What I've Been Up To:Custom Mini Figures

  I hope you're all social distancing and managing not to go insane doing so. I feel bad for those of you who live alone. I know I'd be pretty insane by now if I hadn't had people here to talk to. I don't do well for long stretches on my own. I tend to start talking to the cats too much, and then to myself!
   At least now there's the internet and cell phones. We can stay instantly updated, constantly entertained, and always connected. My sister-in-law called from England yesterday to wish Fuzz a happy birthday,(25!),and she is all alone,social distancing and attempting to stay safe. She missed her grandson's 9th birthday party yesterday,and I think she was feeling lonely. At least she has this beautiful view to look at from her door.

 Fuzz chose not to have a birthday celebration and cake, but to just visit friends. I baked a cake anyway. Nobody is going to turn down cake,even if they don't want to blow out candles.
  I ventured out into my own yard to do some yard work last week. I raked up all the twig things that fall from the walnut trees,which I missed doing before the weather got bad last fall. I was working,as you may recall, on Ivy's room then, and my back was out for a while. So I cleared up all of those so I can mow the yard soon. I raked the hosta bed because I noticed the shoots were starting to come up. When they get to about 6 inches tall we'll eat some of them. We had them a couple of times last year, and they were pretty good.

Last year's sauteed hostas.

  My lilacs are budding, but they still don't have any leaves to speak of!

My side yard daffodils bloomed and are on their way out.

As you may have noticed in my post on the Daisy Kingdom raincoat, my short fencing has seen much better days. I'll probably be replacing it with a plastic one this summer. I have a similarly made regular sized bit of fencing that was in the ceiling of our garage. It's ancient and still in great condition. This stuff is modern, and thus, crap.

But my daffodils at the back,down the little sidewalk to the side yard,didn't get one flower this year. The flowers that grow on the ground cover vines are growing full force though.

Yes, I do need to rake in the back and sweep my sidewalks.

The yard is also full of wild violets.

There are also these little white flowers that I have only otherwise seen growing in the woods.

It was good to see that with all that is happening, that nature and life goes on.
  I have been working on a project you will see later this week, and there's a long post you'll be seeing soon,connected to that previous post on Our Dolls,Ourselves. But today I'm showing you something else I have been working on.
  After Christmas there were lot of things clearanced at our local Kroger store. One thing I found was these little Lego type figures.

They were only 30 cents a box. There were policemen and rescue guys in hats too,but I needed the guys with hair. I had an idea for a project,but I needed four of the ones with hair,so I had to get four packs of the action heroes. I worked on them the other night,painting their suits.

Then I had to paint the hair and put faces on them.

I'm hoping you can tell who they are supposed to be now!
 

 I got the idea because there are Yellow Submarine Beatles Legos. Yellow Submarine is probably my least favourite Beatles thing though. I wanted some earlier Beatles. So when I saw these guys with this hair, I thought,hey! I'll make my own!
 

  It sounds easy. But painting those very narrow lines for those tiny faces was harder than you'd think. It took a couple of days of trying. That's why you didn't see this post yesterday! For one thing, I thought I could just turn the heads around and use the blank backs, instead of trying to paint over the faces that were already there.

But as you can see in the above picture, that didn't work because the heads were shorter in the back. Once the hair was put on, it made the faces so short there was hardly any room for the faces. So I had to paint over the prepainted faces,and then leave that to cure for a while.
  Then there were a million tries at painting the faces. I practiced before hand by drawing a few million caricature faces on paper. That gave me a false sense of security, because it was a lot easier to do with a pen on paper, than with the world's tiniest paint brush and a needle, on a rounded, tiny plastic head. So this is my semi finished product. I'm still not satisfied with them. I still have some heads,so I will probably keep trying until I get it right. I haven't put any fixitive on them yet either, so, as you may have noticed, the suits need touched up. So they're not finished anyway. But here they are. This is what I've been doing.