Dusting off the cobwebs

Well... It has turned into a BUSY year here.  I've been slowly crafting away, sporadically.  I've been very busy with our garden.  This year was the most ambitious garden yet, we built an 8 foot tall "T-Rex fence", as I called it, for my cherry tomatoes to climb.  We did it by putting in 10-foot T-posts and then double stacking 4-foot heavy duty hog panels.  In summers past, our attempts at building fencing for the tomatoes to climb has resulted in saggy wire fences by the end of the year...  Not this time!!  We have tomatoes, squash, cucumbers, and peas all over the panels out there and our massive structures are still going strong!

I decided to skip the farmer's market this year and keep everything we grow.  We bought a large food dehydrator and between that and canning I've had a lot going on the last couple of months.

Back in July, I had surgery for a mystery abdominal pain that started up last October and had been plaguing me ever since.  No one could find the cause.  I went to specialists and had a bunch of tests done.  Finally it came down to going in there and looking around.  They found some endometriosis and removed it.  They also removed my appendix.  I do not recommend having surgery in the middle of summer.  It messed up a lot of plans: gardening, horse shows, and so on.  The good news is that the pain seems to finally be gone.  They bad news is that endometriosis tends to come back, so I may be looking at more surgery in the future.  For now though, all is well.

On the Studio front, I actually ceased all work on the Stagecoach back in late January.  I found some mistakes in historical accuracy with what I had done so far (the wheels) and me being the perfectionist that I am, I let it get me down.  I really want this thing to be PERFECT, but in all reality, it'll probably take me years to make it, flaws and all, so I've recently decided I better get back to work on it! 

The good news is that I found out I shouldn't put the 200 tiny nails into the wheel rims, BFORE I did it.  The timing was so close, I was just about ready to start nailing.  It turns out this type of stagecoach is a "Concord" and they didn't have the bolts in the sides of the wheels.  That was something done in heavier vehicles, used for cargo, and for another type of stagecoach, less fancy, called a "mud wagon".  I'm glad I learned all of that, before nailing away.

The big, and most recent news on the Stagecoach, is that just yesterday the rest of what will be "The Team" arrived.  They have a long way to go as well.  Each horse will be remodeled, resculpted, painting, and then harnessed up.  For fun, after unpacking them, I set this up.  Behind the horses is the 1:1 scale poster that came with the kit.  I had thrown around the figure of 4-feet long for the whole rig before even having horses to put in front of it.  As they stood in this picture, with approximate spacing, the whole thing was exactly 4 feet long.  I still have a LONG way to go on this project, but I'm getting excited about it again!