Here There Be Dragons!

About a month ago I was asked to help lead "Morning Out," which is an excuse for the sisters and children in the ward to not go completely crazy during the winter by giving them a time and place to socialize as a group during the week. Today was a very special kid-oriented morning out, called "Princess and Hero Day." I had been preparing for it since I'd been asked to help lead. Why was I preparing for so long? Because, as I said, the event was for the children, and I happen to be a child-at-heart.

I built a dragon. And a castle.


Ok, John and Andrea (the other leader of Morning Out) helped assemble the castle (in 2.5 hours), but it was my project. I got to order a long-desired toy for myself in order to make the castle work. Due to the size of the eight refrigerator boxes it took to build the castle (which took the better part of a month to chase down), John said to just trow it out when we were done, which I was perfectly ok with. After all, I (now) know where to find refrigerator boxes in quantity in the greater Ann Arbor area, and it doesn't take that long to build from scratch. The sisters we met with today were appalled that I'd even consider throwing it out, and managed to convince me to store it in the attic of the church. So there is a castle in the attic. A currently flat castle, as the thing collapses down nicely. We're working on a permanent solution though.

The real thing that has taken me the month is the dragon. I built it from wire coat hangers, newspaper, a stick, some other recycled materials to help support the inside, masking tape, duct tape, 8lbs of salt to weight him so he'd stand more-upright-ish, chicken wire, flour, water, Elmer's glue, spare pieces of cotton fabric a little bit of crayola air-dry modeling clay, some spare cardboard and paint.

I built a wire-frame skeleton.
Then I put chicken wire over the back to help form/hold a shape and hoping that the octagon pattern would show through in the final product as scales. I then papier mâchéd some newspaper down to the frame.
Two more layers of papier mâché later...
After that I used the fabric and Elmer's glue to give him a final layer of skin (at which point, due to impending deadlines, I failed to take a progress picture). I then proceeded to paint him as seen in the first picture above, and below. The kids had a blast! I did too! I also got to read a couple of my favorite princess/knight/dragon stories to the kids (Tomie DePaola's The Knight and the Dragon, and Leah Wilcox's Waking Beauty). I sort of ate up the attention of the other sisters who were all very impressed with the lengths I'd gone to. While I really feel like it was next to nothing, all Paulson's are performers, we just all shine on different stages (ask Shauna about costumes, Kayla about well, just about anything on a real stage (puppet included) and Scott eats up attention about homemade doughnuts like most people eat doughnuts, and that's just my immediate Paulson family). So, credit where credit is due, this guy taught me how to build a castle, and this guy (and a wonderful high school art teacher) taught me how to build a dragon.

John would like to add that we've had two perfect batches of white bread turn out back-to-back.