Hi/Lo

You know you are living in a state of heightened technology, when your mother, who is 4000 miles away on a desert island, finds out you have the flu by reading your blog and emails you about it. This is especially significant because my mother hates technology ("it'll rot your brain") but has reportedly not let go of my dad's IPad since buying it for him for Christmas. I never thought I'd see the day.

Now that I'm recovering from the ick, I used a decidedly low-tech and inartistic solution to put the fancy lines on my cotton candy. It was also inspired by my mother. I've been putting off working on this part because I wasn't really sure how to do it, and didn't want it to look silly.

I laid my giant cotton candy stencil on the floor, and put some dressmaker's tracing paper underneath it. My mother, who learned to sew in the 60's, uses this to mark her patterns as she's cutting them out. It's been replaced with some newer techniques, so you're not likely to see it on Project Runway, but it's what I grew up with, so I use it too and happened to have some around. I didn't actually even know what it was technically called until I looked it up to link it. You can see the paper below on the cone, it's kinda like carbon paper, but a little chalkier and it wipes up with a little water

I traced (poorly) all the lines so that I could get the placement right. The thing I wasn't happy with when I was free handing was my bad angles and placement. My eye just isn't good enough to freehand that stuff. On the other hand, I am fantastic at painting by numbers.

 

 

Here's what it looked like when I was done. The lines are a little washed out in the photo, but they were pretty dark in person. They're also upside down, because blogger doesn't recognize it when I flip my pictures. 

 

 

I also used it to go back over the cone to figure out where I messed up those lines. One was so bad that I sanded it off, I'm going to touch it up with black and white. But the important thing here, is that one was ALMOST right!! Hooray. 

 

I filled in the lines I traced with black paint, more or less. It looks so much better than my freehand attempts, which looked a lot like someone puked a Rorschach test on the floor.   I am pretty sure most of my more-artistic friends will laugh at me for doing it this way, but they had their chance at tacos and immortality. I am so pleased with the way my copied lines came out that you get two pictures



I also cleaned up some of the junky bits where I dropped my brush, and parts of the circle. I'm trying to figure out if I want a border around the circle, but I think I may just clean up the edges and leave it. One more session of touch ups and I'll be ready to wipe it all down and seal it. Thank god! I'm about a week over the time I'd budgeted for doing this, which all things considered isn't that bad.