short forays and model making

It's a little after 9 AM and it's already 81˚ and 83% humidity. Gonna be a hot one. Just another summer day in the Gulf Coast Plains.

The cicadas finally hatched out adding their song to the summer landscape and one of the banana spiders snagged one.

I've seen more banana spiders this year, three or four, than ever except for when we first came out to look at this house which had been vacant for a year and they were everywhere. The next year just a few and then none at all until last year I saw one. They don't seem to last long, just a couple of weeks and then they are just gone. The one that got the cicada was gone just a few days later but the husk of the cicada is still hanging in the tattered remains of the web.

You know what I haven't seen this year? June bugs. One, I've seen one when I fished it out of one of the birdbaths the other day. They usually hatch early in May and bumble around and get in the house. They are such clumsy fliers.

The baby anoles are starting to hatch and the toad that lives in the bromeliad was at home.

In between short forays into the yard to pull a handful of weeds or pull out the leftover gone by dead spring bloomers or to water the flower beds I've been working on the heron box, specifically the sculpture that will adorn the top.

I had loosely arranged the sticks to suggest a nest so the next thing was to make the egg and to do that I had to make a mold of a stone egg I had which was smaller than I wanted but the next one up was bigger than I wanted. I used liquid latex and over the course of a few days I applied 10 coats and then peeled it off the egg.

Once I had my mold I took it over to the shop/hell because it was hot as hell over there and when I finally was done mid-afternoon it was so hot that the fan blew hot air and standing there doing nothing sweat rolled off me and plugged in the wax pot and poured the first of 3 eggs. Once the wax had hardened I peeled the mold off 

and shaped it a bit and then because it was smaller than I wanted I dipped it in the melted wax until it was about the size I wanted and then shaped it again. So now I have two eggs though I'll only use one but I have an extra ready in case the first one doesn't cast well. The third egg I left in the mold to help it keep its shape while not in use.

Next is to finish attaching the sticks and cleaning it up and polish everything and then it all gets glued down to styrofoam which is what I use to make the reservoir that holds the glass while it casts. I think I'll be doing that today which means another trip over to hell.

There's a feather that goes with this arrangement that I made earlier in the year with the modeling glass. It's flat right now but I might slump it for a more natural look. I sent off the second best feather to a friend to slump it for me so I can compare.