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Egyptian Treasure
January 25, 2008
The Grand Rapids Public Museum will be hosting the National Geographic MAPS exhibit from February 2 - May 11. This interactive exhibit on loan from the Children’s Museum in Indianapolis encourages children and families to imagine and explore with hands-on displays, activities and computer simulations such as navigating an Egyptian tomb or following the routes of early explorers.
In conjunction with the opening of the MAPS exhibit on February 2, the museum is hosting a letterboxing event as part of a series of events encouraging adventure and exploration. Several West Michigan area letterboxers are involved with this event which will offer an informational area where people can learn about letterboxing and a stamp-carving activity for kids using fun foam. I am helping to coordinate the carving portions of the event and will be doing a carving demonstration showing the process of carving a rubber stamp. A carving tutorial will be available for visitors to take home with them if they would like to give it a try.
Several letterboxes have been created specifically for the event and strategically planted in the museum for participants to find using provided clues. My contribution to the collection of letterboxes is “Walk Like an Egyptian.” I spent a few hours this afternoon at the museum gathering information for the clues, which will require seekers to collect information from throughout the museum to deduce the location of the letterbox. The letterboxes will be in place throughout the duration of the MAPS exhibit. After the day of the event, clues can be obtained at the information desk. Here is a sneak peek at my letterbox, which includes a hand-carved stamp and handmade coptic-bound logbook housed in an ornate wooden box.
{ Walk Like an Egyptian Letterbox }
Posted by Deb
Topics: letterboxing, artwork
January 26th, 2008 at 1:40 pm
That’s so cool, so did you have to contact the museum to help or did they contact you?? I think it is really cool that they are doing this. I was just telling someone at my work about your letterboxing..she hadn’t ever heard of it. I’ll have to tell her about this too. awesome carving!
January 26th, 2008 at 5:02 pm
The museum put out a request at one of the letterboxing groups looking for people who would be willing to help them host this event to coincide with the opening of the MAPS exhibit. A few of us met with them to check out what it was they were hoping to do and then enlisted the help of other area letterboxers to help out with various areas and activities. It is really cool to have some letterboxes in the museum, even if it is only for a few months.