Saturday, August 29, 2015

News from the Creepy Little Toyshop

I made a few leaps of progress on N's mummy today:  for starters, I found the perfect material to use for bandages:  beeswax impregnated cotton that is used as a fine alternative to plastic wrap and can be washed and reused for up to a year and is sold in Asheville at the Bee Keeper store downtown.  I bought a bread loaf wrapper piece of the stuff and cut a strip around 1.5 inches wide.  This is a great material for all your mummy bandage needs!  As you wrap you can mold it to the mummy, and it needs no further fastening.  An added advantage is that it smells just right-- beeswax and resins give it a yummy mysterious smell, perfect for a mummy in bandages.  Drawing 5453 shows the mummy with his painted mask on top of his bandaged mummified body.

I also made headway on the inner casket or case, as you can see in the two drawings on the left above.  I have it molded around the top of a marble rolling pin.  The terra cotta is the natural color of the air-dry clay, and I've decided to leave this inner case unpainted so that N and I can paint it together.  On the right above is the alternative mummy with mask but showing mummified clay body.

Then I made a trip to Tobacco Barn this afternoon when I realized I was not going to be able to make a good outer coffin out of clay.  A thorough and seemingly endless search of the place finally turned up a perfect little salesman's model cedar chest from the early 20th century.  The mummy in the bottom of the inner case fits perfectly.  I will leave the painting of the outer coffin for N and me to do together too.  He can use his hieroglyphics decoder to find some things to paint on it.  I am trusting that the top part of the inner case will slip right in on top of mummy man.  We can add lots of gold paint to the inside, too.

5 comments:

  1. i haven't been over for a bit and see that you have really enjoyed this whole process...i remember when my first grader son told me he wanted to be an egyptologist.

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    1. My problem is that I've never gotten over my childhood fascinations. I can completely get your son's vocational aspirations!

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    2. Not being able to get over your childhood facinations is gift not a problem!😊

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  2. The beeswax-impregnated cotton is perfect! When I was thinking through making a mummy of Barbie, I had planned on dipping some canvas strips in melted beeswax. My father-in-law was a beekeeper so we've always managed to cadge the odd bit here and there.

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