The Home Museum

in
Curated collection of sand dollars, sea urchins, shells, and felted wool.

Curated collection of sand dollars, sea urchins, shells, and felted wool.

For our family, going TO the museum is an important part of the experience - getting outside our house to explore our world and learn something new. But, we also do plenty to create museum experiences at home. 

Museum collections are one of the ways we bring museums home. Our family is based in Pittsburgh, but we travel often to Maine to visit our extended family. Each time, we return home with shells and rocks, sand dollars and sea urchins, and sea glass. We have quite the collection! 

Rather than keeping all our treasures piled together in a bag or a box, we've chosen to display them on a table in our dining room. We use various glass container to display the different types of objects we've amassed. There's a jar of sea glass, the shallow bowl of sand dollars, sea urchins and slipper shells, and a taller glass cylinder with larger shells. We curate our collection.

A few of the questions we ask to help decide what goes and what stays:

  • Which items are the best examples of what we've found?
  • Do we group items together by size? by color? by what kind of animal they once held?
  • How will we know when it is time to change up our display?
  • Will we play with our collection, or is it a thing to only be looked at?
  • How does our collection highlight what is important to our family?
  • Can we add an unexpected element to our display? (like the metal sand dollar in the photo above)

Shells, rocks, acorns, leaves, and other found objects make great collections. Of course, so do family photographs, trophies, tea cups and any of a hundred other items that people collect. Taking the time to think carefully about what items we collect and how we display them turns a random pile of stuff into our very own little museum.