a circus train one piece at a time over a period of several time over a period of several years, our interest in anything related began to grow.

This included carnival rides with carousels leading the way. We knew that it would be great to have a G scale carousel to use when we got around to putting a layout in the backyard but the few that were available were both expensive and in our opinions sort of ugly and unrealistic.

One day I suggested to Scott, "why don't you build me one..." He looked at me funny and said, "ok." From then on, we were on the lookout for anything that could be used in the making of a G scale carousel. One day while in the toy department of a store we saw a toy carousel that moved around with a crank. It was pink, purple and very much the look of a plastic toy for young children. Scott sat in the floor for a long time studying it and eventually told me that this cold be the foundation for my carousel. We bought it for about $20.00 and Scott went to work. This project became very large and would ultimately consume well over 1000 hours of time building and hunting for parts. It would be painted, motorized, outfitted with miniature lights and a real wooden floor, adorned with over a thousand gemstones, and built onto a large base with staircase, park benches and shrubs.

During the building of our carousel, I became Scott's source for information on how these rides were built and decorated. He bought me a number of books on the subject and I fell in love with the beauty, the history and romance of those incredible machines from days gone bye.

From that moment on, I was hooked on anything related to carousels. Shortly after the completion of our G scale carousel, I found myself unexpectedly pregnant with Jennifer. Since we had both fallen in love with carousels we decided to decorate the babies room in a carousel theme. This way we could use a variety of colors and it would be suitable for a boy or a girl. We had a lot of fun working on the room. We had a carousel lamp, the linens for the crib were made with material printed with carousels. There were carousel quilts, carousel light switch covers, miniature carousel horses on the chest of drawers and the most noticeable carousel additions to the room were the three paintings that Scott made on the walls. Over the chest of drawers was his first painting of a stylized horse. It was painted in blues and other pastel colors. When completed, he glued over 500 gem stones in a variety of colors all over the horse and saddle to decorate it much like many of the real carousel horses. This horse was about two and a half feet wide. He then painted another slightly smaller horse over the babies changing table. It was also decorated in hundreds of colorful gem stones.

The biggest project Scott undertook was the painting of a complete carousel on the wall over the baby's crib. It would be four feet wide, completely hand drawn and painted in a rainbow of colors and gold trim. The carousel showed a row of five different horses in a variety of color schemes and styles. The carousel was decorated with over 1000 gem stones. Many of these were the aurora borealis stones which were difficult to find making it necessary to drive on weekends to other cities to gather enough to finish the job.

In this part of my web site, I thought I would share some information about carousels, let you see Jennifer's room when she was born, and our carousel that Scott built for me. Click on the links above to visit each page. I think carousels are a wonderful part of history and should be preserved in every way possible.  - Becky