Ice Cave!

As many of you may know, Sara and I had our first baby at the beginning of the month.  Dorian James Hall, arrived a week ago today.  God has really blessed us with such an amazing little guy.

Dorian's Baby Stats!: 9lbs 3oz. , 21" long , 41 weeks cooking, arrival at 8:18pm on 11/9

  We are so glad he is here!  Sara did an amazing job, she was in labor 63 hours.  She is healing well and doing good.  Below are a few pictures of the little guy.

Sara and I both thought, what better way to celebrate our baby, then to make him an awesome room.  So below is my latest set design :)

The Ice Cave!

Sara and I set out to make Dorian's new room an Arctic Wonderland.  He has Penguins, Orca Whales, and Ice burgs on his walls.  Sara did a great job coming up with all the scenes and painting them all.  She did pretty much all of the painting except for the cave.  The whales and penguins look so realistic.  I don't think the photos do them justice.

Since, my part was mostly the cave, I will delve into that.  To start I made an arc with 2 layers of 1x2 lumber cut at angles.  It is shown below.

   I added 2x4 studs that ran down at various lengths to make the vertical structure.  You can see them in the photos to the side and the plot above too.  To give the cave some rigidity, I put spacers at the bottom of the studs.  I had to cut these to match the angles the studs were at.

Lastly I covered it all in chicken wire for the next step.

For the next step, I covered the entire structure in paper mache.  Paper mache is very easy to make, just rip newspaper into strips and cover it in a glue (I used a mix of 2 cups flour, 1/2 cup water).  After letting this initial layer dry, I put on a second coat.  This made a decent structure for the cave, but it was obviously paper mache.  

To make it look more realistic I added a few layers of paper mache glue and drywall mud.  It retrospect, I would have only  used drywall mud.  It is much easier to work with and dries better.  Below are some pictures of this part of the build.  This part took the longest, probably 50 hours.

I sponged on some grey and white paint to give it a bit more texture.  Above you can see the final product.

As with any good set, it is only as good as the lighting that accompanies it.  Having this wonderful knowledge, we decided to get I cove LEDs for Dorian's cave.  Here are some pictures of me learning how to set them up and what they look like.

I wired the system up to a wireless network too, so know you can control the LEDs from any computer via Color Kinetics QuickPlay Pro.

Well that is all.  Best of wishes from our family.  I am looking forward to a very busy Christmas, but will update my blog when I can.