A 52-year-old mom of four from Wiltshire in England has spent hours creating miniature lockdown scenes with her pet hamsters. Beverly Borrill, who runs the Instagram account @harcourt_hammies where she tracks the animals’ adventures, clearly knows the best way to spend her time while at home, that’s for sure!
- Borrill has been posing her hamsters in amazing scenes for years. Creating intricate little universes for the hamsters to enjoy isn’t new for Borrill, who’s been posting photos of her scenes online for the past several years. Now that there’s a nationwide lockdown, however, she was inspired to try a new theme.
- She’s always trying to do things in good taste. Instead of having the hamsters pretend to be ill, Borrill’s lockdown scenes are a bit more lighthearted, though she did have the animals help out the National Health Service. “I’d thought about posing the hamsters in these coronavirus-related scenes for quite a while, when we first went into isolation,” she said. “I didn’t want to do anything in bad taste so I decided that it would be better to have them do things such as help the NHS, as opposed to the hamsters pretending to have coronavirus.”
- The lockdown has really helped Borrill’s hamster creativity. “Really I’ve just been inspired by things that we have done in lockdown – endless amounts of laundry, cleaning the kitchen and quite a lot of time with some wine in the hot tub!” Borrill said. Instead of hating being stuck inside, she’s been loving it. “I’ve been enjoying having more free time to do the things I love the most, such as creating these scenes for the hamsters.”
- Creating these lockdown scenes takes a lot of time. They’re intricate and labor-intensive, which means they take a lot of time. “The hospital probably took about four full days to do. I have to say, my other half was extremely helpful because he 3D printed the little hand wash pumps and also the table that the ventilator sits on,” Borrill revealed. “The bellows in the ventilator do actually work – it’s incredible – and my daughter Maddy did all the paper folding for that.”
- Making hamster scenes is a family affair. “My mum knitted the little blanket for the bed so it was a really big family effort. Normally everybody’s rushing out to do their own things but now it’s so nice to have everybody around the table doing something together and chatting,” Borrill said. Agreed!
