MazeCard: hand puppets

There is an outdoor museum in central Germany called Hessenpark, where all the county's old buildings from the Middle Ages are restored and exhibited. Once a timbered house is in danger of being torn down, preservation status gets determined and the building is taken apart, transported to the park and then reconstructed. The result is an imaginary town with a market place, farms, churches, synagogues and a number of small settlements. Each building is open to visitors and exhibits either a living quarter, a store or a work environment such as the shoemaker, the school or stone carvers work place. The place is just amazing.http://www.hessenpark.de/index.php?id=englis

When we visited this imaginary town, they had choreographed a Children's Week, where in almost every house there was an activity for kids. We are talking sophisticated crafts such as soap stone carving, toy boat building, hands-on weaving on real looms, actual paper making and so on. The museum had been transformed into a museum of the lost arts of the Middle Ages.

I was most inspired by the doll maker. She was working on making a series of dolls for the museum's puppet theater and the kids worked on a smaller project. She had walked me through the steps of doll making and I can't wait to try them out. In the meantime, some of these images are inspired by her dolls, others imitations from old hand puppets that I inherited from my grandmother.