WIP Wednesday: Wasteland Weekend Projects
We’re down to less than 50 days to go, so I’ve been spending most of my time working away on my biggest projects for Wasteland Weekend 2019. The first is a pair of large signs to mark the new Green Place ward I’m helping to run for the first time this year. Each of the signs will be about 5′ wide by 3′ tall (with a little extra height to clear the ground) and be placed along the road at each end of the ward. I finished the first one last week and have been working on the second for most of this week, getting as far as starting to chalk in the tree today. The tree is based on a drawing I did then scanned in and digitized, and I’m transferring it to a large piece of olive green burlap using a grid system. The trees won’t be identical but they’ll be pretty close (and we’re using the tree as a logo in a few other places too).
Besides the look of the tree in general, the thing I’m most proud of with these signs is a treatment I did on the lettering on the first sign, and will be repeating on this second sign. I found this cool stuff online that the Department of Transportation uses to make things like street markings and stop signs glow in headlights. It gets really dark after sunset out at Wasteland, and this year is a new moon, so I thought it would be nice if the ward sign was at least a little bit visible after dark. It lights up bright in a flash (see the second picture) or direct flashlight, but in indirect light -- say from the nearby camps -- it’s just nicely readable. The reflective beads didn’t want to adhere to the fabric evenly, so when the paint dried it ended up with a really cool ragged edge to the glowy part of the letters, perfect for the Wasteland aesthetic.
The painting is the part of this I really enjoy, so I’m hoping to be able to finish chalking in the tree tomorrow and get on to painting it. This second sign is going much faster than the first, thankfully. Once they’re both painted I’ll be turning them into big pillowcase shaped things to fit over frames that Donda, my partner in crime in Green Place stuff, is bringing with her.
The other project I’ve been working on, mostly with Jack on the weekends, is the first of a matched pair of storage crates for our camp, modeled on old fashioned rifle crates. We got the end caps added on this weekend (shown clamped as the wood glue dried), and then modified the lid a little to fit. Last steps are to finish sanding the outside, stain it with this awesome weathered stain I have left over from previous Wasteland projects, and maybe stencil some words or letters on the outside. We’ll be using the pair of these to store our clothes at Wasteland, so we can keep them outside in the visible area of our themed camp, rather than having to go into the sweltering hot sleep tent to find stuff during the day. We’re hoping to start on the second crate this weekend, and I may wait to stain until both of them are built.
I’m confident we can get both these two-part projects finished up in the next few weeks. The open question is really just how much time I’ll have left for other Wasteland projects once these are done. Hopefully next week I’ll have more progress to show.
