Sculpey New Year!

After an all-too-brief interlude with my parents (complete with cross-country skiing!), we're back with John's family. I idly considering using the cold, cold, cold Vermont snow as a way to make an attempt at teaching myself a bit of tracking, but it was a no go -- sad but true, not only was there snow, but there was also ice and sleet, a good bit of it. Ew.

Back down here, though, today was a day for sculpture. And, weirdly, after the total failure of SassyCat this fall, I was apprehensive. In order to avoid the total collapse I went through earlier, I build an armature out of unbent paperclips and newsprint, then covered the whole shebang over with polymer clay. The design was more based on Mondrian's "Red Tree" than on an actual tree from nature (though it has certain similarities to a tree across the street from John's parents' house), but ultimately there's also some, um, either artistic license or missing skill there. John's sister recommends using it to hold jewelery or something like that, but we'll see.

Texturizing the bark was much more work than I'd expected, and I got bored a few times and took a break to watch Burn Notice and knit, but in all, generally successful. I wish I knew how to make the branches a little spindlier or better-forked, but in all, I officially nominate myself for the sculpt-from-nature component of the badge (so far). I still need to wait for the tree to harden a little bit so I can remove some of the paper armature without things entirely crumpling, and then the whole thing needs to bake for a while. As it stands now, though, the tree is at least mostly-completed. Hooray!

It's shaping up to be a pretty low-key New Year's Eve, which I don't mind even a little. What's your plan?