Curiosity cabinets: dream rooms

I spent some free time this morning cleaning a snapping turtle shell and skull for my curiosity cabinet.  Unfortunately they're so fragile that when put into a peroxide bath they totally fell apart and will need to be re-constructed.  Which I'm willing to do but will be a painstaking process.  I also checked on the fox skeleton.  It's coming along well enough and may be a winter project for my husband and I; after I clean and sterilize it we might try to articulate the skeleton together.

If you are at all interested in natural history preservation, please visit this site: Jake's Bones.  Jake lives in Scotland.  When he was blogging he was still barely a teenager.   This kid is an amazing wealth of knowledge.

Later in the day I was stuck in the driveway, both kids sleeping in the car, unable to take them in because we were in the middle of a severe downpour.  I used that time to browse Pinterest to look at images of curiosity cabinets and rooms.   I really like these ideas and hope some day we have a library room where *one* wall can be dedicated to this kind of thing.  My collection is 90% natural history finds.  It's great to be able to watch a nature program with the oldest and then go pull an object out of the collection to discuss together; skulls, fossils, beetles, stingray egg cases.    i'll have to post about our collection at some point.

Anyhow, these are some things that I really like:

I like the order to this along with the globes and the clocks.  My father is a clock collector and some of the early ones are so very interesting.  My husband and I have seen the great astronomical clock in Prague.  It would be fun to add an old clock to our collection.

I don't know if these are paper cuts or what but they're very beautiful.

I've collected and cleaned a large collection of eggs from domestic birds from friends and family.  Everything from ostrich (my aunt and uncle raised them) to quail.  A domed frame like this would be a treasure.

The pressed ferns here are a nice touch.

Our Native American artifacts displayed like the frames at the top, from the Warther Collection in Ohio.  The bottom two rows are made of buttons.

I love a lot of things about this; the seafoam green color of the display, the red coral, whale prints and oh, yeah, the giraffe of course.  Probably not going to get a taxidermy giraffe any time soon but it's always fun to dream isn't it?