A contemporary fairytale by Alenka Spacal entitled Little Beanie Belle Runs from the Bean Soup tells the story of a bean's journey. Little Beanie Belle runs from the bowl full of beans intended for bean soup. When she rolls along the apartment floor during her run and learns about the outside world, all she sees around her are legs. She meets table legs, chair legs, slippers, dogs' paws, cats' paws, and a tree trunk. We see the perspective of a small child who explores its environment when crawling along the floor, from where it gazes upwards. In addition to freeform parquet patterns, the author also emphasizes in her illustrations the exciting textures of different types of wood appearing on the furniture, for example, on the chair and table legs or the wardrobe in the apartment and on the bark of a tree trunk in the garden. In addition to wooden characters, Little Beanie Belle meets protagonists made of softer materials, such as woollen slippers.

That gaze upwards while growing up, that we quickly forget, is the meeting point of the display of furniture in the open storage collection, and the reason why we wanted to display illustrations from Little Beannie Belle Runs from the Bean Soup in the Maribor Regional Museum.

Looking at illustrations created with a brush seems equally important for a child's development as listening to fairytales read by parents or told by storytellers. This is why Alenka Spacal reads her fairytales to children herself, along with the illustrations that ecnourage the youngest ones to develop their own creativity. This year, she is going to present Little Beanie Belle in our museum.