Main Set Building Is In Progress

Our 110-year-old home's master bedroom serves as the room to set up the Halfland Main Cottage and landscape set. Its ceiling, as does its floor, needs redoing, so I'm further superficially abusing the room a bit while it's used as the exclusive 1/2L set stage area. I decided to staple up various fabrics as the furthest back layer of the sky. The patches will get painted with random housepaint to blend into a pale blue-to-black gradient.

Down below, the cottage set is getting its expansion into an edge-to-edge landscape setting for it. The detail in the ground, grass, and flowers will match the cottage just around it but fade into rough fields of color as the distance increases. The distant landscape will appear blurry due to how it will be photographed, so spending full time and energy there would be wasteful. Here Kyelynn and I are team-sawing off the corners of the extension planks attached to the set table built by Dick Kaneshiro.

Big items have been removed from the room and used elsewhere to make as much room as possible. Last month, I was able to haul away a 300-pound steel library card catalog drawer unit that had been used as a materials organizer. But since the sets have now all been built (!), the sheer weight of it could be pared down to save the house. I also decided to move the old baker's rack that held the heavy cement puppet molds completely out. The molds were triple-bagged

against moisture and stored outside while the rack went to the garden to become a greenhouse.

The reference images pertaining to the landscape are posted in the room. Kyelynn helps me staple fabric draping to the ceiling and walls. It's unblended by paint yet and will be over-layered with a canopy of sheer blue sky fabric, pulled taut across it. As it looks today (the before) as it is beginning to be roughed in.

The materials have been culled and sorted: Far-away grasses, flowers and vines, ground cover for the furthest away, close-up grasses, roots collection, and large tree branches ready to install onto free-standing distant birch trees.

I felt overwhelmed by the amount of work this would take me to do alone, even with the precious few hours per week I could afford to pay for Kyelynn's help. Even though I don't want strangers in my house for COVID and personal safety reasons, I was desperate enough to ask a very talented fine artist who lives two doors down if she would be willing to come help a bit. There's so much to do, and she'd be more than able to have a task delegated to her. So I dared to ask but she has a residency on the East Coast for a year starting today, bless her, so no can do.

I have asked for saving help throughout the years, and some people have greatly contributed their time and talents to the project. But I finally realize the cavalry isn't showing up at the eleventh hour, nor should they! I am the cavalry. I have to be my own cavalry in my own mind.