So Many Candles . . . So Little Cake (part 2)

Back when I worked at CopyMax, one of the services we offered was "padding" paper. You know those tear-off pads of paper, that aren't adhesive like Post-it notes? We'd make those for people. It's surprisingly simple:

1. Get all the slips of paper lined up
2. Put something heavy on top of them
3. Brush the edge with white glue, and let dry
   
4. Repeat step 3 until glue layer is thick enough.

To stabilize the pages of the book, I "padded" all 3 exposed sides of all the book's pages together. This turned everything between the covers into one solid mass that could better support the Jim Beam if the covers of the book were to fall open.

I did this by waking up multiple times Saturday night/Sunday morning, from midnight to 5am.

By 8am the last layer of padding glue was dried, and I was working in Photoshop on the cover. Steve and my wife had scoured the Internet for funny cover ideas, and had come up with some good ones. Ultimately, I went with one that Courtney found:

"So Many Candles . . . So Little Cake"

A quick Google search had turned up one of the images I would steal use, and a Flickr search (better when you're looking for something esoteric that nobody in their right mind would make public) netted me the other:

Yup, that's Flickr . . . images that nobody in their right mind would make public. Handy, though.

Making the book jacket was surprisingly easy. Because I still had the original book jacket, the dimensions were all right there for me. 1¾" spine, 6.375" page width, 3½" inside flaps, 9¼" tall. I laid those dimensions out in Photoshop, gave myself a quarter-inch bleed, and the rest was cake.


(Click for "full" size. Even the enlarged version is reduced from the true full-sized one.)

The front-cover flap is lifted from Jim Bean's website. The quotes on the back are all made up, except for the modified Government warning about alcohol. The piece that took the longest was probably the Oprah's Book Club seal on the cover (the original book was from Oprah's Book Club, and Steve thought it would be hilarious to keep that. He was right.) I didn't even go for photo-realism on the logo, but I got it pretty close:

(Left: Real logo. Right: Mine.)

It looked and felt like a real book jacket. Which is hilarious, because I spent all of 3 hours making it. I doubt the professionals spend a whole lot more time on book jackets than I did, yet I bet they charge a pretty penny for the service.

The finished product:





The gift was very well received. He kinda glanced at it first, said something like "funny title". Then he tried to flip through it, snapped it shut immediately, and said, "Oh! That is a good book. That's a very good book! I will read this book very carefully when I get home!"

Happy 30th, Bob Gaither.

So Many Candles . . . So Little Cake

It was Bob Gaither's 30th birthday yesterday. Being a few months away from 30 myself, I still have leeway to make fun of everybody else for turning 30 (and can get away with calling them old.)

So I decided to have a little fun.

My brother Steve, my wife, and I had lunch at Red Robin on Saturday, and then hit a whole mess of new and used bookstores. We were looking not for a specific book, but for a specific type of book . . . it had to be around 2 inches thick or more, and needed a title along the lines of "Coping with aging", or "Dealing with old age". This was a tall order, as evidenced by the long list of stores we visited.

We'll get to the "why" in a moment.

After about four hours of searching, we had no good ideas (except a $20 new book from Book Bin), and were ready to give up, when I realized "hey, maybe it would be easier to make a new book jacket in Photoshop rather than try to find a book with just the title we want." Courtney and Steve agreed that perhaps I should have thought of this hours ago.

We bought the thickest book on the $2 shelf, made a scheduled stop at the liquor store, and returned home.

The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen, is almost 600 pages long. That got it to the thickness we needed, but the nature of our plan was such that the difficulty of our task increased with every page long our book was.

Because we were cutting a hole into every single page.

Four hours later (Steve had eventually gone home, I fear out of boredom), I finally cut the last hole in the last page, using the side of a Raisin Bran box as a backing so I didn't mar the inside cover. I had some finessing to do with the edges of some cuts, and had accidentally torn out a couple pages here and there, but it was good enough:

That's right . . . we managed to fit the Jim Beam (the reason for our aforementioned liquor store side-trip) into the book.

