Three short videos showing cardstock and wood models I've built.  These are for sale at my Etsy shop. 

Test fitting the patio on the back of Howl's Moving Castle. Click on the image to see a larger version.

Howl's Patio



Still working on the Howl's Moving Castle model. Today, I just did the outdoor seating area. If you hold a penny behind the bucket (hanging from the thread ), it will just cover Abe Lincoln's mouth and chin, as his eye peeks through the handle.

Also, you can barely see the chair -- the white dot in the center of the patio. That's a small disc of paper with the legs and back made out of thread.

This model is going to be great, if I ever find time to finish it.

Best in Show!



I entered three card models in the Multnomah County Fair this year: the Disneyland castle, the Disneyland train station and the San Francisco cable car. I won "Best in Show" for the crafts division, and got another ribbon for... something or other. Plus a whopping $24 dollar check!

I'm building Howl's Moving Castle. Just to make it more difficult for myself, I'm building it about 1/2 size.


Just bought my first color printer, which makes things a lot easier. Got it at the thrift store -- it was marked $15, and it was one of the half-off items that day. I've been printing extra pages as I need them to increase the surface details or when I make mistakes.

Friends gave me this one for my birthday -- it's called "Doomed". When you turn the crank on the side, the fish flops about helplessly. A very quick build -- one afternoon. I like the print job, which makes use of different colored paper for different parts.

I'm getting ready to go on a trip to London in October, (details here), and I have found yet another somewhat practical use for my paper models -- orientation. I realized when I finished the Tower Bridge model that I could get an idea of the size of the Thames river relative to the model, the size of the double-decker bus on the model, the size of six-foot tall me relative to the scale of the bus, and all of the above to my maps of London.

It turned out larger than I thought it would. Had I glued the ramps on, it wouldn't fit on this six-foot-wide shelf in my home office.

The rigging went smoothly, though it was very tedious. This is why I don't build ship models. I used dental floss, and some of it got a little twisted. Oh well.

I put the bus where I did for a reason. On December 20, 1952, at 9:35 pm, Albert Gunter drove his southbound double-decker bus across the rising bascule of the bridge, leaping the gap and safely landing six feet below. Passengers received only minor injuries; Gunter got a ten pound bonus in his pay packet. Gunter had been a fire-engine driver during the blitz, so I count him as a hero twice over.



I also enlarged a model of the Big Ben clock tower from the Canon papercraft site by 200%, which makes it roughly the same scale as the bridge model. Roughly. I used Google satelite maps to compare the two, and 200% felt right.

If I were to set the two of them a proper scale distance apart, I don't think they would fit in our modestly-sized apartment.