There’s not a lot to say about these two days accept work, work and more
work! This Thursday and Friday we dedicated almost exclusively to producing the
large model flower and bee for the Fascination of Plants day and Festival of
Nature. Below are some photos of our work in progress.
I was tasked with making all the flower's petals which I managed to complete on the first day. Every petal had to be painstakingly cut out, machined and then hand stitched to give a ruffled effect.
Jessica made a wire frame for every petal which could be inserted inside so
that they could all be internally connected and not flop. Here I'm applying
some pressure to the flower’s centre to make the petals stand more firmly.
We'll have to find a way to devise this look permanently when all the flower
parts are finally attached together. The UV paint arrived on Friday and so we
did start to use it to paint the petals, however, it was unfortunate that
despite our efforts the paint did not take well to the petal’s surface. It did disappear
and caused barely any change in texture which is what we wanted, but as the
petal material was not at all absorbent the paint was very reluctant to stick
to it, giving some very ugly paint streaks rather than a smooth covering.
Furthermore, we only had a small UV torch to help us see where paint had been
applied and it didn't work too well to show up the colour, therefore we were
left to mostly paint away blindly. Also, we hope it’s not the same under a UV
black light, but the colour seemed to be more pink than red which was a little disappointing.
We decided to give this task a break to see if we could devise a more practical
way of doing it later.
Jessica took on the responsibility of
producing all the underlying wire structures. She also made this stand. On the
left is the wire structure, the right the finished stand which is covered with
felt. It's designed to be able to contain a small heater so that the flower
will show on infra-red cameras as well as in ultra-violet light, again
replicating a real flower.
Here I'm making the flower’s centre.
First of all I sewed some of the left over white material to a wire structure
made by Jessica. I then painted the surface yellow and cut in half many small polystyrene
balls so that they could be stuck to the surface to mimic the bobbley
appearance of a daisy's centre. Unfortunately, we grossly underestimated how
many we would need, so we'll have to buy more later.
At the end of the two days this was our progress so far on the flower part of the sculpture, we will be continuing next week.
As for the bee, its fluffy body was cut out and sewn. We decided to discard
the internal wire structure this time as it was becoming a bit of a hindrance,
and instead decided to opt for stuffing it with the left over fabric. We also
started making the legs and a band for the middle to distinguish between the
bee’s abdomen and thorax.
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| Here is one of the bee's wings made from wire and a light, transparent fabric. |
As well as constructing the flower, a few other things happened in the last
couple of days. One was that the ants finally arrived and we put them in the
farm. The instructions however did say that the ants would not start burrowing
for 48hours, so we’ve yet to see any progress. We'll return to check on them
next week to see how they're doing.
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| The ant farm empty. |
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| The ants exploring their new home. |
The fungi in the agar plates also appeared to have started growing.
And lastly, our plant from the botanic garden seems to be stretching towards the light!