So now you see why we wanted a book on "dealing" or "coping". It's a gag gift, and one I'm glad to say we had spent only $2 on (minus the cost of the JB, and of the gasoline used for 4 hours of thrift store hunting).

Exhausted, several razor-blades poorer, and unable to bend my wrists all the way (600 pages is a lot of cutting!) I retired to bed. I still had a Sunday School lesson to plan, and Bob's party was at 1:30 the next afternoon. Sunday morning would be busy.

One last look at The Greatest Piñata Ever Made

The Greatest Piñata Ever Made, Part 15

Cory "I Wear Nothing But Kelly Green Shirts" Folkert gave a sermon today, in lieu of Pastor Jerry. While he had my attention for nearly all of it (and the time of worship was incredible), I kept to my usual habit of doodling during church.

I knew that today was dark brown day, and that I'd need a good design to go off of. I had the basic idea of dark brown loops that (very) loosely follow the skull fenestrae, but angles were tough to pin down. The third design down was the one I decided I would try to recreate on the finished piñata.

(The scale patterns were something I was planning on doing with a Sharpie. I thought I would draw scales all over the piñata, and was experimenting with shapes and patterns. The prohibitive cost of Sharpies was brought up in a conversation after the church service . . . and so to be cheap I have given up my dream of covering the Tyrannosaurus with scales.)

Using the church bulletin as a guide, I taped up 11x17 sheets of white paper along the top of the piñata, and then I just started drawing. Each sheet was then cut up, traced onto dark brown butcher paper (twice). I then taped up the dark brown versions (so that I could continue lining up the edge of the brown paper sections).

For the top, I did almost no measuring . . . just grabbed rectangles of brown paper and glued them on, tearing holes for the ropes as I went.

Once everything was cut out (this was the first time I'd measured and cut everything before starting to glue), I went about the same laborious process as I'd endured with the light brown . . . although the dark brown pieces were generally a little thinner and thus easier to wield than the light brown pieces had been. I intentionally crumpled the dark brown in the hopes of getting the same splotchy pattern . . . with generally positive results.

Having glued down all the brown (and negotiated some last minute re-papering on the back of the head), I washed up and went upstairs to my computer. There, I printed out a new pair of eyes (I intentionally papered over the old eyes so that their circular outline would still be in place for me under the brown paper). The eyes are 3" across, probably a little bit too big, but what do I know? I glued them to white cardstock, then cut them out and attached them to the (so very nearly finished) piñata.

It is a sight to behold:


All that remains is for me to glue the tongue to the lower jaw, and for me to finish painting the gums around the edges of the teeth.

And to fill the whole thing with candy.

And to weep as these weeks of work are ended in only minutes, at the flailing hands of crazed, feral children.

3 working days left.

The Greatest Piñata Ever Made, Part 14

Happy Birthday, brother John Lund!

I'm doing my Tyrannosaurus without lips.

I know that theropods had holes parallel to the gumline that could have carried nerves and blood vessels to support fleshy, muscular lips. I also know that lips help prevent teeth from drying out, which is helpful when you need your teeth to keep living. I also know that all living reptiles (except crocodilians, which live in the water so their teeth don't dry out, and beaked reptiles like turtles and tortoises) have some kind of lips, or at least scales that hang down to cover the teeth when the mouth is closed.

I also know that Tyrannosaurus had really, really long teeth. And while certain animals clearly manage to have both lips and exceptionally long teeth, it does pose problems. Further, since Tyrannosaurus (and all theropods) were constantly growing new teeth, protecting the old teeth would be a lower priority. Last, some stuff got published 11 years ago that says Tyrannosaurus had no lips.

I'm doing this piñata without lips.

That's actually harder, because it means when I apply the light brown paper flush with the upper jawline, I'm going to need to cut sockets.

