Season's greetings from the Museum of Miniature Found Objects. This charming yuletide display has been created by local children at the nearby St Erik's Academy of Wrestling Excellence, using objects from the museum's collection. Its opening was serenaded in a truly festive manner by the museum choir, with a delightful selection of Christmas carols.

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
Found objects:
= blue star: 3.26pm, Wednesday 10 August, Dunsmure Road, north London; 
= chocolate gold coin: 11.47am, Wednesday 30 November, Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, central London; 
= circular mirror: 10.54am, Thursday 17 November, Westfield Mall, west London; 
= green feather: 2.11pm, Thursday 14 July, Mackenzie Road, north London; 
= large silver star: 10.27am, Friday 29 July, Friars Court, Lyne Crescent, east London; 
= small silver star: 12.01pm, Thursday 21 July, Elthorne Road, east London; 
= snowman sticker: 11.01am, Monday 5 December, Warner Place, east London.

Recent visitors to the Museum of Miniature Found Objects will have noticed members of staff sporting this badge. The high numbers of visitors to the museum's galleries of late has sometimes made it difficult for individuals to find staff to answer questions and provide information on the exhibits. Working closely with the Institute of Invigilating, the museum has raised the profile of gallery attendants, through this innovative design (© MeggGlobalConcepts), thus ensuring the visitor's experience of the museum is a satisfying one.

The Museum of Miniature Found Objects has just concluded its first artist-in-residency, which marks the successful inauguration of the museum's arts programme. The Biffo Art Collective has been working in the museum's galleries, drawing inspiration from both the museum's collection and members of the public, to explore the relationship between the finder and the found. The works are currently on exhibition in the entrance hall, and presented here is a small selection from the Biffo Art Collective's work over the past fortnight.

The Pooter Wing of the Museum of Miniature Found Objects is currently showcasing jewellery held in its collection. These have been acquired over the summer and autumn, from across London and in Nottingham.

The MMFO would like to remind visitors that the Museum's Submissions Committee welcomes entries from all corners of the globe, and those with items they'd like to send in should first send a photograph to the Museum Submissions Committee at MuseumofFoundObjects@muse.com. Entry requirements are as follows:

(i)   Items measure no more than 50mm by 50mm by 50mm.
(ii)  They must be found by chance.

(ii)  They can be found in any environment outside the home.

(iv) They must be made of a durable material.
(v)  On finding an object, the time, place and date of finding must be recorded.

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = 

Found objects:

= blue felt star: 3.26pm, Wednesday 10 August, Dunsmure Road, north London; 
= crystal pendant earring: 1.51pm, Thursday 16 August, Duke of York Steps, the Mall, central London;
= golden buckle: 1.23pm, Thursday 12 July, St Petersgate, Nottingham; 
= large pearl: 5.52pm, Thursday 8 November, Manor House Underground Station, north London;
= oval faceted jewel: 12.25pm, Friday, 29 July, Thebarton Street, north London;
= pearl ring: 6.11pm, Friday 16 September, Old Street Underground Station, central London; 
= pink crystal square button: 6.20pm, Monday 5 September, Fairtholt Road, north London; 
= pink jewel encircled by diamonds: 1.25pm, Saturday 6 August, Dunsmure Road, north London;
= silver bead: 11.24am, Thursday 14 July, Old Street, central London; 
= silver button: 10.15am, Friday 3 June, Hertford Road, north London;
= silver metal buckles: 9.36am, Thursday 20 October, Woodberry Down, north London;
= square silver stud: 2.29pm, Friday 15 July, Highbury Station Road, north London.

Dan Hartney's Buckethead is an enjoyable piece of animation, with an effective use of sound and colour as a key part of the story's development. Buckethead drives the animation, rather than the other way round. Hartney takes a simple story and fills it with life and humour. Buckethead's transition from robot creaking through an alienated landscape to dancing with the joyful zest of Gene Kelly is a pleasure to watch.

