For this Halloween of 2022 I dressed up as a spartan warrior. My plan for the costume was to focus on the helmet and shield and then go on to make leg and body armor. I had had no experience with making anything like this before, but I still had a general idea of how to go about making the shield, so the helmet was going to be the main challenge. After watching some videos, Mom and I got to work making a cardboard frame for the helmet, planning to paiper-mache over it, but the shield and leg armor would also need to be paiper-mached so we decided to do all the paiper-macheing at once. The shield was made out of cardboard with a paper plate in the middle to give it a curve, the leg armor was also made out of cardboard curved to fit my legs. Once everything that needed to be paiper-mached had been made Mom and I began paiper-macheing. After two coats of paiper-mache I them dry and then primed them, after letting this dry I painted them with bronze spray paint. We used red tulle for the plumes in the helmet, and painted the spartan emblem in red on the shield.
Remember-
• Spray-paint in the corner of the back yard, on the Grey junk table!
• The craft paint is not waterproof and rubs off easily when wet! But when varnished it has no trouble with water.
• Start with paper prototype.
• Paiper-mache takes a long time to dry, so let it dry overnight.
• Spray-paint does not take very long to dry.
• Always bend cardboard with the corrugation.
I taught a class on iconic short stories this spring at our homeschool co-op. I don't know how many of my former English teachers may have passed since, but any that have are rolling in their graves at this news. I find teaching especially stressful but this class exceeded my expectations in basically every way and that might have made it worthwhile. We read 20 short stories, which I was free to choose primarily on the basis of how much I liked them. I organized them based on loose associations. Table of Contents (We never officially read this, but it was so short, I included it in case I needed to read it aloud during that first class.) One Summer Night , by Ambrose Bierce Short Story Elements To Build a Fire , by Jack London Irony The Necklace , by Guy de Maupassant The Gift of the Magi , by O. Henry The Ransom of Red Chief , by O. Henry Irony - American The Veldt , by Ray Bradbury The Lottery , by Shirley Jackson Setting - Irony - Foreign The Sniper , by Liam O'Flah...
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