I decided the best way to figure out exactly where each tooth was positioned relative to the jawline was to do a crayon rubbing. I taped up a big sheet of brown paper, peeled the wrapper off a brown crayon, and rubbed away. Just like those leaf rubbings you did in the second grade, this gave me a good outline of where the teeth went. After that, it was just a matter of cutting away the paper teeth and leaving nice neat sockets in place.

Handling the giant pieces of paper proved much more difficult than the little scraps I've been working with. The glue makes the paper heavy, and (perhaps not surprisingly) sticky. My arms ended up entirely covered in glue on more than one occasion as I attempted to cover the last few dry parts of the paper without the rest of the sheet ending up a balled-up gluey mess.

In the end, it all worked out though . . . and the crumpling of the paper left a very cool pattern when the glue dried. It's one of those "happy accidents", the kind of unexpected turn-for-the-better that makes hands-on projects turn out extra good. Stuff like this is what made the ships and creatures of the original "Star Wars" trilogy so much better than the CGI stuff of the new trilogy.

Not that my piñata is nearly as cool as the sarlacc or the Y-wing.


Four working days left!

The Greatest Piñata Ever Made, Part 13

Just photo updates.

Covered the lower jaw in off-white paper:And got all the ropes attached to the upper jaw.

The Greatest Piñata Ever Made, Part 12

I took an informal poll last Saturday about how to color this piñata. Given the two choices to the left, I asked a few friends which option they preferred.

Now understand that I greatly preferred the stark-white lower jaw. I don't know exactly why, but as long as I've been coloring dinosaurs I've had a preference for mixing dark browns and white. (I know that a giant sea of eye-catching white would not be good camouflage for a predator that probably tried to be at least a little bit sneaky on occasion . . . but it looks so crazy awesome to me.)

So I had just planned to do the jaw in white, but on showing this idea to my wife, I was told that my white was too much, and I should go for more of an all-over brown. I showed a couple other people, and they all agreed: too much white!

Wanting to justify myself, I sent the options out to a whole bunch of friends, to see what they thought. Tragically, my brilliant opinion was very in the minority.

But two people joined me! Kim "Berly" Basilin and Sean "My Skin Is Like Unto A Ghost" Swanson recognized my bright white lower jaw for the artistic genius that it was. Hooray for Kim and Sean! They are masters of taste and class, while everyone else can go suck it.

The piñata's going to have a white lower jaw.

Edit: I got one more vote for the white jaw, way too late to influence my decision, but not too late to help me feel even more justified in the action I was already going to take.

The Greatest Piñata Ever Made, Part 11

Pythagoras came to my rescue again today. With his help, I measured, calculated, Photoshopped, printed, traced, cut and installed the sublingual area (below the tongue), all in just a few hours' time. As with the others, the image to the right is to scale at 4.926 px/inch.

* * * * *

I'm trying to multitask (since time is short) . . . so while the glue on the sublingual plate was still drying, I also cranked out 2/3 of a freehand tongue.

No measurements, not even a plan really . . . I just grabbed some posterboard that was laying around and started folding and taping. The end result looks pretty good, I think (though the back 1/3 of the tongue still needs to be added). It's not fixed in place, and I've only just begun to papier-mâché the thing . . . but it will work. This is the first "volumous" portion of the piñata not made with corrugated cardboard.

Tonight I'm planning to coat (or begin to coat) the entire piñata with a cosmetic layer of pure white papier-mâché. Any coloration added to the finished piñata will go over the uniform white layer.


9 days left!

The Greatest Piñata Ever Made, Part 10

Waiting for the glue to dry on one jaw joint before I put glue on the other . . .
10 days left!

The Greatest Piñata Ever Made, Part 9

Alternate Title: How to get two giant piñata parts to stick together (and stay that way), part 2.

Step 6: Make papier-mâché paste.

Take a heaping serving of Elmer's Glue-All and pour it into a tray you don't mind never using again if you forget to wash it off right away. Add about half as much tap water as glue (so . . . 2 parts glue to 1 part water, max). Hey, look, you just made (cheap, inauthentic, fake, amateurish) papier-mâché paste!

