… or why it’ll feel a bit like Christmas when we’ll do move-in on Wednesday next week.

So, you make something awesome and big, and then you need to get it somewhere else on the planet so others can enjoy it as well. In this case, this:

I knew I was going to have to ship it eventually, so I choose a cardboard construction that can be flat-packed like IKEA furniture. Still, the big vertical sheets are the full size, which is 50x70cm. So I needed a box with at least that base area. Which is honestly huge in comparison to most of the shipping boxes everyone stores in their basement. A friend pointed me at a shop that specializes in packaging, and I got the smallest box that fitted the requirement for base area:

It may not look that big in the picture, but it was always standing in the way in my kitchen for a while there. You can just see the cardboard pieces inside already. Here’s a better look:

Doesn’t look like much, lots of box space left, but the box couldn’t be any smaller because of the large size of some of the individual pieces. Time to fill up the box! Who needs packing peanuts when you have wool?

You can see the big bag of leftovers on the right, and the little box on the left holds the children’s loom. The rest of the supplies went on top, and I ended up with a pretty full box. It’s not particularly heavy (somewhere around 15kg, which is way below the weight limit for shipping), but it’s unwieldy and its dimensions are just within the size limits for a normal parcel. Here it is, all taped shut, in front of my apartment door:

The text on the sides is for the lovely people doing logistics for Dublin 2019, so they know where to deliver it for move-in. After successfully dropping it off at the post office and anxiously following the tracking number, the box is now safely in the convention’s off-site storage waiting for the day it’ll be unpacked and assembled.

I’m looking forward to showing you what’s inside real soon now!

The covering has now aquired a few strategically placed holes, time to give everything one last test drive before taking it apart, putting it in a box and sending it off to Dublin.

So, here we are. First view is of the covered model without the platforms, so you can see the backdrop:

Now, let’s add the platforms:

And here’s a few close-ups – the entrance hole:

… and the hole where the waterfall is going to come out:

The fabric covering still needs a bit of sewing at the top edge to have something sensible to adjust the width and to hang it from, but that needs a tiny bit of shopping beforehand. And then it’s off into the mail! The next time you’ll see it in its full glory is when we meet in Dublin five weeks from now. I’m getting excited! (and nervous …)

 

The countdown on the front page of this blog helpfully says that there’s just 55 days to go till we meet in Dublin. One of my major points of worry has been that one platform doesn’t make a model, at least not one that fits the idea in my mind. To get that little problem off my back, I exchanged needle and thread for cardboard and cutting knife in the past few weeks.

First, materials: I wanted something stable but relatively light, so shipping to Dublin wouldn’t break the bank. While browsing through my local art discounter, I found those 50*70cm panels of corrugated cardboard, 2.5cm thick. After making a trial with my practice platform, I decided that this would work out – somehow. But I had absolutely no idea of how to actually build a backdrop for the model from those.

At some point a few weeks ago I decided that just thinking idly about the problem wasn’t likely to get the job done, so I got myself a pile of panels and started to play. And here we are:

All in all, there are 10 sheets of cardboard in there. The vertical panels on the sides are full size, everything else got cut up in various degrees. The platforms are not attached, so they can be removed when working on them. Everything else is safely stuck together, but can be taken apart easily for transport. Overall, the backdrop is 1.5m wide, 70cm deep and 70cm high. Here it is, with the platforms removed, so you can see the construction a bit better:

And a view from the back:

I’m quite happy with how things turned out, but now we have a new problem: lots of real estate to fill! Let me know what you’re working on and bringing, so I don’t worry too much about that part!

Needlework takes time, usually about twice as much as I estimate. For that reason, it’s important to start with a reasonably small bite out of the ecosystem described in the books so we can have something lush and good-looking. The colony tree is huge, and has lots of interlocking platforms around its stem.

I started working on a single platform as proof of concept. The sample platform is made out of a 50×70 cm piece of 2.5 cm corrugated cardboard – very stable but light, and the right size for still being reasonably easy to handle and ship. The sample trees top out at about 25 cm of height, which is pretty much the maximum that’s possible to have on a platform that size and not look totally unrealistic.

The platform is currently living on top of my embroidery stand. I’m envisioning some kind of backdrop showing a bit of the bark of the colony tree itself, possibly including the entrance hole, and a way to safely attach platforms to this. If you have experience with this kind of model and ideas on how to achieve something like this, I’d love to hear from you!

I did take pictures when building the platform and will do a tutorial on this in a later post.