Today I spent some time working on a few different crafts! The first craft was casting some more jesmonite pots. I wanted to experiment with using my candle dyes to tint the jesmonite instead of using acrylic paint, but it turns out that oil based dyes don’t spread very far in jesmonite. The red ended up being more of a dusky pink, and the lime green I was after turned into a mossy sage. I’m glad I gave it a shot at least. After those two attempts, I went back to acrylic paint and was really happy with the colour pay off in the end. I even mixed in some jesmonite chips I’ve been collecting after each of my projects, hoping for a terrazzo effect. The end result looks a little more like guacamole in the shape of a pot than I thought it would but it’s still cute.
The second craft I did today was more mushrooms for my Halloween garden. I finally got around to sawing off the ends of the umbrellas we bought to create the big mushrooms and then I was able to put one of the umbrellas out on the grass to start covering it with spray foam. I also set out a few more bowls to make the small mushrooms, and then I got to spraying everything. I’ve learned that it’s way better to spray the rim of the bowls first and then two crossing lines over the top. As for the umbrella, I started out by spraying from the center towards the outside edge, kind of like the spokes on a bike tire. I ended up using a whole can on this first step and then a whole second can covering the rest of the bowls and filling in maybe a third of the umbrella. I reckon I’ll need a few more cans to finish off the umbrella, and there are still some gaps I missed on the bowl mushrooms. It’s a good thing I bought quite a few cans of spray foam!
Anyway, the jesmonite and the spray foam were both pretty much whole-day projects. Lots of waiting for things to set before I can move on to the next step. Tomorrow I’m going to try to finish off spraying the big mushroom and hopefully I can get started on the other big ones!
The last couple of evenings I’ve been really enjoying giving the cats treats. It’s so difficult to give our four cats treats because they immediately climb into our laps and won’t take no for an answer. Lately I’ve been using this activity center thing to hide treats and it’s been so cool to see the cats work out where the treats are hidden and how to get them. Dolores might like it the most, which is kind of good because she is always trying to get the boys’ treats (which she really shouldn’t eat) so it’s been pretty useful. Ichabod is the only one who doesn’t care to search for his treats. He’d much rather sit on a pillow and be fed treats by hand like the prince he is!
