Gypsy Wagon Details....

 

And More Rhododendron Blossoms...

I don't Know about you, Dear Readers, but Time has been playing tricks on me lately! It seems like only yesterday that I had painted the inside of the Gypsy Wagon Barn addition and got side-tracked with the sleeping nook with the rabbits and roses. I had several unfinished parts of the Barn that needed to be completed once the paint was dry, and I worked on them the very next day. That was almost two weeks ago! But before I show you those details, I wanted to remind you of who lives in this little traveling barn; the goats of course! They are still waiting for me to add the straw bedding and some hay to munch on. The nanny's name is "Jingles", and her kid is "Jester". (Thank you, Birgit for sending him many (but who's counting....) years ago!) The parts of the Barn that I worked on were the chicken coop doors, and the "pannier" cages. 

The chicken coop boxes needed to have a mesh screen added to the openings.

I dug in my supplies and found some already "prepared" scraps

 from way back when I was working on the Tree House windows!

They were already painted and the rectangular scraps

 were exactly the right size once cut in half!

 

 All I had to do was apply glue and let it dry!

Here they have all been glued. 

Once they were dry I decided it needed

 an extra "frame" on the inside for strength.

I decided cardboard would do the trick and cut the openings.

I painted them before cutting them all the way apart.

And glued them to the inside of the windows.

As for the "pannier" cages....

 I forgot to take any progress pictures of the attachment process! 

(It was difficult and fidgety!)

These "cages" had been constructed ages ago...

 and they have been  falling off every time the wagon is moved... 

it is a miracle that they are intact!

The "problem" that slowed my completion 

 was that the holes for the bars at the bottom

 needed to be made larger.

 And the drill doesn't fit in close enough to reach all the holes!

The ones at the edge by the walls couldn't be enlarged.

And I had to align one bar at a time into it's hole....

they kept popping back out!

 Tweezers helped me to push them in... 

their alignment was not exact in the first place

 so they needed to be bent a little....

Bit by bit I got them in the holes... 

but then I needed to get glue in there too!

If you look carefully at the first picture

 you can see a line of glue along the base...

applied with a toothpick!

Whew!

And there were two of them to do!

It took a lot of patience and persistence!

But I got them attached!

And the little "doors" still work perfectly!

And yes, somewhere, the bunnies who will live in them are hiding...

And as for the Rhododendron blossoms, Dear Readers,

 I have been working on them "intermittently".

I have not been able to make a good "sequence rhythm"

 to the construction process,

 in part because I am not happy with

 my methods of joining the florets to the stem!

I am trying to get the minimum length

 of the floret stem needed to attach it,

 and not add too much bulk to the cluster

 where it joins the stem.

Here you can see how they get very "thick" as a bunch.

The problem is exacerbated by the addition of the leaves... 

which need to spiral out right below the blossom cluster.

Here are the first three clusters grouped together

 the way they will be on the shrub...

 they will be densely packed together.

But in this picture you can't really see the ugly mess

 that is the stems attachment below the blossoms.

And at the moment I am Way behind on making the leaves....

 which need at least 8- 10 leaves per blossom cluster.

Here are some of the still not assembled blossoms....

And I am not sure whether I should use

 regular paper rather than card stock for the leaves....

Decisions... decisions...!

The one thing I am sure about, Dear Readers,

 is that I think the blossoms look wonderful in the cluster!

So even though Time is getting away from me, 

You can see I got a tiny bit done on the Gypsy Wagon

 and the Rhododendron blossoms!