N.A.M.E. of the Game

October, of course, is Miniatures Month, and to celebrate, our group recently participated in the N.A.M.E. project day.  We built as a group a pedlar's cart - we had a choice of 1/4 scale, 1/2 scale, or 12th scale - or we could do a combination of all three. I ended up doing a 12th scale, but have the 1/4 scale in my stocks at the moment. I did some last minute shopping, assuming there is one left, of 1/2 scale, because one can never have too many pedlar's carts, amirite? 

We started the day off early - too early, some would say, but they soon left  and we were left to get off to a roaring start (after some initial misfires, but that often happens I suppose). 

As always, we start by opening the lovely packages and staring excitedly at the plans, then start looking furtively left and right to see how everyone else is starting. This kit was complete, including wheels an' an' EVERYTHING. The only things we really needed to bring was our tools and glue, but we never go anywhere without those, right? 

  Figuring out which part goes where. Would have been nice to have had diagrams or the pieces labelled, but since the large cart was all of $7, one mustn't grumble. The big trick was to keep your pieces organized, however.

 Getting everything square was crucial, so great care was taken.

 The cart box, taking a little more shape. I, of course, managed to put the small drawer on the wrong end again, but I have decided that is how I roll (get it, roll? cart? yeah? Nothing? hoookay then.)

 Time to start adding the bottom structure, with cart struts, etc. 

Flipping 'er over, and adding wheels and top supports. 

 Little elves, working hard - oh yes PRODUCT PLACEMENT. International Delights, I hope you are paying attention and are willing to award us with swag? 

 No time for pie! Must build....
 

 People happily working, and just getting the job done. 

Just before the wheels went on. The wheels were clever, although one had to be very careful not to force the axle too hard - there were a few sad little snaps happening. I found my axle too thick so I did a little judicious sanding just at the end.

 The trellis, or just starting of same. This was perhaps the most complicated portion of the cart, with the least directions. Again, though, if everything is handed to you, what fun is it?

 The finished cart! I stained mine raspberry, and then went over it again with mountain green. I roughed it up as well. I am quite pleased with it. At this point, a picture formed in my mind of what I wanted to do - a coffee cart (this may have had something to do with an early threat in the day of there being no coffee forthcoming. They don't know how close I came to leaving right there and then. No coffee is grounds for dismissal, after all. Happily coffee did appear and no one got beaned). My coffee cart will have a twist, however. I have a lovely doll I bought from dear Cate many years ago...my lovely Esme. Esme strikes me as a lady who likes to socialize, and coffee is a social drink.

Esme of course is pictured with a mandrake root, which is around here somewhere, I just can't find it. If you look closely in the cart, I do have a spider plant in there, but I have to find my mandrake too. I have a great many ideas, and not enough hours in the day, but it will all come together (this is why we need more than one cart, I suppose). Anyway, Esme specializes in Witches Brew coffee. There will be a few references as well - she will sell some apples (its a family thing), along with coffee, treats, potions and spells. I have to dig out all my Halloween ephemera that I have floating about, and I have been taking advantage of Halloween sales as well this past week to get supplies for her cart. 

Also, I wanted potion jars, as Esme is going to be asked for spells and what self-respecting witch goes out without her magic? Now, these right scale jars can be expensive and hard to find. However, I went into a dollar store and scored - very inexpensively - nail art kits. They were $2 a piece. I got 18 jars in total, and I don't even really have to fill them either. Granted, I got a lot of nails and glue, but I am sure we can find a use for those as well. If you know someone fashion-forward tween, you might be able to beg jars off them as well.

I also made Esme a rather wild little Cappuccino machine - this is what happens when you listen to vintage Dr. Who while you design, it is a very fun Cap machine indeed! I have posted the instructions for this before, and I will again (with the suggestion, don't have the sound on  - just trust me on this, okay?). This is basically a copper pipe fitting (any hardware store, and they are inexpensive - some of the fittings look a lot like other things, it is worthwhile to dig!)  and an assortment of different jewellery findings etc. Mine came out a little more steam punk,  but that is okay, Esme is not your average vendor.

 
 What, you say? What did everyone else do with their carts? Well, I haven't gotten any pictures in yet, although one talented  and well organized lady (Sherrill) did finish a wonderful 1/4 scale flower cart. She made every single flower herself as well (premade, I should say, and I have said this other times, the success is ALWAYS in the pre-planning). She had a whole tray of OMG SQUEEEE flowers, and darn it if she didn't use each and every last one. 

