Like I wrote in my last post about finding buried treasure in my “catch-all” closet, once again, stuffed on the top shelf, I discovered another shoe box. The contents of this box were unfamiliar, small parts of polymer clay (Sculpy) and some pieces of velvet and brocade. I thought, “A lot of junk”! But upon further investigation, I realized I had uncovered a box of figurines my daughter had made when she was in grade school.
As I sorted the contents, it became clear that these were not random figurines but an entire community, a kingdom, to be exact, complete with a royal family – the “Royal Tudoras”! The sculpted empire included knights, woodsmen, ladies-in-waiting, “Subjects”, “Visitors” and “Animals”, almost 30 in all including miniature buckets, trays and bowls of food, candlesticks and goblets. Little did I know that one could be an archaeologist in their own home for I had unearthed the lost kingdom of “Pinaré”! I had to keep this collection and find a way to display it!
A baseball bat frame was the only three-dimensional/shadow box frame I could find to house the whole “kingdom”. It ended up providing a nice way to lay out the complete collection. With the “Head Priest” presiding over all, “King John and Queen Isabella Tudoras” reign from the center of the frame with their family members and “Subjects” flanking them on either side.
Included with the collection was a “Kingdom Log” and a list of “Things to be Done for Pinaré”. In the log, my daughter had given each figure a name with an identifying code that she then inked on the bottom of each figurine. On the Pinaré to-do list, all items were checked as complete except for a “Map made with labeled coordinates with people/things in their own main righteous place” and a plan to “Make crutches…”. Since my daughter never got to making the map, I had a blast creating one for the frame’s backdrop (and, while I was at it, found a cool, huge, fantasy map-making community online). I also had fun coming up with names of the places on the map using some of my daughter’s made-up Pinaré names such as Gooseberg, River Oddyseuss Telahumus and Golosh Gap. Plus, I added some of my own fictional places – Sea of Sculpy, Port Pinaré, and Lake Effect. (I never made the crutches either!)
To complete the display, I made a name placard for each figurine using the kingdom log and the tattooed codes. I then happily found out about “UHU Tac” (a mounting putty museums use for projects like these) and secured each figurine and placard to its place in the frame. Since the frame was black and dark, I also added mini, battery-operated lights to the frame’s “ceiling”. They were a nice feature until, after a couple of years, they stopped working (and have since been removed).
I certainly had a lot of fun creating this assemblage. In the future, if my children or grandchildren don’t want to display “Pinaré” in their homes, I would love to see it displayed in The Strong: National Museum of Play in Rochester, NY! That would be a dream come true!