Wednesday, April 10, 2013

Putting Kraken parts together UPDATED- L

A quick glimpse of the nearly finished eye casing.

The bubble wrap background will likely be replace with something less obvious, even though it DOES look kind of awesome.

By the end of the day today the eyes and the body will be connected and the tentacles underway.

And the best part?  The wavering lines of the plasma ball hypnotized one of my cats.  He sat and stared for nearly an hour; occasionally leaning in to sniff.

I have now started working with my fourth type of glue. This one works well.  Unfortunately it can only be used to glue flat surfaces together.

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I'm NEARLY ready to put this together which WILL include tentacles.
My lack of experience and proper tools is hurting.  I have tried so many, many glues.  Most take 36 hours to set.  This means it takes a couple of days for me to learn the extent of my various failures.  But I have not given up.  I have loads of tiny cuts on my hands.  I have random glue blobs to clean off my 'head'.  I still have some aging and pounding with a hammer to do.  I'm really looking forward to the hammer part.


My current struggle is to get the flaps around the eyes to lay flat.  They don't want to lay flat.  Nothing sticks to them.  Last night I cut the pieces that will attach the head/body to the eye unit.  And if you look carefully, you can see a plasma ball in place. I still haven't figured out how to hold the eye piece closed.  It needs to open and close to allow access to batteries.   Did I mention that this bad boy is HEAVY?  I haven't even added the tentacle tubes.  This weekend is very busy and I'm not sure I'll make much progress.  But I can hope.

On top of this, I got volunteered to help with costumes for my son's acting class.  So far, other than minor repairs, I have 4 sets of wings, a halo, 4 girl's colonial dresses (including one stars and stripes for 'Betsy Ross') and 6 boys colonial vests.  The difficult stuff comes today with 'fantasy creatures' (I know there are at least two flying cheetahs).  And I have 4 short weeks to do it all.  And no money.  Magical!!!