It's not quite going according to plan

It appears that the lack of a dehumidifier or a hot airing cupboard means that it's not as straightforward to make shrunken heads as it was the last time I did it.

After a week or so, I checked on the apples, but despite the silica gel in the tin to help remove moisture, it wasn't dry enough, and they'd started to develop mould. OH NOES!!

So, I put them in the oven on a low heat....for 10 hours. And I'm giving them another few hours tonight, because their insides still have an icky, stringy sort of moisture, as you can see below....ewww. They look stewed!

You know, I never knew I needed a dehumidifier....until now.

The end product

I finally got a chance to go to the print shop, to get good copies made of the maps, and a digital copy made for future (as the original of the New Zealand map is going to my brother). The copies are on lovely, stiff 300gsm card, and it was even sunny enough today that I got to take photos of them in proper light!

So, if you're crying out for a map of New Zealand or the UK, filled with animals and filigree, here ya go!

10 minute terrarium

I love candles. Lots. And I love the fact that some come in little jars....this also plays into my tiny things thaaaang. What better to go in tiny jars, than tiny plants? And what's the tiniest plant of all? Moss!

So, when a candle ran out, I cleaned it up (poured boiling water in and left to cool, then lifted out the solidified wax), and cleaned the sides/bottom (lighter fluid on a cotton wool pad)*, making a nice, empty jar..

Then I got a small handful of little stones, and filled it about one third full.

Then I took some pieces of moss I had (of course, it's perfectly normal when you unclog your gutters to keep pieces of the moss from them, right?), and put the three of them on top of the stones. The moss pieces sides were pushed down into the pebbles, and the moss joining areas created small, depressed valleys.

I put larger stones, and a decorated shell, into the moss dips.

Then I put the lid on, and it's done - 10 minutes, max.

Now...where shall I put it?


* How many tins of lighter fluid does one person need in their house? Three, apparently. Dad likes to make sure I'm well supplied with the essentials.

That shrinking feeling

Halloween's coming up fast, so that means I need to start thinking about preparing the decor for the fancy dress Halloween party that it's kinda become a tradition for me to host. Now I have a house instead of a flat, I have a lot more space to fill, so I need to make more decorations! To help out, my friends Lorna and David came over last week, to take part in a bit of shrunken head making. Shrunken heads are fun: made from apples, cloves, rice, and some fake hair/sewn up lips to complete them, if wanted.... when they're finished, 4 of these wee guys will be spooking up my house, and2 will go to Davids for his own party.

We did the peeling, some snazzy facial carving with Very Sharp Knives, and then the messy job of rolling the apples in lemon juice and salty solution, before popping them in the oven to jump-start the drying process, and remove the surface moisture from them.

So here they are after 3 hours in a low oven:

And here they are after another 5 hours of low heat:

Attractive, yes?

They're now sitting on little racks in a tin, along with (to use the technical term), a sh*t-ton of silica gel, in order to keep the dehydration process going (I don't have a dessicator to do the drying "properly"). Hopefully they should be dried out and shrunken enough in a few weeks to start playing....I think I'll sew the lips of mine up, then thread them onto some string, and hang them in the living room window...

Scotland, England, Wales, Ireland, Northern Ireland...

All those bits that make up Great Britain, the United Kingdom, Britlandshire...after many, many hours of intensive doodling to fill in the sketched outline of the country, this is the completed map, yay! Large enough to show the details of the filling.

There are 16 animals hidden in the map (or not-so-hidden: I deliberately darkened them to make them slightly easier to spot, in among the swirls and twirls):

Badger
Hare
Deer
Hedgehog
Swan
Snail
Mouse
Heron
Frog
Butterfly
Snake
Dragonfly
Fox
Squirrel
Robin
Highland Cow

And here's some closeups, also enlargeable:

Starting again

So, I tried hand drawing the UK map. After 5 hours of sketching. erasing, redrawing, erasing, and drawing again...I decided my retaining some level of mental health was more important than trying to draw a map by hand!
So, I downloaded the clearest outline of the UK that I could find, and spend another 3 hours tracing over it, first roughly in pencil....then more accurately in pencil....

...then drawing over those lines even more accurately, in ink. Beginning with Scotland:

Then, adding England and Wales:

Next...Irelandshire! Then, the fun part - filling the interior with filigree and hidden animals :D