Julianne and Lainey spent much of the day brushing on the base coat of paint on the enormous dragon. They discovered it has much more surface area than they originally thought. They’ll tackle it again with the preliminary blend in the correct colours tomorrow. Stay tuned to watch the magic happen…
A peek inside
The Hazelnut Inn is our passion project, squeezed between the fun work we do for our customers. Over the past year, in the shop, we’ve kept busy with many wonderful signs and features dreamed up, crafted and delivered to our dream clients around North America. As we finish off the last few items for Vala’s Pumpkin Patch in Nebraska and Stocker Farms in Washington state, our minds are planning the next weeks of work at the Inn which we hope to accomplish before we start into extremely ambitious fall and winter seasons of shop work. The UnderHill suite will be the next to be completed and inside things are taking shape beautifully. Outside, the luscious landscaping on the roof is now finished and growing nicely. This private getaway is going to be every bit as fantastic as the recently opened North Star Suite.
Pedal to the metal
The giant flower lamps we did for Castle Fun Park turned out great. Vala’s Pumpkin Patch loved them so much they wanted some for their storybook land. But, as is our style we didn’t want to simply repeat ourselves. So we upped the game by including things we wished we could have last time around. This time the flower pedals won’t be flat. I thought out a design and then tried things out by making a paper cutout. The pedal halves were easily bent and fit together. So I repeated this idea in the computer software and sent it to the CNC plasma cutter. The FastCut CNC cut the three flowers perfectly from 10 gauge steel. Then I described to Keith how they should be bent and welded together. It sounded simple except for the fact he needed to build some special jigs to bend the pedals perfectly. The first flower took much longer than he anticipated. The second one was faster. By the third flower, Keith was an expert and he could do it quick and easy. This is how almost every project goes in our shop as we continually up the ante and raise the bar with every project.
