MECO Show and Sale

MECO Show and Sale
2016 Show & Sale will be the Saturday 14th May 2016 held at the Peachland Community Centre in Peachland BC. contact person Barb Janes-Yeo at 250-757-2842 barbandpaulyeo@shaw.ca

Sunday 23 February 2014

They Shoot...they Score!

Woke up to the world looking like this ...



Yup, that is a large full frontal blizzard. At the end of February no less. Three short weeks out of spring. It was a little dismal. Personally, I only like blizzards that look like this...

Too bad what we got was the snow and ice cliche kind, and me managing to lose my good gloves this week. Its enough to drive a girl back into bed.

 However, when I turned on the TV - I got this! 


Nice work boys! Hey, not even ashamed to say I had a bit of a tear in my eye as the lads lined up, held each other in a line hug, and sang the national anthem as our flag went up. Canadians don't get all that patriotic, but when you are talking hockey, even the most hardened heart will melt - sniff! (wipes away a tear). 


So.....its been awhile. Decided since I wasn't going to venture out into the ice, snow, and -10 windchill (and if anyone tells you that windchill isn't an issue, tell them that is only true for inanimate objects, in weather like that a warm blooded creature  can freeze their toches off ). Anyway, its the  perfect time to update this bloggy thing. 

What have I been up to, you say? Lets take a looksee what we have on the film, shall we? 





On a day sunnier than this, obviously, I was gifted with a container. It will probably be a glitter village container at some point, when I make more houses and such. It started life off as a bath and perfume gift pack apparently. It smells vaguely like a box of old cards to me, but eventually it should air out.  It is unfortunately a little small for my Mondorf Christmas Market, so I will find a different street scene to do. With glitter. Did I mention, I like glitter?

 

Speaking of Mondorf, I have finished most of the structures. Above are the baffles of the Church. After fiddling with one side, I realized I was going about cutting these out the hard way - i.e. I was cutting each piece and gluing each piece, meaning I was doing some interesting finger gymnastics and making a general mess. The next batch I cut so everything lined up back to back, and glued the whole chunk as one. Then I only had to cut 4 pieces out instead of 8, and only had to glue once instead of 4 times. 

The wee baffles glued down. It looks like it is hovering, but that is some folds under the church propping it up a bit. They are level. 


The big Christmas tree for the square. Really quite elegant in the design - basically 4 cones built, with a rectangle folded into a tube for the trunk. 

The top of the tree. 
A middle section and a trunk made. 

Stacking the tree parts....

A view of the under-structure....



The finished tree with the star at the top (Take that, Joyce Kilmer!). Again, you may look at this and say "weird scale", but it is again a more naive interpretation as opposed to a strictly accurate rendition (which is a really good retort to anyone getting fluffy at you because you have goofed up on scale, by the way - you are welcome).

I have been repainting my mushroom house again - you may or may not recall, I bought this at a seconds sale for I think a quarter, possibly 50 cents, I can't remember. I redid the paint job, mainly because what I did before didn't thrill me - for reminders, this is what I had done: 
I liked the more "realistic" look I saw on a little mushroom house at a card store. Fairy gardens are hitting the market place in a big way, by the way. I bought three gnomes from the card store  (in a section which they dubbed "the garden centre") where I found my inspiration mushroom (okay, that sounded better in my head). They had a number of little fairy and gnome things, which I resisted with a strength of will not seen since biblical times.   The smaller gnome, which to me is more of a traditional gnome with the pointy red hat, I found at Michaels, and he is probably going to be in the mushroom, or at least around it. Anyway, if you like gnome and fairy cottages, this is the time to go scoop them up, before the trends change again. 

The next thought was, what can I do for the inside?  The whole mushroom house is a cool concept, but there are some logistics involved in decorating a structure with a strangely formed inside - i.e.  you don't get with nice straight walls - plus a mouth opening that doesn't quite let you do much.  I tried a number of different things, eventually settling on a clay treatment for the floor and walls. I used my das clay. Oh das, is there anything you *can't* do?



I cut wood patterning into my walls with a knitting needle. Once everything is dry, I can sand the floor, and decorate from there.

Not bad looking and definitely will be easier to build in now. Air drying clay also solved a small issue I had with the chimney too - unfortunately mushroom roofs are notorious for being rounded and don't lend themselves well to a square bottom chimney, which of course is important to any fantasy narrative, a mushroom house HAS to have a chimney, or it just reads wrong (totally ignoring my mycology class way back when which taught me that fungus cells don't have walls, which is why they are soft, and of course you can't really get much strength out of mush and heat will definitely deflate a mushroom, plus the mushroom I made is notoriously poisonous in a kind of a terminal neurotoxic kind of way, but oh well). The benefit again of air drying clay is you can mold it right to the structure. It is important though to put down glue before hand, or you will have problems later on. 

I stopped there for the day, as I have to let this stuff dry before I proceed, and the hockey game is going to be on again soon.  I am betting the Canadian boys will win again, what do you think?

On a last note, I did a few more buildings in paper. I find I quite enjoy these little paper houses. My camera doesn't want to load the pictures though, which is probably because I haven't fed it enough batteries today. These are an example of what I made - 

Which you can find the patterns for on about.com . The ones they have actually print up a little bit too big, so I actually reduced them, which you can do right from your printer. I am waiting for a less haunted version to come out but these are still quite cute, in a spooky kind of way. 

Speaking of about.com, you can also find a pattern tutorial from Lesley Shepherd there as well of little gnomes to make. Proper teeny gnomes too! 

I found this fellow on Youtube. He shows you how to make a bit bigger gnome. The time lapse is a little funny, it reminds me of those "how to draw" cartoons, which started off with a stick man and ended up with the Mona Lisa or some other piece of art in 3 easy steps, but it is an interesting approach, and could be easily translated smaller. 
 



 



Hope you all have a wonderfully "warm inside with a big hot chocolate, warm blanky, and smokin' hot hockey game" kind of day! Ciao for now!








No comments:

Post a Comment