First Shot of the Last Shot

Close up of finished open flower.

A first little test of the mechanism. It's a very big deal however because wanting to post it drove me to open the editing software for the first time ever.

I had to sneak up on myself to overcome the trepidation. Between lowering the expectation and just trying it and searching for answers as needed, I was able to thump around to get something. It wasn't the overwhelming wall of inscrutable technical whizbangs as I'd feared. I don't and won't understand most of what it can do but I only want to ham-hand myself through to get what I'm after.

30 years ago I bought several $1 pickle pickers, the small plastic mini grabbers with four wire fingers that emerge from a tubular syringe to tastefully snatch the last of your snack foods left sitting in icy cold brine from their jar. I was taken with the way the wire fingers opened simultaneously, like flower petals, and had this exact Halfland purpose in mind.

The very last shot of Halfland is of the petal motifs at the top of the Musician's tent revealing themselves, forming a 12-petal Flower of Life. And superimposed over that, an opening 12-petal floral, the same kind that grows from the Musician's head as the flowering of his thoughts as he plays his music.

It took me quite a while to develop the way to render this flower prop. Now I know exactly what to use and how to construct it, but it's done.

First thing I did was sacrifice one of the plastic pickle pickers to see what the strange magic of its inner workings was. Through the years, I had bought a few strands for this moment of fine music wire (wow, just put that together), which is the only required thing to make this gag work, no other type of material has the necessary spring attributes that cause it to revert to form after being compressed in the tube.

I selected a few tube candidates with the right diameter options from my "greeble" drawers of plastic and metal (lower right). I dump any leftover pieces of broken or saved things, sorted by their material, in an old card catalog file drawer kept in the materials closet. Really huge and extremely heavy, but very handy.

(Lower left) I made fine cuts in a slender dowel with a pull saw and laid two lengths of music wire in each of the three directions of the 6-spoke starburst shape and glued them in. Bent each of the now twelve wire petal supports from the six strands in the most symmetrical flower-like positions they could be forced into. Music wire is stubborn and doesn't like being shaped. I paired it with various tube experiments and found that pushing the dowel with the secured wires up through the tubes using slow hand pressure worked perfectly. (The two photos in the middle of the bottom row show this draft all the way open and all the way closed.)

Despite delays from wrong-way detours in the making of this flower, I blended bits that worked from the fails together and got this first draft to finally work in the fourth version, as seen in the video above.

I chose cut-up pieces of starched silk flowers for the petals and sewed them onto the wires (upper right). I frilled scrap pieces for the flower center filament and dipped their edges in crushed chia seed anther then painted them in Urhu's rich yellow color. These were carefully glued around a faceted gold bead ovule, interlaced with fine gold threads and handpainted green sepals, seen finished (second from left, top row). Cleaned and cut up a cat toy tube, sanded its cut edge smooth for easy movement in and out of the flower, and drilled a hole for the dowel to function as a push rod through the bottom (upper left).

Below you can see how I strapped this tube securely to a block of scrap wood with a small clamp and tightened that into a bench vice so that the point the flower blooms stays in the same fixed position as a time-lapse of an opening flower would look in nature.
 

There were bloopers in the making-of process and what seemed like dead ends to the point I felt silly for spending my time on something that wasn't fully "necessary". But in the process, I learned to watch out for tangential dead-ends and what they look like earlier so as to better recognize when it's time to bail from them more quickly. I learned that disciplining my time isn't about curtailing my creative pursuits but to make the best choice for spending my time at any given moment.

The update on the Resupp process is that both Kyelynn and I are finding it amazingly effective for bringing awareness and direction to our weeks. We tell each other twice a day what we want to get done and update several hours later as to how that went. There's no judgment for ourselves or the other, genuine support for our successes, and constructive suggestions for stuck places that show up in all our lives.

Resupp (Remote Project Support) is highly recommended. Just pick someone you respect, trade your goals via text, and if you're someone, like us, who tends to overthink, or, despite having loads of passion, has blocks to taking action, you may find this gets you to bloom. Thanks for reading and best of luck to you.