This is an image of Coco the Clown from Clowns International's magnificent egg record, taken by photographer Luke Stephenson. Coco the Clown (Nicolai Poliakoff, born in Latvia in 1900) was one of the most famous clowns in the UK in the middle of the twentieth century, and was one of the founding members of Clowns International. And the importance of the egg record is that make-up is a vital element of a clown's unique identity. At Clowns International the tradition of recording each clown's face on an egg (both the make-up and as a portrait) was started by Stan Bult in 1946, on a blown egg (though these days it's done on a more durable porcelain egg). To see many more of these eggs recording individual clowns, go to Luke Stephenson's website and click on the Clown Egg Register.

The Museum of Miniature Found Objects is delighted to announce the opening of the new Pooter Wing. The international architectural design competition saw many fascinating explorations of environments in which to exhibit the collection for the new wing. There were thought-provoking entries from internationally renowned architectural practices such as Benn + Partners Architects and Studio Daniel Libeskind, through to small one-man bands, all creating exciting culturally enmeshed spaces rich in synchronicity. The Board of the Museum found it a challenging decision to make, but felt the ideas from a small north London studio practice, E. Edge Builders ('No Job Too Small'), met the museum's vision for the future.

This image is from the work of Frank Meadow Sutcliffe, taken circa 1880 in Whitby. The subject of his study is unnamed. Sutcliffe was a photographer who earned his living in Whitby at the end of the nineteenth century as a portrait photographer, though his real interest appears to have been documenting the lives of the fishing community in the town. This photograph combines the nineteenth century's romanticisation of rusticity with notions of beauty from classical antiquity. Sutcliffe has photographed the young fishwife at her work in an arabesque pose (with all its references to classical Greek sculpture), isolating her from her fellow workers who appear blurred and distanced. It's a satisfying image to look at.

A stroll on the beach at Robin Hood's Bay on the north Yorkshire coast when the tide was out gave this view. And up the coast at Whitby the town hall clock raced ahead of St Mary's parish church on the cliff above, with the hour chiming in the town a good six minutes ahead of the church's up above. Another curiosity of Whitby — wherever you go in the town the smell of fish and chips wafts through the air.

This is one of the ugliest things on show this week in the shop windows on the Kingsland Road in Dalston. A glass AK-47 submachine gun for a bottle, handsomely presented in a wooden army crate, with bullets for the shot glasses. Just the thing for under the Christmas tree.

Mr al-Habib of west London very kindly donated this item to the Museum of Miniature Found Objects. He found it on the pavement in Cadogan Street, near Sloane Square, on Monday 5 September at 1.34pm, five minutes before a heavy rainfall.

This image is from my early Sunday-morning sortie down Brick Lane (if you'd like to see it larger, double-click on it), in the company of Gillian, a fellow graffitista. Having admired the street art in the area for several years, I thought it was time I contributed work of my own. I had an old Penguin paperback whose woody pages were yellowing nicely. I glued several together to get the size I wanted, then printed my image on to it. The inks sank into the paper, rather than lying on the surface, which gave the image a furry look, which I found quite pleasing. I like the idea of using pages from unreadable novels and out-of-date textbooks as an integral part of the work, and I plan to put up a new image around Brick Lane every two to three months.

I've just been to see the exhibition 'Watch Me Move: The Animation Show' at the Barbican in London. What a feast! There are some lovely and intriguing works by animators from across the world, people like Caroline Leaf, the Brothers Quay, Zhou Xiaohu and Lotte Reiniger. But it was Yuri Norstein's Tale of Tales that transported me to a different realm as I watched it. Released in 1979 by the USSR's Soyuzmultfilm, a Russian animation studio based in Moscow, it's a beautiful film and succeeds completely in the way Norstein's style and the narrative come together to evoke the quality of memory. And I like that about it very much, that I'm remembering a film about memory, in the same fragmentary way I recall memories from my own life.

