I loved Marjon's ideas for the detective convention. How about some feet sticking out from behind sofas and under beds! Look out Laurie Sisson..a whole new use for your 'The Foot'!lol (Laurie sells weighted feet in many sizes and styles perfect for making your dh people stands without help.)

Alice Zinn- Pt. St. Lucie FL

Detective's Convention: you didn't mention what period detectives you were thinking of, which would make a difference -- Sherlock Holmes, Lord Peter Wimsey? Sam Spade? Nathan Heller? I've always thought Marcia Muller's Sharon McCone and Sue Grafton's Kinsey Milhone ought to run into each other on a case since they both work in California. Or in a medieval house you could have Brother Cadfael, Sister Frevisse, Feste the Jester, etc. Or a Roman villa with Gordianus and Falco...so many detectives to choose among!

Loretta.Sniarowski

Basketball: I'm not sure I can answer your question completely, but I have a basketball that has been cut and finished inside with some kind of plaster so it holds it's shape. It was given to me, but I am unable to get in touch with the person that did it. Maybe, if you started at the bottom and made a smooth floor, then as that dries, fill in all the sides and top, and insert a heavy balloon and blow up to hold it until it is dry. Pop the balloon.

Betty in Ky

Play with room box: I made a room box for one of my granddaughters using a Critter Home It is a clear plastic container with a lid and a carrying handle. I got mine at a pet shop where they had a better selection of color for the tops, but I have also seen them at Wal-Mart and I believe K Mart. They come in several different sizes.

Mary Lou in Portage, IN

Boarding House: How about a young couple with a baby? The room crisscrossed with clotheslines, the harried mother trying to iron while the baby is trying to climb out of the crib, and poor Dad searching the want ads for a job. The traveling salesmen is a great idea, too. How about a pulp fiction writer hammering away on his old typewriter?

Molly

Boarding House: A boarding house sounds so incredibly ambitious! The first thing that came to my mind is a young lady that as come from a small town to work in an office while she dreams of getting married. Don't know why that struck me but I could just visualize her sitting on the edge of her bed looking at bridal magazines while some photographs of her family and the farm are on the desk. Her country clothes could be draped over a chair or hanging in the closet while some shopping bags or boxes would spill out her new city work clothes. Another guest could be a recent immigrant. Books or records on learning to speak the English language, a passport, travel posters of home on the wall.

Reva

Boarding House: Don't forget the neighborhood snoop / gossip who doesn't have a life of her own so spends her time on the telephone with binoculars in hand (behind the drapes), still in her own bathrobe with clock reading 12:45. There should be a soap opera scene on the t.v. set which has an old wire coat hanger for an antenna (remember that?). Since her time is pretty well taken up with other peoples lives, her sink is running over with dishes. The trash can, however, never overflows because she makes frequent trips there to see what So-and-so threw out. The uncleared table from breakfast will quite obviously be set for one. I can say that this snoop MUST be a woman without being a sexist pig. If it were a man, snoop gossip would more likely be presumed to be some sort of perverted voyeur which would NOT be an amusing miniature subject

PetiteFacades

Boarding House: How about an old gunslinger? I do historical research on the old west and some of these old guys lived into the 1930s. Wyatt Earp didn't die until 1929. There could be all kinds of old cowboy things, wanted posters, guns, badges, and a very elderly man living in the past.

Rita

Boarding House: I thought the suggestion of a young woman was great - I had been thinking of a movie I saw recently (I tried to find the name & couldn't) of a young woman at the turn of the century who moves to Boston to be one of the very first female "typists" - she winds up in a boarding house of the strangest oddballs (it's a requirement to live there!). Besides herself (a woman with a job!) there's a man writing a dictionary and an inventor. Also, I think, a songwriter and a painter (I only remember them because they have a routine of buying one another's latest works, so the money just keeps making a circle through the house). Here in Haverhill they used to be famous for their shoe factories, and the working-class girls who came to work in them were housed in strictly chaperoned boarding houses. Maybe a couple such girls sharing a room? And the lady of the house might be a single (widowed?) mother, so her child(ren) would also need a room!

Grace

Boarding House: How about a pair of bank robbers, just returning from a heist, stuffing the mattress with money? Or a chemist, quickly recovering from some sort of miscalculation, trying to remove the green hair now growing on the floor and the sofa? Then there's the fortune teller, polishing her crystal ball. There could be an old man sitting on the front steps, spinning tales for the neighborhood children . . . and why not a miniaturist, surrounded by materials, staring cross eyed at the tiny object she's trying to paint?

Elaine Brown