......I am so over her.
Really.
Husband and I were talking the other day watching some collecting show and I said to him...
"I am so NOT nostaligic"
"No, you are NOT" - he said without missing a beat.
....made me think....as I do often in my life.....does that make me a bad person?
Wait...I am a bad person. Ha! Silly Frog Queen....
Wow, good to know I do not need to keep up appearances.
The day that this display makes me some money...enough to rent a storage unit to store my nostalgia.....then the frog queen will changer her tune.
I have already sold the church facade and ALL the mud men......what more do I have to do to prove that I do not attach myself.......
....well, I do, but I cannot really.
I only have so much space to store this stuff.
It is a LOT more than most of you, so complaining about space to most of you.....yeah, I hear ya!
Anyway.....I sold "Beloved" - one of our first props inspired by the great and awesome Webby out of SLC - you Utah haunters are amazing.
Where was I going with this?
Yeah, well....if she is gone what is replacing her?
This is:
Well, not exactly this one....unless I am going cemetery robbing.........
Again....she is the inspiration.
This is our progress so far......
We have a long way to go.....I mean....wings are not an easy thing to carve....trust me....I have tried.
The funniest part about this whole process is this email we got from a friend:
"Your new "Beloved" monument looks great. I hesitate to say
it looks simple because nothing you guys create looks simple, but in terms of
materials it doesn't look like a lot of parts.
Could this be something you could do at (name left blank)? I haven't seen the
finished product and I have no idea how much work it actually is so I'm just
spitballing.
I would like to see a class at the Graveyard for your tomb/sarcophagi."
I about fainted.....
Okay....this by far is the most technically challenging prop we have done right the first time.
...from the base to the soon to be carved into existence wings..
We have taught a lot of classes at the graveyard. But this one.....at another location????
You know....the place where we have our own tools and can easily make stuff up as we go along.....trying to do this at another venue?
After two years at
HAuNTcon........not going to happen.
Cutting the curves on the base was only possible because I have a crew member, who is incredibly anal about things....and with our crew, that is saying a lot, it took him half the day to cut four pieces of foam to fit that base .......no kidding....not complaining, they line up perfectly. I have yet to have a student in one of our classes with that much attention to detail.
And a new really cool band saw! (husband can never say I did not let him buy anything!)
Maybe after we make it a few more times....we will get a pattern we can teach.
Also, we are not cost cutters. Not that we throw money away...but after a lot of time looking at carving arms (trust me the human body is not easy) and the cost of casting real arms.....we paid the fantastic and wonderful
Michael at Ghost Ride (he make the award for the
Home Haunter Video Awards - we LOVES him!!!) to make us expanding foam arms (they are usualy out of swishy foam) that we cut up and put back together in the shape we wanted. (they were both straight unbent arms when we got them.)
Nothing you get from Ghost Ride is cheap, especially a custom order.
And cutting up the arms you spent.....that much money for....to make the bends and the arms lay correctly is not something a lot of people can stomach.
After that you have to make damns around the bends and pour expanding foam to make the the missing parts....then you have to sand them to match.......
The crew wanted to me to let you know that none of them was aware that "teaching prop building" was part of their crew agreement.
Fair enough.
The truth is we do not want to show you how many mistakes we make to get from here to there.......
That said...there is a good chance....due to time, that this might be a wingless prop this year.
Cross fingers that we can make this happen. We promise to share if we can pull this off!!!