Her flower pots were quite interesting - these are beads glued together, or interesting beads, etc. She used a superglue gel to build bead vases. Apparently it is a unicorn substance, because it appears rarely and to only to certain people. I did find a superglue with a brush included, which actually was close and a lot more useful than the tubes. The flowers above were made from pre-cut petals that Sherrill found at one of the shows, but she took the bits of paper and made magic.
 

Examples of her metal vases from jewellery findings....

These little vases below are actually pieces from turned newell posts etc. 
Really, anything that looks right is good in 1/4 scale - much of it is sleight of hand. 
 

 This is Sherrill, diligently putting together the teensy 1/4 scale cart. This gives you a good idea just how small they were. Sherrill also built a stand in her cart to display her flowers, which I will do as well - it just gives you a bit of height and extra space. 

 Sorry for the fuzzy picture, it was difficult to keep still, if only because of the tiny size. 

A slightly clearer picture, which does not even come close to what this looked like in real life. The finished article, however! Well Done, that girl!

Hope you enjoyed the glimpse into the N.A.M.E. day event, as done by MECO! Until next time, my sweet petunias! 

Just Monkeying Around

Humans are creatures who will only change if there is drama or trauma involved. This was said by me, but has some physics backing to it as well. We tend to follow the rule of "a body in motion tends to stay in motion" (Real Science People!) , and a change in course is a big production and often met with "but we do it this way, we have always done it this way, so we should always do it this way!"  The problem is, if this thinking had continued on in history, we probably would have still been picking bugs off each other's backs somewhere up in the trees. Granted, there seems to be a segment of society that fantasizes about going back to this, but I have to tell you - tree branches aren't comfortable, I would rather sleep in my bed,  and bugs can stay the heck outside if they don't want to have my shoe being the last thing on their minds, thank you very much. I guess what I am saying is, eventually someone had to fall out of a tree and say "hey, guys? this isn't so bad".

...and that would be me. There has been a rather large change being implemented at work lately, and people are starting to feel that they should scurry up to the branches to safety, in case the tiger of the unknown is on the prowl. Being the cheeky little monkey I am,  I am on the ground looking to information as my main weapon - the more you know, the more you learn, the better prepared you are to defeat the tiger.  Hopefully the other little monkeys see the wisdom in my ways, and come down soon, because really, things are never as dire as they seem. Well, almost never.

So, with the above in mind, it has been a rather busy week, although  more in terms of work than in minis, but since Jack does not live by work alone, I spent the better part of the day building my beach hut. Granted, that included a trip down to the art store to pick up some supplies (such sacrifice!), because of course I have 7000 pieces of wood, and absolutely no one piece was the right size or shape. Yeeha. Once back, however, I started on this...

 
I had a second choice as well, one of Joanne Swanson's offerings, an ice shack that had good dimensions. I chose, of course, the one that was going to be more fiddly, because that is just who I am. This is an interesting build, because I haven't done stick building in a structure before.

 I started with the planked floor, which is matboard and the planks are drawn out and scored. Eventually I will have to finish this, preferably before I get too far on the structure. 

 Cutting the wall frames...

Setting up the frames, with my handy dandy square. You know I am serious when I use math tools. 

One of the end peak pieces.

I did my best to centre this roof piece, and it looks centered, but once I got it on my structure it doesn't look quite right. I might have to make this over...again. It happens. 

Gluing the peak to the frame. 

Sigh, you can really see the gap. Mike Holmes would not be amused. 

The girls are gathered by the structure, they can't wait! My dolls keep getting bigger, I am not sure why - although the last one was modelled on an art drawing figure, so that might be the reason. 

That is pretty much where I got to today. Next week, it is NAME Minis Day, so I should have a lot more excitement as we build our project, as hoards of other miniaturists do the same. 

Until next time, my cheeky little monkeys!

Happy Birthday Dear Blog!

Happy Birthday Us! This is the 52nd posting, so one year has passed since your beloved fearless leader took the helm of the S.S. MECO Blog - so far, no ice bergs in sight! Soon we will be toddling around unaided, throwing small fits, and otherwise generally soaking up life as we know it. 

On a side note, do I know how to mix metaphors, or what?