Here's a mater dolorosa in Seville Cathedral. I found many of these in churches across the city, dressed in rich fabrics, hands clasped in an agony of suffering, with rich gems sometimes depicting their tears. It seemed to me the sufferings of Mary are something of a cult for the Spanish, Jesus playing a secondary role in the drama. I liked these churches, some shabby and dusty, at times busy with people or just a solitary priest pottering about. I wondered about these statues, that perhaps the Spanish invest all their sorrows in the Virgin Mary so that they can get on with the business of enjoying life.

These are some of the recent acquisitions at the Museum of Miniature Found Objects. The two metal hearts are the kind donations of Mrs Plimmestine of west London. From left to right:

= the metal heart with an arrow was found at 8.51am on 9 August, in Earls Court Road near Kensington High Street;

= the heart-shaped sweet was found at 10.08am on Friday 29 July, in Guildsway, east London;

= the plastic red heart was found at 11.11am on Saturday 28 May, in Lordship Road, north London;

= the filigree metal heart was found on the paving stones in front of Hackney Town Hall in Mare Street, at 5.59pm on Saturday 18 June.

For the past year my sister Bérénice, an artist, has been working on a project based in an art gallery and our mother's house nearby. My mother moved from this house to a smaller one over a year ago, and took only those things from the house she wanted or needed. Bérénice was fascinated by what had been left behind; as she says, "What is our relationship to the stuff we no longer need? What happens when something as big as a house is superseded by a new life? There are things stowed away in our houses that we only seem to find when we vacate them . . ." One of the project's participants, Mike Ladd, captures the poignancy of this in his film, Ungiven Gifts, which features the voices of Bérénice and our mother Anne, telling the story of the some of the objects left behind. 

Bérénice's blog is also well worth a visit.

I spent the day in Nottingham recently and wandered up to the Castle. I was delighted to find this magnificent Robin Hood in the grounds. He's made of a wire frame, stuffed with compost and planted with about 3,500 tiny plants. It's the attention to detail I like so much - the three pheasant feathers for his cap, and the spare arrows in his quiver. Rufford Tenants' and Residents' Association, who made this fine piece of vegetable work, are to be congratulated. I'm not sure this kind of British municipal park decoration crosses cultures though; as I took the photo, a party of French visitors were guffawing away behind me.

I've been playing around with printing on non-standard paper today. I picked up an old paperback recently in a charity shop. It's got nicely yellowing pages and the paper is very absorbent, so the colours should come out quite flat and, I hope, look rather old-fashioned. I've put together this image to use for the experiment, and if it works I'm thinking of printing out a lot of them and sticking them up around where I live.

This paperback cover is a gem of 1950’s jacket design, jumping out from a crowded rack in a second-hand bookshop in Islington. The image is a dramatic piece of illustration, hinting at a racy story before the book’s even been opened. When I took if off the rack to have a look I discovered a card inside — Walter Trauffer on the Via Cattedrale in Lugano advertising his music boxes and cuckoo clocks. By the look of it The Case of the Empty Tin’s from the same era, with Walter Trauffer’s offerings used as a book mark on an Italian holiday.

Here are two recent additions to the Museum of Found Objects. The earring was found at 3.04pm outside Masala Zone in Bishops Bridge Road in west London on Saturday 4 June. The toy soldier was found on Friday 8 July at 10.23am in Tufnell Park Road in north London.

This is a shop front in Stoke Newington in London. These older shop signs are a fast-vanishing remnant of the 1960s and 1970s. The dated terms used in them was originally intended to suggest the shop's racy modernity, but now evoke a sense of nostalgia.

Here's the latest addition to the collection at the Museum of Miniature Found Objects. It's a miniature Easter egg, found on Eltham Common at 3.01pm on Sunday 15 May, as part of an Easter egg hunt. The donor, Reginald McGuiver, was pursued by a group of angry parents as he ran from the park.

The Museum staff have been thrilled to hear recently of another similar museum in Mijas in Spain, the Carromato de Max, whose collection contains some of the smallest objects in the world, such as Churchill's head sculpted from a stick of chalk and a copy of Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper painted on a grain of rice. The Museum of Miniature Found Objects looks forward to forging links with this sister collection.

