I missed making last week's blog post because the weather was once again very nice and the mountains were calling. This past week has been peak color. The season does not last long, and when the perfect opportunity presents itself, there is no other place I would rather be this time of year.
It was probably just as well that I took a break. I tried for three days before I left to make a decoration work that is just not in the cards when working this small. I was trying to make a fringe for the tiger's saddle blanket. I wanted it to look soft enough to look like soft tassels but stiff enough that it would not get tangled and could be set to take some paint. Not to mention that the fringe was only a quarter of an inch (6.35 mm) long. Neither my eyes nor my fingers are up to working on something that small anymore. When things like that come up, I get frustrated and need to take a break while I come up with a Plan B.
The tiger has so much texture that I did not want to detract from it with too many decorations. I want the tiger to be the star of the piece.
My Plan B turned out to be stars. I decided to add four stars to each side of the tiger's saddle blanket. I did not want to just paint them on there. I wanted them to be slightly raised so that they would stand out a little bit from the blanket.
Making the stars turned out to be a bit more of a production than I expected. They were not very much larger than the fringe I had spent days working on.
The reverse of the tiger has the same stars on it.
I chose the best stars to go on the Romance side. (For newer readers, the Romance side is the side that faces outward to the public on a carousel.)
Making the stars was not easy either. I started by drawing small circles. I used a circle template. The circle size I needed was 7/16 of an inch (9.0125 mm). Photos of the circles and stars are below. I don't have a lot of leeway on where I place the pictures.
As I said above, I wanted to make the stars stand out a little form the saddle blanket. To accomplish this, I cut out 24 circles form a piece of a file folder. Three circles were glued together to make it thick enough to stand out, but thin enough to cut a star out of the circle. So, I ended up with eight circles, four for each side of the tiger.
I drew in the stars by hand on each of the glued circles. I did the best I could, to keep them equally sized, but I knew that there would be errors in cutting them out. I was not worrying about them being perfect.
Trying to cut them out was a challenge in itself. It was too hard to hold them and cut with scissors. The three tiers of the circle made it difficult for scissors to cut through, and it was hard to keep my fingers out of the way. Next, I tried holding the circles with tweezers. The pressure of trying to cut them kept pulling the circle out of the tweezers. I finally put them down on a cutting board and cut them out with a craft knife. I had to hold the edged of the circle down with a fingernail to keep it from moving around. It took a morning to make these, but they are finished.
You can see the tiny stars up in the left corner. The debris below them are the tiny pieces I had to cut out to make the star.
To put the stars on the tiger's saddle blanket I added a blob of thickened glue onto the blanket and also painted glue on the back of the star with an old very small detail brush.
Note: Thickened glue was made by leaving some glue out to set up for a while.
Once the stars were pressed into the glue on the blanket, I gave the stars a topcoat of glue. This will help in preparing it for painting and also helped force glue into the sides of the stars. That also takes up a little bit of the space difference between the blanket and the raised stars, slightly reducing the about of the space that holds them off the saddle. I am hoping that it makes them look like part of the blanket, but with a little texture when it is painted.
Anyway, that is all for this post. I plan to be home next week so I should have a new post up on Monday or Tuesday. Things may get a little spotty as we move into the holiday season, but I will try to make sure that I get up as many posts as I can.
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