Masha

Rainham Lane – stage two

mashadutoit — Sun, 27 May 2012 10:38:00 +0000

Yesterday, Liana organised a truck to pick up all the waste we ripped out of Rainham Lane. The truck just fitted into the lane! The two men who came with the truck pretty much picked up all the rubble, sand and weed piles while me, Dittany and Liana did our bit to help. I did not get any good photographs of the guys, but they did a fantastic job.

In little over an hour the lane was cleared of most of the rubbish. The next stage to gather the loose soil and sand left behind into containers for plants. Here is the lane as it looks now:

And this is what it looked like before we started. Part of me prefers the forest of weeds rather than the bare concrete, but under those weeds were heaps of garbage and builders rubble.

Casing the joint at the museum

mashadutoit — Thu, 24 May 2012 18:04:23 +0000

I spent the morning at the Natural History Museum in town doing research for my new book. It’s a strange place. Part of it is brand spanking new: glossy displays with beautifully lit objects, enhanced by multi-media sound and video shows . And part of it is a sort of time warp, with the stuffed animals crammed together into huge glass cases backed with hessian. I was relieved because this is just what I needed for the scene that is supposed to play out here:

Also happy to see that there are no security cameras in this older area, and the locks on the display cases look very pick-able. No, I dont intend to break into the museum, but one of my characters might need to!

Some of the older parts are lovely, though. Particularly the bird displays and the dioramas.

“The Story Trap” wins the e-book Cover Designers Awards for April 2012

mashadutoit — Mon, 14 May 2012 11:33:17 +0000

I’m so pleased. The cover I created for my book The Story Trap won the “E-book Cover Design” award for April 2012.

Thanks Joel!

Go have a look – there are quite a few other great covers listed too. And by the way, if you are a writer interested in self publishing, Joel’s blog is a fantastic resource on book design and other aspects of self-publishing.

http://www.thebookdesigner.com/2012/05/e-book-cover-design-awards-april-2012/

Cleaning Rainham Lane – work in progress

mashadutoit — Sun, 06 May 2012 06:35:07 +0000

Yesterday a small team of us, residents of Chamberlain and Salisbury street, started cleaning up the servitude that runs along the back of our houses: Rainham Lane. It was pretty bad. Some areas of the lane were completely choked with weeds.

We could hardly open the door leading from our backyard into the lane, and everyone got covered in burs. Did not stop the dogs from having a total ball though:

The weeds by themselves were not so bad – home to praying mantises, crickets, snails, spiders and earthworms. But there was also a lot of garbage woven in among the plants. Plastic packets, chunks of concrete dumped after renovations, condom wrappers and so on and on:

There were also some pleasant surprises, like this gooseberry bush :

We ripped weeds out all along the lane, cleared doorways and the gutter all along the lane, and caused a slow-motion panic among the snail population.

We soon saw that there was far more rubbish than we could dump with our single bakkie. The plan is to get a truck in next weekend to get rid of the worst of it. In the end we managed to take out the entire weed forest and sort the rubbish into piles. It does not look pretty at the moment, but this is just the beginning:

Sorting Scraps with some help from Pippin

mashadutoit — Fri, 04 May 2012 16:33:12 +0000

Pippin helped me sort my fabric scraps today That was pretty much all the progress I made on the Mermaid doll today though.

Bought some Mermaid hair

mashadutoit — Wed, 02 May 2012 14:00:47 +0000

I forgot my camera at home today, so was reduced to taking low quality pictures with my phone. Today I bought some hair for my Mermaid (braiding hair from a Chinese shop) and chose some more fabrics. Furry blue stuff, crushed velvet, maybe? I also started blocking out what shape her body might be.

Baked Mermaid

mashadutoit — Tue, 01 May 2012 13:45:28 +0000

I fired the Mermaid head and hands today – super sculpey can be fired in a normal oven at 130 degrees Celsius so no special equipment needed, except an oven thermometer. Here’s the Mermaid hot out of the oven. Her eyes look a bit different, I think foil on the back of the beads has wrinkled a little, but it actually looks quite nice:

Then I had fun setting out all my silks and gauzed to choose what colours I should use when making the rest of her:

My final selection. The colours don’t show up well in this photograph – a range of greens, greys, blues and purples with some orange or yellow for accents.

Mermaid hands

mashadutoit — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 15:52:29 +0000

Further work on the mermaid doll. Hands. Hands are quite difficult, as they tend to get flatter and flatter the more you work on them. And the left and right hands have to be more or less the same size.

Mermaid progress

mashadutoit — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 15:51:36 +0000

Some more work done to the mermaid head. First ears and eyebrows, then scales:

Is she a mermaid?

mashadutoit — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 19:21:28 +0000

I started a new doll head today – the first one in years. This one is going to be wall mounted – the head has no back to it, the plan is to mount it on a board sort of like a trophy. I’m using super-sculpey polymer clay over a core of aluminium foil with beads for eyes.