It's Too Soon!

My Front Garden/Apple Orchard

This just plain isn't fair! It was 24 degrees Celsius on Saturday, but 5 degrees on Sunday, and this is what arrived in the course of today, Monday. Yes, those are nasturtiums under the snow at the right. There are also still sweet peas blooming, but likely not for much longer!

Fortunately, this was forecast, but we try to be hopeful; it didn't work this time. The snow tires went on my car yesterday, just in case, and the snow scraper/brush was already in my car. It'll be cold for the children tomorrow for Hallowe'en. Six months of this stuff is not something I look forward to....
 

The Directions Aren't Always Correct!

 As I had mentioned earlier, when I started this project, we're working from a series of articles in Nutshell News published in 1992. I said in my previous post that I'd make another set of evaporating pans, as the first set didn't fit on the sugaring fireplace. Well, the second set was also too long....

Out came my ruler, and after measuring, two or three times, the drawings from which I was supposed to take measurements, the diagrams for the fireplace and the pans did not exactly work out size ways....

My resolution was to add a row of stones to the end of the fireplace, which made everything fit just right! A bucket is awaiting some more faux painting, and I did manage to make a scoop out of card and a decorative toothpick; all it needs is some painting. I've also got to make a sieve and a wooden paddle scoop, as well as a skimmer. I may have to use heavy aluminum foil for the latter, as it needs holes as well as a shallow, dished profile, but I'll experiment with card at first.

The sledge is stained, and the Medieval Market offered up one of its large barrels. I kind of want another barrel, though, as well as another pail. My first experiment for the sap bucket didn't work out as well as I'd hoped, so I'll try another approach on Friday. Tomorrow I work.

That Part is Done!

 

Today's work is the painting of the sugaring fireplace hood and chimney. It has been faux-painted to look like tin, complete with rivets along the hood seams. The photo can be enlarged by clicking on it.

Tomorrow the new evaporating pans, and the damper which goes behind the fireplace, to control the flow of air for the fire.

Made Some Mistakes....

 

The handles on the evaporating pans are on the wrong side, which probably means making a couple of new pans. The backdrop is there to give you an idea of what this scene may look like, but keep in mind we're in the early stages yet. I bricked the fireplace on Wednesday, but decided to paint the bricks as I did not like their original colour. As the bricks are a plaster product, the paint had to dry thoroughly; also, I worked at my volunteer job Thursday.

The stuff on the back of the fireplace is the hood and chimney, made in cardboard, currently being held in place by a drinking straw, so that orange thing will go away! And of course, the whole fireplace hood needs to be painted to look like well-used metal. The sled too needs to be stained, as well as the one bucket, and they all need to be dirtied up, um, that is, aged.

Tonight I'll put a seal coat on the card, and then I can do the faux metal painting over the weekend. It's an interesting project, for sure, but so many small bits and pieces!

Among the smallest are the spiles, i.e. the taps, if you like, that are inserted into the tree to allow the sap to drain. The ones above are very old, made of wood, except for the one at the top, but as they are maybe 1 cm or so long in miniature, carving wood that way would be horrible.

These three are the basic spiles; I will use the type at lower right, more cardboard to paint to look like tin. The narrow end goes into the tree, and the hook is for the sap bucket to hang below. I also have to make quite a few of those, along with their hinged lids that prevent forest debris and perhaps bird droppings from getting into the precious maple sap. Fiddly work, but I'll work a way to do it quickly. I photographed the spiles at my volunteer job; we have a large number of them, so I had the real thing to study!

I'm Back, But Still Waiting for the Punch....

We got back from our visit to western Canada for quick visits with our 3 children and their respective spouses/partners,  without getting sick from the rhinovirus hitting that province and the kids (1 just over it, 1 partly through, and 1 at the end of it) or catching Covid from airplanes, and wonder of wonders, no luggage was delayed or lost. We had a good time, and now that I've more or less adjusted to Atlantic time (3hrs earlier  than the mountain time we lived with on our vacation), I'm finally sleeping through the night again.

I achieved a goal from my bucket list; fifty years ago, I worked for the Western Regional Office of Parks Canada, and decided that I'd like to visit all the Rocky Mountain national parks. Well, I visited them many times, except for Waterton-Glacier Peace Park, which straddles the border between Canada and the United States. Usually, I don't post personal photos, but I finally, finally got there! We had traveled through the US portion years earlier, but never to the Canadian part.

