Friday's Accomplishments

Today was dedicated to working on some of the items needed for our group Remembrance Day project, so we can make up for our missed meetings, hopefully this coming Wednesday. That means I have a few days to work down my list.

The first thing today was to paint and age the chair, abandoned in the dug-out at the end of the war.



A dark green colour seemed like a good choice; the interior of the dug-out is fairly dark, with a lot of grays and browns, and hopefully this worn green farmhouse chair will add a small pop of colour. The chair was made by Louise, and I was given the finishing and aging - two things I really enjoy doing.

The next thing was to put some foliage on all those poppies that are going to be planted on the top of the dug-out. I had already made up about a hundred blooming poppies, along with some just opening buds and some closed buds. Wild poppies have very little foliage, and what they have is kind of ferny, for lack of a better word. I used a fern spray punch, then cut that up to be small enough for the poppies. And as poppies have long, thin bare stems below their blossoms, the foliage is down fairly low along the stems.



They still need to be sprayed to prevent fading, but as it is raining today and I hate to spray inside the house, that will be done the next sunny day. There is more foliage that can be added in once the flowers are placed; I find it easier to gauge where extra leaves are needed once the plants are in place.
I guess that will be Marilyn's job, as she is doing the grass for the landscaping....

That leaves the veteran's clothing and wig, and some small accessory items, which I hope will be done by our next get-together.

Flu Season and Other Stuff

We have now had to cancel something like 4 meetings, either due to illness or winter storms. I am still working, just missing my mini Wednesdays!

In place of miniatures, I am working on some of my other hobbies. We will get back to miniatures, especially the Remembrance Day Project, I promise! During the inevitable intervals, I am finishing projects in some of my other hobbies.

In the meantime, we have been enjoying daily visits from a wild turkey hen. We just hope she doesn't become a problem, like the ruffed grouse last year, who decided he owned our garden and we weren't allowed in. That bird was quite vicious, and smaller than a chicken. Have you even really looked at the size of the feet of a wild turkey? Or its beak? Or thought about how much those things weigh?
We still have mountains of snow that have to melt before we can go back to working our garden....

Not a Good Week

First of all, we are buried in snow; see photos below. I took them from my front steps this evening, to show the amount that we are dealing with right now. It is only the beginning of March, and we have at least six more weeks of winter to go. They are already indicating that we may have another record flood this year, based on the snow pack.




 Photo one is from the front door to the garage. Our apple trees are once again buried well above the trunks. Photo two is the drift pile in front of the kitchen window; this window is at my eye level when I work at the kitchen sink. To get into the house, we go up three steps. So, I estimate this pile is about a meter and half or higher. We had some very heavy winds for two days this past week, so there was a lot of drifting! Photo 3 is out to the road; we are running out of space to dump snow, and there is more coming tonight....



I turned in an odd way last Sunday, resulting in a serious back spasm. It is almost back to normal, but lengthy periods of standing are painful. So I didn't get as much done this week as I had hoped. Today, I did manage to stain the second floor of my steam punk loft project. As the wood used was very rough, there was a lot of hand sanding involved, and my back is complaining! The little chair is for the Remembrance Day project, it will be painted and then rubbed back for wear and aged and dirtied.
The only other thing I managed to finish is to paint a sheet of paper for the leaves for the poppies in the Remembrance Day project.

There is a real beauty to winter, but at this time of year there is also a desire for it to just go away, already!

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.....