Wednesday Work Day Results

No storm this week on Wednesday, but we had one on Thursday, so I couldn't go to my volunteer job. That gave me a day on which to begin assembling the poppies for the Remembrance Day project. We needed about a hundred of them, along with closed buds and opened buds.



Check. Done. Now I have to paint the paper for the leaves, which we will then cut out and assemble on our next work day.

Here are a couple of the photos of the project, as it was on Wednesday just before we broke up and headed home. Marilyn at Charminis had hoped to finish the spackling of the ground, but nature being very focused on procreation, her spackling compound grew fuzz....



The walls have been bleached and aged, and the floor is ready to be painted, sprinkled with rocks and sand and other debris. The sandbags are beginning to be placed, as had the rusty corrugated iron.



The landscape form has been installed on the outside; this area will be thoroughly messed up, as it has been abandoned for many years. More sandbags will be installed, along with the rest of the landscaping and of course, all the debris that has fallen into this depression in the ground for many years.

Louise made a chair to go inside this scene, which I get to dirty and partially destroy - I mean, age and scuff up. We are going right along with this project, and beginning to put some thoughts into what our next group project might be....

Remembrance Day Project Update

...but to see it you will have to go to Charminis' site. We worked at her home on Sunday, and she has posted a photo of the setting for some of the smaller pieces we have been working on.

We Now Have Listing...

...thanks to Marilyn D. at Charminis, you can now find a listing at the right side of the blog, with an alphabetical list of topics you might want to explore, that were written here on the blog. It is below the previous listings you could see...

Wow! I am tickled pink with these additions.

Yeay, There Are Now Links to Projects

Thanks to help from Marilyn D. of Charminis, my posts going back to the beginning now have key words. That means that if you happen across a post regarding my Tudor Apothecary Project, for example, by clicking on the key word or phrase at the end of the post, every post with that subject will also show up.

As today was a day that was unplanned, due to weather cancellations of the two events I was supposed to participate in, I used a good part of my day to go right back to the beginning. That's my mini work for the day.

Now, if I could only figure out how to get my key word list available to the viewers of this blog! I guess there is yet another learning curve.....

Winter Weather Blahs

There is a freezing rain warning out for Friday, so the meeting of our group project has been postponed to Sunday. Sigh!

Right now (Thursday evening), Sunday is supposed to be sunny and dry. BUT, and this is a big but, it is winter in Atlantic Canada....

Sometimes I get the impression weather forecasting consists of throwing darts at a dartboard marked with various weather scenarios, while wearing a blindfold!

Another Day, Another Pile of Sandbags....

The pile of sandbags has increased somewhat; there are now about 3 dozen of them, including some slightly shorter ones to go over the door lintel. Interestingly enough, the tea dyeing threw me for a bit of a loop; although I had soaked them as long as the previous batch, then baked them in the oven at low heat until they dried, this second batch is much darker on the top side. They were placed on a paper towel in a baking tray, and the bottoms of all the bags is rather lighter than the tops.

Coming up, we have a porcelain doll house figure to dress up; he has already lost his apron (he was intended to be a shopkeeper), and may lose his striped trousers for a pair of gray flannels. He will also get leather shoes and a blazer, as well as a wig and a mustache.



He will be dressed as a WW I veteran, visiting the field of battle years later, in remembrance of his fellow soldiers who did not survive. The figure will be removable from the setting, as he may only appear on Remembrance Day, November 11 in Canada. I think the addition of "real" hair and a "real" mustache will make him look more "real" - that's a lot of reals in that sentence! We had planned to keep his trousers, but I think I need to check how gentlemen dressed in the twenties and thirties; I feel they didn't wear such boldly striped trousers....

We missed our Sunday work day due to illness, and the Wednesday one due to a forgotten appointment; we are aiming for Friday now. Let's hope the weather co-operates....

Building a Field of Poppies

This actually represents two days of work; that's how long it took to make all the poppy stems, buds and opened buds. They are made of built-up "dips" in tacky glue mixed with paint in the appropriate colour. We are still experimenting with what to use for the poppy flowers, although coffee filter paper painted with markers looks promising.

Marker-painted filter paper was used to make the green bud covers on the little red opening buds. It looks nice and bright. I grew up in "Flanders Fields", and have very vivid memories of hedgerows of red poppies, bright blue cornflowers, vivid yellow buttercups and ox-eye daisies, growing in wild profusion on the edge of the wheat fields.

We missed our Sunday get-together due to illness, so are hoping for a snow-free Wednesday, in order to build up the sandbag walls on the dug-out. Tomorrow (Tuesday) is devoted to making about 24 more sandbags.

Hopefully I can get all the sandbags made tomorrow....

What Happened?

I just spent a week working on a knitting pattern that should have taken a couple of days, at most, to complete. Instead, it nearly drove me crazy. However, I persevered and it is now done. On the mini front, bad weather wiped out our mid-week work-day, so we are trying again tomorrow. It has been snowing all day today....

And, I managed to re-pot a six-foot tall Madagascar pencil tree (as its sap is poisonous, this has to be done very carefully!) Today was devoted to creating three Real Life cactus gardens out of two dish gardens and a bunch of toppling tall cacti on my windowsills. You have to do this with thick gloves on, as some of the cactus spines are more than an inch long....

Tomorrow, back to minis!