TOBY'S SPACE

Shaking a snow globe and watching the snow float inside it, is a charm by itself. For some reason it brings back joyful moments from our childhood.

The other day I decided to put some notes on my collection and I was really excited by the rich information which I gathered on the symbol inside each globe.

For those who are about to stumble into this folder, I hope you will enjoy reading the way I did when I created it.

Finally, I made my own snow globe.

Collecting snow globes from different world locations would have remained incomplete without a globe from my country Lebanon. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find one in the local souvenir shops, so I decided to make one of my own.

I must admit it was not an easy task to do. I needed all the ingredients, and the most difficult part was finding the empty glass globe.

From the 1$ shop, I bought few globes which have the same baby figurine in it, and then I soaked them in benzene to loosen the glue.

Now I had the globe and decided to put in it the ever green cedars tree which is the symbol of Lebanon. With the help of a snow white eraser, I built a mountain of snow and on top of it I planted a cedar tree which is in fact nothing more than a small pin showing the tree and the colors of the Lebanese flag. I filled the globe with water and snow glitters, and carefully assembled the symbol inside the globe, and then sealed it with the rubber seal which I also removed from the 1$ globe. Finally I glued the glass globe into the wooden base which I had made in a local carpentry. On the wooden base I wrote Lebanon using alphabet letters which I bought from a book shop.

The other two globes were made in the same manner, one showing the citadel of Baalbek (a cheap iron key holder which is already rusting inside the globe) lol...and Harissa which is a famous religious location where a huge statue of the virgin mary is standing on the top of a hill, and which can be reached either by car or through a telpheric conveyance.

The statue of the virgin is a small silver pin and the 3 colored needles are used to show the telpheric :).

What kept my work far from perfection is the air bulb which I couldn't avoid as well as the heavy density of water which made the snow glitters sink rather than float.

Also the rubber seal was not installed properly.

No matter what, I think these are the most valuable globes...lol

A snow globe is a transparent sphere usually made of glass enclosing a miniaturized scene of some sort, often together with a model of a landscape.

Precisely when the first snow globe, also called a waterglobe or snowdome, was made remains unclear, but they appear to date from France during the early 1800s. They may have appeared as a successor to the glass paperweight, which became popular a few years earlier. Snow globes appeared at the Paris Universal Expo in 1878, and by 1879, at least five companies were producing snow globes and selling them throughout Europe.

In 1889, a snow globe containing a model of the newly built Eiffel Tower was produced to commemorate the International Exposition in Paris.

Snow globes feature diverse scenes, ranging from the typical holiday souvenirs to more eclectic collectibles featuring Christmas scenes, Disney characters, popular icons, animals, military figures, historical scenes, etc.

 Snow globes have appeared in a number of film scenes, the most famous of which is the opening of the 1941 classic Citizen Kane. In the film Citizen Kane, Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles) drops a snow globe and gasps "Rosebud" as he dies. In the TV series Lost, the character Desmond believes that no one can escape from the Island because it's "in a snow globe".

  .   Richard Gere's character kills his wife's lover with a snow globe in the movie Unfaithful.

• In the Joel Schumacher film Falling Down, the main character buys a snow globe as a present for his daughter.
• In an episode of the show Heroes, entitled "The Hard Part", the show's antagonist, Sylar, gives his mother a snow globe, knowing how much she loved them.
• In Pixar's Knick Knack a snowman stuck in a snow globe wants to reach a pretty "Sunny Miami" knick knack at the other end of the bookshelf.
• The final episode of St. Elsewhere revealed that the events of the series were all the fantasy of an autistic boy who owned a snow globe housing a likeness of the St. Eligius hospital.