Carousel Part 19- Creating the Flooring

I digressed from my carousel project on the last blog post because I had not had a chance to work in my studio for the last few days.  I hope my readers enjoyed the quilt.  I'm back in the studio now and happily working on the carousel project.

Creating the wood floor.

This week I am working on the flooring.  As I wrote in last Sunday's blog, I have memories of the floors of some of the carousels I've ridden.  I decided that I would try to recreate the flooring on the carousel rather than just paint the disk.  It will make the carousel look a little more upscale I think.  However, this is one of those cases where I'm not sure how it is going to turn out.  So rather than gluing the flooring to the disk to start with, I decided to lay it out and glue it on wax paper.  It it works out that I can use it, I will glue the floor to the base for the carousel.  At this point, I think I can make it work.

Wooden base on the rotating platform.

To begin, I traced a circle of the disk so I would have the size of the base.  You can see a portion of the paper template in the picture.  Then I started gluing skinny craft sticks together to make wooden strip flooring.  I'm using the craft sticks because they are only 1/4 inch wide.  Anything wider would have looked out of scale on such a small piece.  It is not exactly like putting together a floor.  The strips are "sort of" straight and "sort of" the same thickness.  I've had to pick and choose and chop to get pieces straight enough to use.

I think that once the whole floor is together, I will glue it to the disk.  When the glue is dry, I will use a cutting wheel to cut off the ends that extend beyond the rounded edge.  Then I will sand the whole thing.  After that, it will receive a coat of wood stain and some gloss varnish.  That is the plan at this time, at any rate.  The one hitch is that I am running out of craft sticks.  I'm off to the store for more.  At this point I am going to be really miffed if they are out of stock.  I do have some more bent sticks which I can chop into usable pieces, but it will look somewhat odd given the lengths of the other sticks.  So tune in next time to see if the floor is usable or not.