It is also the last weekend in September. Can you believe it? Well, I suppose if you can't, there is no reasoning with you, but either way it is true. This week, besides studying a seemingly never ending group of modules I have to do for work, I have been pondering inspiration. This is not new ground I tread -many have contemplated where artists get their ideas, because it seems a rather fantastical feat for a species not that long out of the trees to have been able to accomplish so much and in such magical ways. My favourite author, Sir Terry Pratchett, wrote once that inspiration sleets through the universe randomly as small energy packets, which strike quite randomly and create that elusive muse of inspiration, and we are totally helpless to where it lands and what note it strikes. Often, unfortunately, these inspirations hit absolutely the wrong sort, and you have some duck being struck with the notion that it could cure the common cold, or some poor illiterate schlock in the 14th century having a really good idea for an iphone App - totally inappropriate and such inspiration is thus wasted. Some people act as a lightening rod, and there is no end of ideas that are gathered - if they happen in the right time to the right person, then magic happens. Others never get an idea and remain uninspired for their entire lives, sadly. There might be some help, though  ... Jim Davis - upon being asked where his ideas came from - answered eloquently in one word "Schenectady". Never been, but I suspect it is a magical place of wonder if that is where inspiration is found. It was a rather oddly inspired answer, either way.

In truth, who knows how we come up with things, we just do. Often for me, my inspiration grows gradually and organically (with helpful heaps of...well, you can carry an analogy too far, so I will stop now). At any rate, I try something, it doesn't work, I go another way, it does - an answer invariably presents itself. Very rarely, however, does an image form in my mind that is exactly as I make it in the end. Occasionally, however, I get one of those flashes of inspiration and what I dreamed, becomes real. I had one of those inspirations this week, in fact. My friend, who is an author, was telling us about her work. She tends to work in the romance genre, and specifically the bodice-ripping, bosoms heaving, heavy breathing, questionably legal/moral/or impossible to do without the aid of a llama, two dwarfs and a feather kind of romance novel.   To be honest, I don't read romances (being a science nerd who likes explosions and men in brightly coloured lycra suits and/or riding around in police boxes), but as I listened to her tell of her latest book, and her forbidding us to read it lest we look at her in a funny way,  and mentioning a rather scathing review that made me wonder why the person felt it necessary to read a romance book from stem to stern when every one KNOWS where the author is leading up to in such literature so it couldn't have been THAT much of a surprise, I had a vision of one of my bathing beauties reading her book, totally scandalized by my friend's book, but unable to put down her summer reading material because it had a grip on her very soul.

In short, Deidre was born. She appeared in my mind exactly as she appears in this blog, and I sculpted her with no aid from my moulds at all. She is all free style, baby!

Deidre, as with Miranda and Penelope, started out with a wire armature. Deidre is looking a little bit simian here, but no worries, I gave her a slightly larger skull. 

I changed her ears a little too - these ones were a little too "elf", or possibly "golem". 

I straightened out the hands too, and ended up remodelling the fingers. If you ever wonder if your doll is looking right, take a picture. You will see immediately the flaws that you don't see in real time. 

 Here is when I decided she needed a bigger head. Also, Deidre has a little more meat on her than the usual girls you find in the dollhouse community, , so I realized - her neck has to be fleshed out a bit more, so I added more clay. 

Deidre, painted. I painted her before she went into the oven this time. I needed to get at her lips because it would be impossible after the clay was set. This did mean gluing a few things later on to keep them from separating in the curing process. She has a purple bikini with little polka hearts, and her nails have all been painted. I wouldn't have painted her flesh tones today, except I kept managing to get bits into the clay, so to  keep her looking like she hadn't been rolling in mud, I flesh toned her with paint. Shame, too, because her hands had just the right kind of lucency but I couldn't let them say as they were because then they didn't match up to the arms. 

When I first envisioned her I saw her as a blonde girl, and I used a tannish colour of embroidery floss. It is curious what hair will do for the head, and it really made her quite pretty.  

Deidre, up close. I think I nailed the whole shocked look, although if you do look past her hand, you can see she is trying to suppress a nervous smile.

 Of course, now I needed something for Deidre to be shocked by. I took a screen shot of the cover of my scandalous novel, and I resized it and "floated" it over a pre-existing scanned book cover - such as on this site. I resized again to fit the cover I wanted. I found that the actual pages of the book supplied were too small, so I did an image search of "book pages",  did a little copy/paste/resize magic, and had pages for my book. I didn't fill my book completely up with printed copy (although that was an option), I just wanted the pages to be "open" for Deidre to read. 

 Just a sample of the covers I could have used. 

 Deidre, reading. Okay, they did what? With the what now?  What is next?!!?

 OMG. Really? How was that even possible?!??

 Hey! No reading over her shoulder! Whoa. Paragraph 3, second sentence in....ooooohkay then! I think we can call it a night right there.

Hope you enjoyed the evolution and corruption of my poor Deidre. We will leave her to read the rest of the book, which should be an education in itself for this lovely shell on the beach. 

