Old Times
Old Times is a set of scenes built inside hinged metal tins: open them and a furnished room unfolds across the lid…
Crafting dreams since 2009 Build Your World, Piece by Piece

The smallest world we know how to make.
Old Times is a set of scenes built inside hinged metal tins: open them and a furnished room unfolds across the lid…
Countryside Notes opens into a cottage study in a tin: a desk under a window, shelves, a lamp and printed pages…
Roam Around in Winter is a travel scene in a tin: a snowed-in corner with a suitcase, a lamp post, a bench and a…
Happy Corner is the tin printed IN A HAPPY CORNER on the lid, and it opens into exactly that: a reading nook with…
A tin kit is a complete miniature scene built inside a hinged metal box roughly the size of a postcard. The lid becomes the back wall, the base becomes the floor, and a surprising amount of dollhouse furniture fits in between. Shut the lid and nobody knows it is there.
This is the cheapest and fastest way to find out whether this hobby is for you. An afternoon, a cup of tea, no special tools beyond what we put in the box. If you enjoy it, the miniature room kits are waiting; if you do not, you have lost an afternoon rather than a month.
Designing a tin is an exercise in subtraction. A room kit can carry fifty loose parts; a tin carries twelve, so each one has to earn its place — the stove, the stool, the kettle, two paper flowers and a shelf of jars. We draw them four or five times over before the little scene reads clearly at arm's length.
Finished, a tin stands open on a desk, a windowsill or an office bookshelf, and closes again when you move house. They also make genuinely good small gifts, because the tin is the packaging and the present at once, and a whole stack of them fits in one Christmas parcel.
Nothing about the craft is different from our larger house kits — the same glue, the same tabs, the same booklet style. There is simply less of it, which is exactly why we recommend starting here.
An afternoon — three to five hours for most people, less once you have built one before. It is the shortest project we sell and the one we hand to anyone who is not sure whether they will enjoy the hobby.
Most do not; there is nowhere sensible to hide a battery pack in a tin that has to close. If you want a lit scene at this size, look at the dream bottles instead.
Yes. Everything is drawn to clear the lid, so a finished tin shuts, travels in a bag and opens again on the other end without losing a chair.
“My 15 year old daughter did this one over her Christmas break while I worked on one of my own. She did a great job but did get frustrated with the very tiny things. Her pack came with a variety of tools and the batteries were included but it's best to have a set of your own tools and glue for these sorts of projects.”
“I built it and it looks fantastic! No general complaints - some of the instructions were a little hard to follow (some parts might have been better in a different order?) If you buy this, definitely use some kind of uber, super glue. Otherwise it's hard to put together.”
“My 15 year old daughter did this one over her Christmas break while I worked on one of my own. She did a great job but did get frustrated with the very tiny things. Her pack came with a variety of tools and the batteries were included but it's best to have a set of your own tools and glue for these sorts of projects.”
Quoted as written by builders on the listings for these kits.
The highest-rated kits from the rest of the bench — rooms, dollhouses, nooks and dream bottles.
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