Merry Christmas All

Merry Christmas to all! It has been a great holiday season for me because this is the first time in 41 years that I was able to stay put for the entire holiday period from Thanksgiving through Christmas and will be able to do so right up through New Years day!  No stress about trying to get things prepared, shopping, etc. So a little background first. Shortly after we built this house back in 2005, my wife bought four "Alpine Firs" at one of the local nurseries.  They were expensive but she wanted something that wouldn't get too big and fat that she could plant relatively close to the house. Turned out they weren't actually Alpine Firs, they were common Douglas firs, probably dug up from the local mountains and sold for a huge profit by the nursery (the one we will never go back to!) They were/are getting huge! Way too close to the house! So two years ago I cut the first one down and we used it as our Christmas tree. Turned out to be the nicest tree we ever had! So we cut the second one down last year and it was even prettier. This year is the third one we cut down. It was 25 feet tall! We took the top 8 feet for our Christmas tree and it turned out just as nice as the first two.

We have one left for next year that is about 16 feet now. This has actually worked out so well I wish I had been planting Douglas firs every year so we cold continue to get our own trees for Christmas.

The next thing I was excited about was to see the reaction from my oldest daughter when she saw the "Organic Steampunk" lamp I built for her. Three years ago she went traipsing through the brush to retrieve birch and alder tree sheds to make a clothes rack for her younger sister. One of them she expressed and interest in for a lamp "some day". I kept it in my shop. Later on she started liking steampunk decor, so I turned this Alder snag into a steampunk lamp, a melding of nature and industry.

Thankfully she loved it. Whew!

Now comes the awesome part. Both my girls came up with the same thoughtful gift idea for dear old dad. Nautical themed decanters with glasses. Fortunately they are enough different that they compliment rather than duplicate. I set them up in my hobby room along with the popcorn air popper I also received from one of the girls.

Well another year has almost passed. I was not a very prolific mini builder this year. Perhaps 2020 will be more productive. Cheers to all and again Merry Christmas!

Update December 26th: My wife gifted me a desk top lift for my hobby desk so I can stand up to work occasionally. I had to reorganize before I could make room to mount it. It works great!

1/1200 Scale Card Sloop

Two years ago this month I wrote a post about Jeff Knutsen's 1/300 scale 10 gun sloop which I thought ended up quite presentable. Today I finished another one. Only this one is 1/1200 scale! And it came out very nice! It fits in nicely with my metal 1/1200 fleets. Jeff says on his War Artisan website that this freebie is the USS Enterprise and I think that is what I will use it for, adding it to my growing AWI-1812 American fleet. This is also my very first try at the toilet paper sea base method. It is certainly easier and takes less time than my usual vinyl plaster method, but just seems a little flat to me. Maybe using more layers of TP would give it more depth? Let me know what you think!

Port side scratch guns

Starboard side scratch guns

Quarter scaling shot

10 gun card sloop next to a Navwar bomb ship

Card Mayflower

Hello all, not doing much at the hobby hobby desk this winter. I did, however, copy this old vintage card model of the Mayflower from Pinterest and printed it on some card stock. It took about an hour to build and doesn't look half bad IMO. Tell me what you think!

Lindberg 1:144 Caravel Pinta

Happy Thanksgiving Holidays to all my Yank friends. I hope you all get to stuff yourselves to your hearts content! I know I plan to.

While completing another home project and starting a new one, I have been taking an hour here and there in the evenings to work on the second of the Lindberg Ships of Columbus pack, the Pinta. This one is also a typical caravel although somewhat larger than the Nina. Again the four cannon with the pack are much too small and the wrong century, so I made four more late 15th century bombards and a couple of small swivel Falconets. Also, like the Nina, I cut the hull to waterline and then finished the bottom and mounted it to the stand so I can set the model on it for full hull display. The gap is a bit distracting but if you don't inspect it to closely, it doesn't look too bad.

Sorry for the poor quality photos. The camera on my J7 Samsung is nowhere near as nice as the one on my old Note.