I will leave you today with a tutorial on how to make a book, and I hope you enjoy it! Until next time, my slightly tarnished angels...

 

 

There and Back Again...

Today is a very special day indeed. It is Hobbit Day! As you are aware, September 22nd is the birthday Frodo and Bilbo Baggins share. Certainly there will be a party in the Shire, and maybe the Sackville Baggins won't show up - we can only hope. 

Oh yes. It is also the first day of fall.  It feels like it too. Given the sightings of fat birds waddling around beneath the trees and trying to go inside when an opportunity of an open door presents itself, there might be an early winter, but I suppose we will see. 

I am also excited today, as I got a new cosplay outfit. One of the local seasonal Halloween stores brought in the 11th Doctor costume, and I am just over the moon, or possibly the untempered schism of time.  Last year I desperately tried to put this costume together before the Halloween party I was invited to go to actually happened (finding a fez is strangely difficult for some reason, given we have Shriners in town). Granted, the party and the invite were about 3 days a part, so there wasn't a lot of time to prepare.  In the end, I floated in as a Flamenco Dancing Vampire, which was fun, but again not my first choice, no matter how cool I looked.  If you follow ...what am I saying...OF COURSE you follow Dr. Who, there are only two more episodes before my boy Matt regenerates to Peter Capaldi. When Matt started out his 4 year term as the Doctor, he wasn't well received by most ("Ten" had a strange lock on a certain set of young girls who were enamored by his moody Emo ways, and they just weren't interested in the "toddler in the Tardis", as Matt was known for a time) , but he had me from "hello".  I found him to be brilliant, and  it will be sad to see him go. Well, now he won't go to far, as he is hanging in my closet (that isn't creepy at all). What I found interesting in the store today, however, was that for some reason there was a song playing on the sound system repeating the words "doctor" over and over, and the young lady who helped me find the right section - looked like Billie Piper (aka Rose Tyler). It was like the universe was smiling on me purchasing this outfit - weeping angels sang, etc.

On the side, sadly I was never a Rose fan.  She just got on my nerves, mostly because she was mean to my all time favourite companion Sarah Jane Smith and she hung on the Doctor like cheap perfume. I was happier than most when she was stranded in a parallel universe, but I digress. 

So, beyond plugging two out of three of my favorite shows (the third will remain Star Trek), what did I do this week? Well, this was the weekend of the annual Pedlar's Market for MECO.  Our day started off like this...

But the sky cleared, and it looked more like this...

 Shopping and visiting was done...

We met new people too... Hi Linda!
 

There were treats and lunch....

And treasures found...

 And a good time was had by all. I snagged this mushroom (possibly a candle holder?) for 50 cents. It had originally been scheduled for a gnome house (and there is gnome place like home, as you well know) but the developer never showed up. I kept seeing it as one of those delightfully nasty Amanita Muscaria mushrooms, which are infamous for populating happy woods of children's stories, mainly because of their bright and cheery colors -sadly, bright colors tend to be nature's way of saying "Don't Touch!" so mixed messages there.  On the side, and apropos of nothing, I was a mushroom in a skating exhibition in my misspent youth, and also spent a semester studying mushrooms ... true story. 

Fairy Folk sitting on an Amanita Muscaria aka Fly Agaric

 My first task was to rid myself of the brown and gold, which again - wasn't fitting into my vision. I also removed quite a bit of straw from the top (failed roofing from a previous attempt) and glue - oh so much glue. Once the surface was clean and prepared, I gessoed.

 Already it is looking fresher. 

The house, first incarnation of paint. I liked the red top and the off white stalk, but the white spots (which are really almost little scales on the real ones) weren't looking right. I just kept painting until I got something I liked. For 50 cents I spent on it, I wasn't too upset when the first try didn't come out right.

I painted some gills on the underside of the cap....

 
 Repainted the top for a third time with polka dots - this is what happens when you listen to Dr. Who Proms while you design, space-time vortexes affect your work. I like how the polka dots work on this, it gives an anatomical fact the case of the whimsies. I did a little decorating around the opening too, although that may be revisited. Its not bad though, all ready to go on to stage two, some woodland folk moving in. Probably not these guys, though, they tend to make too much noise and they generally sing one song with one word - La. This can annoy the neighbors, which is why they are out in a secret spot in the woods in the first place...

To conclude today, I have added a little film to inspire you on a woodland folk scene....Take care and don't cause any scandals (or at least not too many) by going on grand adventures with dwarfs and suspect wizards , my dear friends, until we meet again...