It was cold and windy, so I'm huddled into my jacket. The park is within easy travelling distance of my youngest daughter's house, and she was kind enough to take us for a couple of walks there. Bear evidence was everywhere; the trail we'd intended to hike was closed due to a deer carcass

 - which means a very hungry bear is not far away - and there was a huge pile of bear scat full of berries on the sidewalk on the edge of the parking lot at Red Rock Canyon. This time of year, bears are bad-tempered and are everywhere, and we people have to give them space to fatten themselves up for winter. We passed a "bear jam"  - cars parked either side of a narrow access road to view a young black bear eating berries up the hill - and got the heck out of there before some silly stupid tourist got out to get up close for a photo.

As to the title of this post; we got a message via email that there had been an attempt to deliver the long-awaited punch "mid-month"  while we were away, of course, so we tried to track it. The Carpenter-in Chief headed to the post office to see if it was there, but they said the parcel had had a Montreal address. A message to the company with the tracking number informed us today that the package had been unsuccessfully delivered to an address in Montreal, Quebec (a day's drive away), so it seems we were given the wrong tracking number by the dealer. We have informed the dealer of their error, and are awaiting the response. Will I ever get that punch, I wonder?

Wednesday it's back to minis....

A Couple of Small Things....

 This week, I actually had some time to do some miniature crafting. The photo below is the start of a pair of evaporating pans, used in the maple sugaring industry prior to mechanization. As the diorama for which these items are being made is static, i.e., the items will be in a sealed room box and safely glued down, I'm using some simple materials and paint to mimic metal, etc.

The pans were made of cardboard from the back of a writing tablet, scored, folded, glued and reinforced with finer cardboard tabs. The handles for the pans were made from the wire end of a pair of eye pins, of which I have a lot, shaped around a thin piece of wood, held on with recipe card tabs. The edges of the pans were rounded with some crochet cotton.

And this is what they look like after many coats of paint, reinforced with sealer, and then varnished:

I sealed the cardboard first with a multipurpose sealer, then painted it in hippo grey. This was then dry-brushed with lighter grey, a bit of red iron oxide, pewter metallic, and the bases (which sit over the fire) darkened with black. Once all the paint is dry, the pans were given a coat of satin varnish. They now look convincingly like tin pans that have seen a lot of hard use! (I'm looking for amber acetate film, to mimic the maple sap in them.) Did you know it takes 40 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of maple syrup? Hours and hours of evaporating slowly over a wood fire, while being stirred and skimmed....

The two small items in front are a hydrometer, made of an extra-long bugle bead with a blue glass bead glued and pinned into the end, and its case, made of an off-cut of brass tubing with a handle made from an earring back.

The pans are sitting on a sledge, which is glued, pinned and ready to paint and age. This would have been used by one or two men pulling it, to bring buckets of fresh maple sap from the trees to the maple syruping fireplace. As maple syrup is harvested in these northern climates around the end of March, the woods are usually still very much covered in snow. Larger sugar bush businesses would have used a dray horse to pull a much larger sled, but this operation is the kind a farmer and his family would likely have had, for producing syrup primarily for their own use.

I'm off for a visit to my children out west. Marilyn hopes to have the diorama room box done by the time I get back the first week in October, and has found the perfect photo of a maple sugar forest, complete with snow, for the backdrop to our joint diorama project. There are lots more tiny items to be made....

Now, if I can only figure out how to create a new label for this project, to make the process easier to find! 

New Group (just 2 of us) Project

 The proper size heart punch has not as yet arrived, and we'll be heading off for a short vacation shortly, so Marilyn and I decided to get started on our joint winter project, a maple sugaring diorama which we will donate to our local living history museum, Kings Landing Historical Settlement, for use during their Maple Sugaring Weekends end March of each year.

Marilyn and her chief carpenter are starting on the actual diorama (roombox), while I'm beginning the many pieces needed to flesh out this scene. I've begun with a pair of evaporating pans, and hope to have a photo in the next day or so. We are working with instructions by Ruth Armstrong, published in 3 parts in the summer 1992 issues of Nutshell News. Mrs. Armstrong specialised in metal miniatures, but we are not metal-workers, so we'll be using card, matte board, wood and the like to create our sugaring equipment. 

We are awaiting the landfall of Hurricane Lee, which we all fervently hope will be downgraded to a tropical storm when it hits our shores; however, we are moving everything that could be picked up by heavy winds to a safe, roofed place. We'll likely take the clothesline down too, as the last time we had a really bad storm, a tree came down on it and tore off part of corner cedar siding on our house.