Museum of Child­hood (again)

Last week I went to the Museum of Child­hood with Melanie and Becca. I’ve been to the place so many times (it’s one of my favour­ite places in London), and I have a lot of photos on this blog of the vari­ous differ­ent exhib­its (look at the Museum  tag), so here’s a few things I noticed for the first time. First up this amaz­ing ride-on lady­bird toy.

They also had this, one of Lotte Rein­i­ger‘s scenes from Cinder­ella. I was surprised at how home-made the actu­al piece is- you can see pencil marks on the black card still and the edges are roughly taped (it’s about 75cm across). I always wondered how she got some of the trans­par­ent layers- turns out it’s layers of tracing paper and semi-trans­lu­cent card sand­wiched in between the main layers of tracing paper. Of couse when the whole thing is back­lit with coloured lights it looks immacu­late. Here’s the film . .

They also have an excel­lent collec­tion of magic lantern slides, one of my all-time favour­ite things. These two have levers at the side, which make the sea and kaleido­scope move respect­ively. I wish that magic lantern shows were still a common enter­tain­ment.

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