This post is just about Ryan’s creation – so if you only want to read about stamping stuff you can skip this one. It’s just my story and I can be long winded some times.
A few days ago I mentioned a creation that Ryan worked on late into the night and again early t
he next morning. I had to drive it to school and then he didn’t even get to present it that day. He did his presentation the next day and we’ll be bringing it back home on Monday. He doesn’t know what kind of grade he got and this wasn’t even the main part of the project. The main part was a report and this was his visual aid for the presentation of his report.
He wanted it to be life-size – so it’s about as tall as I am and just barely fit in the back of my car. I should have taken a picture of the back – I’ll have to do that later. He came home on Wed. and asked me for a 6 foot tall piece of cardboard – “I don’t have one” was my reply. “Let’s go to Walmart and buy one.” – he said. “Um, I don’t think they will have something that big. Can it be smaller?” And he said “No, it needs to be life-sized.” This was all without him really telling me what he wanted to make. Apparently I’m not good at deciphering where he was going with this – but Tyler came to the rescue – he said “Mom, let me tell you what he wants to do – he wants to make a card board man that will stand up.” Well, I’m still thinking we can’t buy cardboard that big. Ryan calls Greg on the phone and they discuss it. It turns out we have a large box in the attic from Greg’s TV.
So next Ryan wants to print this drawing life size so he can just trace it – printing a 6 foot tall man and 3 foot wide dog – after some calculations based on an 8-1/2″ x 11″ piece of paper – well that’s almost 50 pieces of paper – I’m thinking no. Ryan thinks otherwise and tries to print – luckily for whatever reason the printer would only print one sheet with some blue lines. So Ryan gave up on that idea. And instead printed it on one sheet of paper. So it looks like this: 
But he still wanted to cut th cardboard to life size. So this is what he did – he measured, calculated angles, and calculated each section to be life size. Drew it on the card board from his calculations and cut it out. Here is what one of the sections looked like once he measured and calculated it all: 
He spent hours doing this. And since it was cut from the TV box it was in several pieces – which he held together with paint sticks hot glued to the back. Then he wanted it all covered with white paper. “Mom, can I use some of your white card stock?” and my reply is “NO – use computer paper!”. Luckily I had some large sheets of white paper and the best thing – spray adhesive! It worked great – I sprayed that on and put the white paper on – smoothed it out and trimmed the paper. Then Ryan traced around with a blue marker – he also wanted to use my Stampin’ Up! Brilliant Blue marker for that – I said NO. Even though I had cleaned out most of our old art supplies and gave them away last month – I did keep a small box of markers – which did contain some blue ones which I think are now dry. So the next trick was glue the dog to the man and make the whole thing so it will stand by itself. I did this part of it since Ryan needed to go to school – actually I also spent the morning finishing the blue outline too. After a couple of tries I did get it to stand – it just leaned alot since the top was so heavy…
In case you can’t figure out what his report was about – it was on GUIDE DOGS. I guess now I should read his report – he didn’t share that with me.
I like it when they give a project their all – I just don’t like it when they do it at the last minute! I told him next time he needs to start a project like this earlier than the night before it is due – or scale it down to something he can do in the amount of time he has to do it. When will they ever listen?
Have a great day!
Monika
