Sunday, April 15, 2007

Cute(Kawaii)

Here are my Gerbils Emi (the dark one) and Doris, they are amazing and cute:)



Saturday, April 14, 2007

Roundhouse and Gerbil

As I mentioned previously I have been making a scale model of an Iron Age Roundhouse (Celtic), after alot of research I realized that there was no standard design, so I took parts from different styles and came up with what follows.
Initial construction, this involved drilling 19 holes and fitting pegs into place to act as wall structure, these pegs were then weaved with thin pieces of willow.

The next stage was using glue soaked newspaper(paper-mache) to replicate the use of Daub (which was a material made of dung, straw, mud, clay: you can see why I didn't want to use the authentic method) as you can see above I left a section un-daubed so that you can see the wood weaving.

Hmmm I didn't take an accurate photo graphic record, so what has happened is i painted the walls, then created the roof, this was the most time consuming part of the project. I had to make a temporary insert for the roof from paper (obviously not how the ancients did it) put the main frame poles in , add some support rings and voila, one conical shaped wooden construction. I then got a hanging basket liner and covered my roof beams with it, this was sewn into place with the obligatory missing section, then on top of this was sewn long dry grass to represent thatching, again my way is not the correct way but actually thatching the roof would of taken months, and I think my version looks relatively good.

On a completely different note here is Emi one of my gerbils, she's gorgeous :)