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Wednesday 25 August 2010

Small is beautiful

I love a miniature village. We went to Anglesey Model Village this summer; which was very cute but distant - you had to stay quite a frustrating distance from the buildings. I much prefer being able to go down the miniature street and get a good peer into the windows.

Also it means you can amuse yourself by taking pictures of your children as the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. I particularly love this picture of the Littlest Latte (she was very little then - this was four years ago) looking like a giant kicking down a garage.

(She's actually not kicking it down, she's looking at the reflection of her foot in the window.
But that takes all the fun out of it.)

(Here the Little Lattes were waiting for the bank to open in order to withdraw more funds for ice-cream. And vodka.)

It must have been on this very outing, in 2006, to the miniature village at Wimborne Minster in Dorset (this was a top miniature village, by the way, with real stuff in the shop windows, and the wedding of an actual flaky-looking redhead going on in the church) that we bought three make-your-own miniature village cards that were then put in the pile of rainy-day activities that I found while cleaning out the basement last month.

I couldn't have been happier. I had a church, a Victorian School, and a Stone Cottage, and I had the most fun ever making them. The children helped, which must mean that they were foolproof. Here they are (being attacked from above by a giant origami bird, sent to me by Lynn from Speechless many moons ago.)


They are gorgeous. A bit of googling revealed that you can still get these models, which just need scissors and glue, and loads more fantastic things at the delightful English Village Designs. You can rack up a full miniature village! And there are historical models too, of Viking ships and the like. How much more fun could we have for £2.05 than making a castle gate with a drawbridge (scroll down)? And then to discover that for another four quid we could get some actual jousting knights (again, scroll down) with their own tents to fight outside it!

Who said cutting and sticking was just for kids?



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