Steve Bell is currently exhibiting at the Cartoon Museum in Little Russell Street. As the political cartoonist at the Guardian he uses a mordant humour to expose the sham in political life. This cartoon is one of the panels from a strip he had running whilst the ban on fox-hunting in England was being debated in Parliament, with a vast amount of hot air being generated by the pro-hunting lobby. There are no sacred cows in Bell's observations, and he doesn't pull his punches.

The Museum of Miniature Found Objects takes great pleasure in announcing its latest acquisition. This plastic brain was submitted by Ms M. Hewlett of London, and was found at 2.01pm on Saturday 21 May on the corner of Ravenscourt Gardens and Ravenscourt Park in west London.

The Submissions Committee is delighted by this first donation, and welcomes all applications from members of the public.

Here's an impression of the experience of walking in Clissold Park, near where I live. Some years ago there was a vast terrapin population living in the New River, which runs through the park. On sunny days the terrapins would climb onto the river banks to doze in the sunshine. Then the local council decided to remove them as they were not a species native to the British Isles. Sadly, the council did this in the clumsiest way possible, which resulted in terrapins fleeing onto nearby roads, with inevitable results. On sunny days when I walk by the river, I think of them, one on top of another on top of another, ghostly little towers of basking terrapins on the riverbank.

I've just returned from Spain, where I spent some time in Seville and Cordoba. At night the streets are bathed in the soft, warm light of sodium lights. One evening in Seville, the sounds of a woman singing flamenco in the café in the street below drifted up to our terrace. In the mornings the air was filled with the cries of house martins, wheeling and diving over the rooftops. And chatting to a waiter one evening who wanted to travel to London to see the rain. Andalucía has won my heart.

This is a Victorian gravestone in Abney Park Cemetery in Stoke Newington. There's something boldly complacent about the 'satisfied' in an age where religious belief held much greater weight than today — as if one's deity has passed muster after being critically assessed. In this same cemetery there are also later gravestones with images of cars and bicycles on them. I like to think these items were highly valued by the individual buried in the grave, rather than what ran them over and killed them.

The Museum of Miniature Found Objects is delighted to announce that submission of found objects is now open to the general public.

Those wishing to submit their entries should first send a photo of their object to the Museum Submissions Committee (MuseumofFoundObjects@muse.com; the Committee requires all photos to be jpegs with a resolution of 72 pixels/inch). All submissions must follow the entry criteria:

(i)   Items must measure no more than 50mm by 50mm by 50mm.

(ii)  They must be found by chance.

(iii) They can be found in any environment outside the home.

(iv) They must be made of a durable material.

(v)  On finding an object, the time, place and date of finding must be recorded.

Once the appraisal process has been completed, the Submissions Committee may then invite the entrant to send in their object to the museum, where it will join the museum's permanent collection. Please note, the Submissions Committee's decision is final.

The Museum of Miniature Found Objects has had a lot of queries from recent visitors, and to assist future visitors, here are our answers to some of those questions:

= the IT/media suite has a full range of audio-visual equipment available;
= the Michelin-starred restaurant is open from 6.30pm;
= our celebrated range of museum jams and chutneys can be purchased in the gift shop;
= the main exhibition hall is available for hire for conferences and weddings;
= the museum provides daily guided tours (please meet at the reception desk);
= there are lifts to all floors and the museum is fully wheelchair accessible;
= a full programme of holiday workshops for children is available (please contact the reception desk);
= job opportunities and internships are available and are advertised on our website.

Here's another item from the collection held by the Museum of Miniature Found Objects. This was found at 11.27am, at the foot of the flight of steps leading up to 74 Tollington Park in north London, on Tuesday 15 June 2010. This, along with the little hand, is one of the earlier pieces of the collection. The inaugural item, however, will be showcased in a forthcoming entry.