Working Away!

With the drying times involved here, it is going a little slower than I had hoped. However, I am still plugging away at the Klompenfabriek, and here are a few progress photos. The photo above is of the clay freshly applied to the wall, with a skewer keeping the hole for the faucet free of clay. As everything is quite wet here, I set the wall down flat on my table (the Lego bricks keep the screws from scratching the table surface.) The tools to the right are what I used to texture and shape the clay; my knife, a rubber-tipped sculpting tool, and a brass bristle brush. The latter is used to make the tiny pits in the wet clay that make it look like stucco.

(If you enlarge the photo, you can see some rather linear pits, upwards and to the right of the brick section. This was removed using my fingers, and then re-pitted using the small end of the brush. Photos are super for showing you what needs fixing....)

The brick insert is at the level of the faucet, and was made of left-over paper clay bricks that I glued on to a piece of paper for stability.  I was a little concerned that the moisture in the cellulose clay might affect those bricks. The whole required about 24 hours to dry completely.

The clay was rolled out as thinly as possible on a smooth glass cutting board; in the past, I've been able to roll the clay on a backing of waxed paper, which allowed me to move it with minimal problems to my wall surface. However, either the composition of the wax paper or the clay has changed, as the paper shredded. There followed half an hour of picking shreds of thin damp paper off the paper clay....(Some bad words were used.) Fortunately, I was able to gently roll the clay off the glass surface, and apply it to the wood, with yellow carpenter's glue.

The stucco has had its initial coat of paint, mostly white with a bit of ochre and grey. The next job is to age the stucco with chalks and paint. There is a fitting in the wall now, at the top of brick section, for the faucet to go in. The photo I had of this wall from the museum photo showed the faucet just stuck on to the stucco wall; however, I felt it needed a proper fitting to look authentic. I punched a small circle out of cardboard, with a small hole in the centre, painted it medium grey and then over-painted it with pewter metallic, so that it would look rather worn and old. Once the aging and dirtying is done, I can do the floor of the hallway. The sink will eventually be glued to the floor.

One inadvertent miscalculation is the long bench destined for the hallway; it is too long, in relation to the janitor's sink. That bench will  move to another project, and I'll make a better size to replace it. It would have worked if the sink was off-centre, but I didn't like the look of that. The small spaces in the corner can now hold a broom or mop. Much of this will be invisible when the bathroom door is open!