Pencil bat Ben - skull situation

 

I spend very little time on mail to my grandkids because they do not save envelopes. Those baseball bats are ridiculous - I could/should do so much better - but, I am consumed with other projects at the moment.

I am only including this very sloppy envelope to show how I sometimes outline my very quickly scrawled writing. I don't have to outline everything - it's more of a *squaring off* process - so it goes pretty quickly.

Here is a before and after. Sometimes I look at the original and feel like it was better without the squaring off. The thing that gets me started on squaring off is that I see things like the *o* and the *e* that need a little touch up --- I could/should just fix those spots and then be done with it....but I get carried away.

And the paper was bleedy - which makes it worse. I see that I forgot to do the bottoms and the center peak  of the *w*

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The following was written in late August. I'm sure a lot has changed since then.

Yesterday morning I discovered that I had not scheduled a post - so at 6 a.m. CST I moved the Sunday post into the Saturday slot. Earlier in the day, I had taken some photos and scheduled an update of the Day of the Dead ofrenda project. So that was an easy one to move into the Sunday slot.

The flowers are all folded and now they need to be fluffed. After staring at the skulls for a couple months, I had to throw them off the proverbial diving board and see if they were going to sink or swim. 

The little test skull is made out of printer paper. Since there was no Day of the Dead event in 2020 due to covid - I decided to put a mask on the little skull as a representation of that year. So I needed to make it into something that was event-worthy. I thought I could just laminate mulberry paper onto it to give it a little heft and a nice homespun surface. 

I tried Elmer's glue - and at first it seemed fine - but then the paper started to cockle. Cockle is the word to describe what happens when paper gets wet and loses its flatness. It can go into something that looks like corduroy or a more bubbled appearance. Once it loses it flatness, it's pretty hard to get it to go back to flat. 

I had filled the skull with bubble wrap to give it support. That was a waste of time. The bottom panels were fine - but it started to cave in on the top. I had 3 miserable days trying to even think of a possible remedy. I would even wake up in the middle of the night and ponder (worry).

I had to do surgery and extract the bubble wrap and then coax the paper into something that was going to work. I ditched the fancy mulberry paper and used really cheap 1-ply paper napkins. The aesthetic of ofrendas and day of the dead paraphernalia is very rustic. So, I'm embracing the aesthetic. But, I'm stumped on how to prepare the large skull so that I don't have a gigantic cockling problem.

Above is the big skull - waiting for a brainstorm on how to finish it.

As much as I like to avoid aerosol products - I'm going to try to coat the large skull with something acrylic and waterproof - and hope that prevents cockling. I've been told that Krylon is acrylic. Most aerosol paints are oil base - and I do not want to put an oil based product on paper. 

This is the small skull during surgery.

It was going to be really hard to get the skull to conform to the shape of the flap.

I had to insert a piece of plastic which would be the *metal plate* that is used in actual brain surgery.

So, I got the flap to fit, layered enough napkins over the incision -- and then realized that I had forgotten to refill the skull with bubble wrap. GRRRRRRRR. After the brain surgery dried - I realized that I don't need the bubble wrap. It would be easy to crush on purpose - but it is surprisingly rigid. All I need is some kind of brainstorm on how to fill the eye sockets.

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Update: I remembered that people often put flowers into the eye sockets. That's perfect.