Haus Headway

Small Progress is being made on the Haus du Maus.
Tasha came by today and made further great progress on her model house. She wants to come tomorrow and next week as well! I hope she does because this house of hers is so wonderful, I'd love to see her get it all done and have a little art opening for it where her mom works. If she does continue to come here to work, I'll have to stop hovering and "helping" as I have been so that I can get my own work done! She's rolling with her project now, well under way, I can let her go to it by herself... but it is so fun to watch!

I've finished shingling the tiny Writing Mouse house. I've given it a Cape Cod-ian stone half-facing, beams, roof joist ends, and a cemented sand pathway to the door. Still left is to finish the chimney and add corbels to the porch cover support. It'll need landscaping and a garden archway made of curved twigs. Handmade door, shutters, and windows too. A tiny railed balcony upstairs, overflowing with paper, inks, and flower pots will complete the exterior.

I don't know why I'm devoting time to this little element at this stage. I need to get back to bigger blocks of time spent doing more bang-for-buck chores. Although, I did hold my nose and dive into cementing the stem joins on the tree while I had the tub of Flexall open for the little cottage. I was delighted to find it was far easier than I had imagined! I didn't tint it first or trim the hot hotglue on the clusters. I just painted the whipcream-like fluff right over where the branch and leaf stems meet. It was like painting a tree into form. Like using a brush to create a 3D tree in the air, I can't explain it. It was fun. It is time consuming though. It took about 30 minutes to cover two or three branches worth on all sides. I still have to paint them over when they are dry. But all in all, a whole lot less crazy than I thought it would be.

When I was last at the mailbox I picked up a surprise package from The Scarlet Stars for my birthday last week. Sven wrote about his experience at the recent PLATFORM animation festival and I was intrigued by his descriptions of the many ingenious installations there. Now I have a dvd of the Lightning Doodle Project to watch and enjoy in addition to an original b-day drawing by Sven and a very special two-gocco screen "Letters" print from Gretchin.
Big thanks to Sven and Gretchin and everyone else for the happy wishes!