Step 7: Make papier-mâché.

Paste is great, but it's not papier-mâché without any papier. Tear yesterday's newspaper into strips. For these huge seams, I'm using huge pieces of newspaper . . . but for smaller projects, or detail work (like around the teeth of the Tyrannosaurus), you can use much smaller pieces of newspaper.

Dip the paper into the glue/water mix, and (this part gets really messy) rub the glue all over (and into) the paper with your bare hands. You don't want the paper to be dripping wet, but you do want it to be saturated with glue and water (the water makes it easier for the glue to soak through the paper). Wipe off any excess paste.

Step 8: Apply, and let it dry.

Lay the strips of gluey newspaper across whatever seam or area you want to reinforce. Smooth out any wrinkles or air bubbles with your fingertips. Don't pull too hard against the paper . . . it's really wet now, and will tear more easily than when dry. Repeat this process up to 4 layers of paper thick (any more and you'll have a hard time drying all the way through).

And that's it! Just step back and let the glue dry. You can add more coats once your first ones are entirely dry . . . not when they're just a little damp, but when they're dry, dry, dry.

Tomorrow's a busy day, but Monday will bring dry papier-mâché, reinforced seams, and a piñata ready to have its lower jaw put on!

The Greatest Piñata Ever Made, Part 8

Alternate Title: How to get two giant piñata parts to stick together (and stay that way), part 1.

Step 1: Position the cardboard.

In this picture, I've already attached the front of the palate to the head, and papier-mâchéd it into place . . . so it's the back half of the palate I'll be attaching. Check that everything actually fits how you think it will (I had to make some last-minute cuts because I'd mismeasured the very back of the head, apparently . . . good to know before you start gluing).

Step 2: Get your materials ready.

These pieces of cardboard are big, and since the office is closed, I can't phone Kent to come help me (if something goes wrong). So that means pre-torn strips of duct tape, white glue poured into a bowl with spreading-knife in place, and everything positioned in such a way that I can get at and around it with one hand should the other hand be preoccupied.

Step 3: Spread the glue.

(I actually managed to, by myself, take photos of holding down the flaps with one hand and spreading glue with the other . . . and wouldn't you know it, they were corrupted on the danged memory card! Gah!)

Get every flap covered with glue. Don't worry about any fancy epoxies . . . for cardboard, simple white glue spread over the whole contact surface (not too thick) is usually plenty.

Step 4: Hold down the fort (flaps).

I use duct tape to hold the cardboard flaps in place while the glue dries. After everything is dried I take the duct tape back off (and replace it with papier-mâché), but for now the adhesive tape will help make sure the flaps are securely glued together.

Having glued and taped everything together, and having ensured that the tape is secure enough to hold while the glue dries, you can walk away.

Step 5: Wait.

The glue has to dry, and you have to go pick up the last part of your mom's birthday present. So come back to the piñata tomorrow.


Less than two weeks until the picnic!

The Greatest Piñata Ever Made, Part 7

Look at that snug-fitting palate. It's beautiful.

Just papier-mâché today. Trying to put the palate into place on my own was a mistake, and I had to make an emergency call up to my co-worker Kent (while everything was covered in glue, including me) who gallantly rushed down to save me (and the piñata) from gluey destruction.

Thanks Kent!

The Greatest Piñata Ever Made, Part 6

Well, I put a drill bit through one finger and put wire-cutters through another, all for the sake of this piñata . . . and hence the delay in working on this thing, and writing about it. I hope it's happy.

In a typical piñata, a suspending rope is fastened with some wire to the top of the piñata. That works well with a one-pound piñata holding two pounds of candy . . . but this sucker weighs a little bit more just on its own, and it's going to hold slightly more in the way of candy. If the rope (or ropes) are just attached to the top of the head, I fear the weight of the candy would cause the roof of the mouth to give way:
My (entirely untested) solution is to support the candy's "floor", rather than the candy's ceiling. If I fix the ropes to the roof of the mouth, and run them through the top of the head, then the roof of the mouth will be less inclined to buckle (as it won't be supported from the edges, but from the middle):Now the candy stays safely in its piñata home forever! (Forever = "until 2 minutes after the whacking starts")

I picked up some perforated steel plates, some zinc-plated brass rings, and braided nylon rope at Ace Hardware.

