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