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I Found Healing In My New Passion – Building Dioramas, Room Boxes From Scratch

This is the first diorama/room box I’ve ever done and I’ve gained a huge amount of satisfaction and pleasure from making it. So much so that I’m quite far with the next one featuring “Little Miss Muffet” whose father was an entomologist and doctor, I envisage Dr Muffets study packed full of insects, spiders, laboratory equipment and poor Miss Muffet who snuck in there to eat her curds and whey, and of course a big spider.

I have suffered with mental health problems since I was a teenager. Now I have never been so motivated in my whole life. I’ve found out, finally, what ‘floats my boat’. This type of work plays to my strengths of being able to turn my hand to most things and my love of working in miniature. It also takes care of my ADHD trait of not being able to focus on a piece for a long time (like when I do a painting, it takes forever). There are so may different elements to the finished work, I can just swap and change as the mood takes me.

I searched high and low for the origins of this nursery rhyme but failed. So I researched the history of beds, bedrooms, and sleeping habits and developed my own conclusions. I found that communal sleeping was commonplace in medieval times but by Victorian times, men and women were to be kept apart, separation and privacy became essential because of anxiety about the spread of germs. I think that “There were Ten in the Bed” nursery rhyme, as well as being a fun way to help children count, was a Victorian warning against sleep communally.

I researched all the details in the room, and built it to depict a not so well to do Victorian bedroom, I made everything from scratch apart from the brass doorknob.

Thanks for reading

Shan

Me and my creation

I Found Healing In My New Passion - Building Dioramas, Room Boxes From Scratch

The victorian bedroom

I Found Healing In My New Passion - Building Dioramas, Room Boxes From Scratch

Ten little rabbits

I Found Healing In My New Passion - Building Dioramas, Room Boxes From Scratch

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I used to be a draughtsperson but gave up work due to ill health. Now, after years of swapping from one craft or art to another, I've found my passion - dioramas and roomboxes, all OOAK and scratch built. Now though I’ve had another change of direction and started doing digital art, it must be the ADHD!

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What do you think ?

POST

Glyn Fletcher 6 years ago

Love it (Y)

2points

Shan Dawson (Post author) 6 years ago

Thank you

1point

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Lina 6 years ago

Please keep making more an more and show them all here. It's lovely!!!

1point

Agnes Jekyll 6 years ago

Wow! Love this. Amazing detail. (The tiles on the fireplace!) There are some great PBS shows about The history of sleep and beds on youtube--I can't remember the names (sorry)--the way Victorians made their beds (and cleaned them) is fascinating.

1point