for our Ancient Landscapes project

 

a sample rockpool was used to get people started

86 people joined us during the day to look at fossils and models of ancient

dangerous fish!

animals, and to stroke, prod, squeeze and generally explore our Ancient Landscape installation. Then most people made for themselves either a fossil fingerpuppet or an ancient rockpool from these far-off Carboniferous days (or both). Given what we were finding in our imagined rockpools, it's probably just as well we humans weren't around then!

We did make some practical discoveries, however, including "the easy way to draw a trilobite" - details will follow in another blog. And we met Toby with his lovely fossil blog - why not take a look? Fossilfriends

hoorah for the small and wriggly!

This project's activities always raises that question of " exact should we be" very nicely: just how much do we push "this is what it looked like"? On the whole, we share ideas, samples and models with people and let them improvise...so our orthocone nautiloids end up looking suspiciously like belemnites, and the few trilobites that were still around in Carboniferous days were almost certainly not a spectacular as our ones. And Hoorah for the soft wriggly and unexpected things that have never, ever been fossilised! But it si good to embrace a world without dinosaurs and to find people are quite happy working with small wriggly, squirmy, swimmy creatures and to ponder the shapes of ancient seaweeds....

But mostly, we made things....

Next event is Saturday 6th April -Miller's Dale