Making of a Cloud

I've been on a bit of a creative binge this past week.  Naptimes and once the Bean goes to bed at night have found me scurrying to my craft room or rummaging through the garage for various things.  There's been the wooden trucks, CTF peg people, a new blanket for Corbin-o to name a few (there are actually a few other crafty projects too but maybe they'll get their own blog post).

So when we got back from camping I was struck with how empty a corner of Corbin's room looked.  There's a comfy grey chair where we read before bed time but other than that, nothing.  Weird, I never noticed this obvious decorating void before.

Around the same time, I found this blog post and inspiration struck!  So after a quick trip to The Walmart for balloons, I was ready to make a cloud.  (Here's a good time to plug my Instagram thingy... follow me @christmastreeface to see what other crazy things I'm up to on a daily basis)  Corbin hit the hay and I mixed up paper mache and began constructing my cloud.

I had to let the top dry all day and then flip it over to cover the bottom once Mr. Incredible got home and was able to corral the kiddo (I tried to finish it with Corbin 'helping' and we ended up with paper mache goop from head to toe as well as all over the BBQ, porch, and much of the yard), but this is how it looked dry.

Its been HOT here so I figured this would dry super fast and I'd be on my way to adding fluffiness... but of course the one day I pick to paper mache is the day the temperature drops and we get drizzle!  Arghh.  So I had to wait for my cloud to dry again.... and then somehow it inched itself (Nora or Corbin might have had something to do with this) out towards the sprinklers and got wet again and needed another day to dry... so world's longest paper mache project!

I was a little worried about the structure holding up so I deviated from the tutorial slightly by stuffing the cavities left by the balloons with more paper... just so it wouldn't complete cave in with the weight of the glue or weather changes or whatever.

I also made a little wire harness for my cloud at this point so it would be easy to hang it.

From then on, I followed the tutorial using spray adhesive and fluff... and it was remarkably easy and quick.

I had a little help from a Starbuck's Refresher... delishhhhhous!

If you're making a cloud of your own, be sure to lift it off of your table every few minutes so it doesn't get glued down.  And always use spray adhesive outside or in a well ventilated place where you don't care about glue drifting to the air and sticking dust to things (like if you do this in your garage, move your car out first so you don't end up with dirt and saw dust glued to it later... not that I've ever done that before...) ( I may have played dumb about said incident later..."what? there's saw dust glued to the car?  I have no idea how that got there"...)

Back to the cloud... its awesome!

I hung it off of our porch to dry and it looks so cool!

Here's looking up from the ground:

While I was finishing this, the sky clouded over (with real clouds) and made the prettiest light... I almost wanted to wake Corbin up for a photo shoot right then... but he's been extra crabby today (tooth #6 making its debut) so I let him sleep and had to settle with photos of just the cloud.  Maybe later we'll get a shot of someone with the cloud to give you some scale.

But for now...

!!!Update!!!

Cloud installed!

Here's the rest of the nursery, pre-baby (i.e. clean).


-CtF