The steel plates were epoxied directly to the roof of the mouth (to the "bottom" of the cardboard, not the top as shown in the illustration above). Since the epoxy filled in the perforations, I drilled out the holes again, and then ran lengths of rope through some of the holes.

Pro tip: Because nylon rope needs the ends melted to prevent fraying, I've found it's easier to just cut the rope BY melting it. Apply a flame where you want to "cut", and when the rope starts balling up over the flame, tug gently on each end. You get much cleaner, and nicely tapered "cuts".

Back to the upper side of the roof-of-the-mouth sheet, I attached the rope ends for each steel plate to a brass ring. I chose a hangman's knot because it's self-tightening under strain, and because it's easily untied if you mess something up (which I did, repeatedly). So with four tiny nooses around each brass ring, the palate was ready to be inserted into the upper jaw (finally).

The Greatest Piñata Ever Made, Part 5

Yesterday, due to prior commitments, was just a materials-acquisition day. Nothing worth writing home about.

Today I set out to build the palate (the roof of the mouth), which in the finished piñata will be the "shelf" on which most of the candy will ultimately rest. Unfortunately, I had no pattern for the palate, because the skull pattern I cribbed from The Paper Museum was without palate or tongue. So I had to create a pattern all my own.

And I never could have done it (easily) without my good and long-dead friend Pythagoras!

Using a sharpie and a measuring tape, I figured all the edge-lengths and widths of my palate-to-be. When I was done, I had 7 widths (across the jaw from left-to-right), and six side-lengths (down the jaw, front to back). I checked most of the side-lengths for symmetry, but since I traced the same pattern for the left and right sides, I was pretty confident everything was going to line up, and I would have myself a nice, tight-fitting piece of cardboard to support hundreds of pounds of candy.

When I was done, I had broken the roof of the mouth into six trapezoids, like the front three illustrated below:And I had the lengths of each trapezoid's sides:Now edges and side-lengths are great and all, but it's hard to draw a really symmetrical trapezoid with just those measurements . . . I'd need to break out a straight-edge, protractor and compass, and constantly check that my base lines were parallel . . . what a pain!

If only I could break it down into rectangles and right-triangles . . . that would be so much simpler!
Oh wait, I can.

Now the nose trapezoid, with one base of 8.875", and one base of 14.125", and sides of 6.25", is not a rectangle of width 8.875", and two right triangles, each with a hypotenuse of 6.25".

But how tall is the rectangle? And how long are the other two sides of the right triangles?
To find the short side-length of the yellow triangle, I just took half of the difference between the bases of the trapezoid. Then I had two sides of a right triangle (the base and hypoteneuse), and since that wonderful man Pythagoras told us that:

a² + b² = c²

I could easily calculate the height of both the rectangle and the yellow right triangle.

Now, instead of having 6 trapezoids to deal with, I have six rectangles and the right triangles that they border. All I really needed to draw was the rectangles (something very easy to draw in Photoshop) and "connect the dots", as it were. When I was all done, I had a pretty little pattern for the roof of the Tyrannosaurus mouth, (full size printed at 4.926 px/inch will be to scale with other patterns). I printed and cut the pattern, traced it onto a big sheet of cardboard, freehanded some tabs off the sides (so I have something substantial to connect it to the inside of the upper jaw), and cut the whole thing out.

It's beautiful . . . it fits very snugly, though I'm not going to glue it in just yet. I need to rig up the steel cords that are going to support the finished piñata's weight . . . but more on that tomorrow (when I do it)!

The Greatest Piñata Ever Made, Part 4

Just newspaper and glue today (and a little water).

Tomorrow I attempt the palate and the piñata suspension system.