Shopping in the basement...ideas abound...thwarted by not-very-soft wood products.
I've had some ideas poking at me lately and it was today I couldn't ignore them any longer -- it was time to go "shopping in the basement" for materials to build a new large-ish plaster cloth guy or two.
There used to be a partial wall around the furnace and water heater area in my basement. When we had the machinery replaced it was easier to tear the wall down than to work around it. I had them stash the wood pieces against the far wall. Every once in a while I go pull pieces out and clean them up and reuse them for body parts -- like the legs of the rabbit guy. Today I pulled a couple of long pieces of wood out and decided they'd be legs for a new guy...but that meant I'd have to pull the nails out and then cut them up. The other day when my sister Sue was helping me try to assemble the rabbit guy's legs and torso and base, she asked me how I determined the length of a creature's legs -- how did I know how tall I wanted something to be. This is a perfect opportunity to show Sue how I do it.
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| Where the partial wall was -- there are still a few bits of it in place. |
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| The scrap pile. |
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| Getting ready to pull nails. |
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| Sue -- how I determine the length of a guy's legs: I stack two lengths of leftover wood together and tape them together in several places. Then I cut off the excess icky part, trying to make only one cut if I can. |
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| Ha -- I won! |
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| Then I measure what is left and divide that number in half. You know I'm not a great numbers person, Sue, so I take one initial measurement then check it by numbers...then I use the yardstick from what should be the middle (by the numbers) and then I come up with the actual middle (by yardstick length). |
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| Then I tape the middle area really well on both sides and start sawing. I go at it from all sides... |
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| ...including the flat/long side... |
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| ...and I eventually get the job done...hopefully without too much splintering. |
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| Ta-daaaaaa -- four legs that are the same length...I don't even know for sure the real measurement. |
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| And now I will need to do a basic sanding/clean up so that I don't get slivers when I am working on the plaster cloth part. |
Now -- to find a few possible items to use as the inner structure for the new guy.
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| I have had it in mind to use a tomato cage on its side for a body...but we will see. I have two or three sizes and thicknesses of tomato cages...I also have various gridded metal sections. |
And while I'm at it I thought I would try to be more practical this time and the guy's legs right onto the base at the beginning, rather than trying to add them later like I usually do. But I found that pretty much all of the wood/wooden materials that I have are really hard. They are either plywood or pressed wood or laminate covered MDF products -- none of which were willing to be drilled or screwed into today. Man! That was really frustrating. I stripped several screws trying to work with that stuff before I finally surrendered. I will go to the lumber yard and see what sort of soft wood scraps they have available...I also have a couple of long lengths of pine that are currently being used as shelves in Studio A -- they are fairly empty and I could use those -- but that means I'd have to cut them and though they are not thick, they are kind of wide -- at least when it comes to hand sawing them.
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| This is a section of what was once a wooden shipping crate for the insides of an Art-o-mat machine that were shipped to my house. I was pretty excited when I got the screws out of the corner but that dwindled quickly when I learned how HARD plywood is...I couldn't get the drill to go in very far and this is what I stripped the screws on...LOL |
I was going to try to find another project to work on tonight but I just couldn't get into anything. Not even outlining another collage/canvas. So instead I am making a couple of new mix CDs for the car.
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