Thank you Butterfly.....

On the eve of the day that we open Small Worlds to the general public for the first time, and our immediate departure for England tomorrow evening, me for ten days and Butterfly for at least 3 months, maybe longer, it seems fitting that I will be directing you to her website, Words and Pictures, for an overview of some of what she has been doing in the past nine weeks.   Without her I would have achieved very little and I owe her huge thanks for her creativity, ability to think outside the box and her staying power!  I shall miss her enormously.  (For those who don't know - she's my daughter.....)

But before I give you the link, first of all a quick mouse update - when we left them they were about to move in, and those pesky pigs were hanging on to the tailgate of the wagon for dear life.  They've now reached the front door and are clearly considering their options.   Maybe they are about to burst into a Christmas Carol?  

Actually, bursting into song might gain them admittance - 


because if you take a peek inside the house then you can see two groups of singers in rehearsal.   Maximilian himself is conducting the teenage boys whose voices have broken...
 

and in the next room Nameless Mouse is tasked with whipping the younger mice into shape.  Butterfly was moved to wonder about the sound-proofing between the two rooms...... 

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the house, all is calm, all is bright.   

The servants are bustling around in  the kitchen,

most of the children are waiting for their tea, 

and the babies are amusing themselves upstairs.

And what of the pigs?   Well at least someone has answered the door .......

I seem to have spent much of the past few days fiddling with teeny tiny things - what the Czechs describe as piplačka, a lovely word. 

  For example there are the flowers I have been assembling from the Britains Floral Kits that have been lurking in boxes for many years. Purists should look away now because I confess I have been misusing them and turning lupins and delphiniums into wisteria, and sticking things in vases rather than in flower beds.   

Some of the flower heads are truly tiny as you can see from the tulip head next to the point of a toothpick. 

So when I drop them on the browny-red floor you can imagine that the language is not of the sweetest......

The flowers will feature in the new window we shall reveal tomorrow when we open.  As will something else very piplačky - the model that I started to build about 20 years ago and which Butterfly and I finished earlier today 

                                                                                                                      Imagine our horror when we discovered that we were expected to glue the bonnet down over all that painstaking wiring I assembled so long ago.  We decided to disobey the instructions and leave the car with a removeable bonnet so that in due course a chauffeur can bend over the engine and do some running repairs....

And now prepare to be amazed as you head over to Butterfly, for a look at what she has achieved in the past nine weeks. This post is dedicated to her with my heartfelt thanks and admiration for what she has done - take a look!

Thank you for staying with us on this journey.  It's not over yet so I hope that you will come back for many more blog posts.