Design Central

Oh, Tex and his grandiose plans. He's had them since he was born, I think, and reality never does quite live up to his expectations, but he keeps plugging away. I've been fascinated to watch the evolution of several projects this week.

There was the allosaurus we made last year, with the crushed-aluminum foil skeleton and heavy, baked-on polymer clay. The foil would crush closer together every time we squeezed more clay on, leaving air pockets and saggy clay that eventually drooped off the form. Tex tried again using a foil skeleton and a lighter plastic clay, this time making a velociraptor, but the air-dry clay shrunk where it wasn't well-smoothed and revealed gaps. Finally, two days ago we constructed a skeleton out of wire coat hangers. I did the grunt work, of course, bending and snipping the wires according to Tex's specifications and holding the frame steady while he worked clay onto it and shaped it into a velociraptor. He gave the velociraptor teeth, a pattern to his skin, a bumpy ridge on his tail, a curved second toe-claw, and three feathery plumes on his head. Even the positioning had to be precise, with the tail acting as a cantilever to the beast's head so that his whole spine was almost parallel to the ground. This kid knows what he is doing! And I am happy to report that after two days' drying time Tex's velociraptor is standing upright on his own power as well as having a flawless complexion with no gaps! Can't wait to see how this guy is going to be painted in the next couple of days.

Tex also has an abiding interest in costuming. No surprise given his backstage-crew parents, but it has taken forms I never would have suspected before having children. In the last few years we have made together: a dilophosaurus costume, complete with painted long-johns, sculpted foam head, and Jurassic Park-style neck frill; an oviraptor costume, using a balaclava as the basis for the head and adding a feathered back ridge and tail to the dilophosaurus long johns; and an unfinished R2D2 that sits in the corner of my room awaiting inspiration. We have now begun the long process of designing and creating next Halloween's costume!!! I suppose I should be happy that we've moved off dinosaurs but finding out my next challenge is going to be a robot by the name of General Grievous, from Star Wars Episode III, sort of made me long for a functioning pterodactyl costume order. But we must press on...

So Tex spent much of last week or so Googling "General Grievous" images to find the form he'd prefer and angles that allowed us to get a good look at how things really go together. Then he and I took a trip to the home improvement store yesterday. We investigated plumbing fixtures, tubes, wires, pipes, dowels, tried things on, speculated on form vs. function, and finally walked out with the makings of two matching lightsabers: two 9" turned table legs for the handles, to be painted in a pattern of silver and black, and a 1 1/2" dowel to be cut in half, painted green, and used for the blades. The costume itself is going to take a lot more work and trial-and-error. There were some great plumbing parts that we think we can use as the basis for the feet, then use copper tubing wrapped in black duct tape to form the metal toes. The arms and legs will be the biggest challenge, while the face we're confident can be made from pieces of PVC pipe cut into semi-circles and glued together before painting. A cloak will most certainly be used to great effect. At this point I'm just happy Tex decided to settle for two-armed mode instead of four-armed, but even there I don't want to hold my breath! One thing is for sure, we will probably use all 9 of the months he's allotted us.

In the meantime we have a smaller costuming goal: wings. Tex wanted to dress up as some Transformer from Beast Wars today, and this guy apparently has eagle wings. The closest thing we have in this house is Monkeygirl's pink fairy wings. Definitely not beast-ish. So again we bust out the wire coat hangers, the wire cutters, the last of our stash of brown pleather, and a boatload of craft glue. Tex designed the wings himself, explained it to his poor, old Mother's tired brain over and over until I got it (he finally had to get out the string, cut it, and have us both pretend to be wings connected by the string in the way he wanted before I understood), and consoled me when I completely mucked it up by forgetting to make the wings in mirror images so that the right side of the fabric would face out. He even found the solution: making the wings smaller so that I could cut the correct mirror from one and then trim the other to match.

And lest you think that we're all makeup and show tunes around here, I have more reading progress to report. Tonight at bedtime (historically Tex's worst time for trying to read, and who can blame him after a long day?) I was reading aloud from Watch Out for Jabba the Hutt when out of the blue Tex took over and read a few sentences, without hesitation and with perfect comprehension: "Anakin and R2-D2 fly together in a spaceship," "Yoda is one of the most powerful Jedi. He is small but very strong and wise," and "He is big, bad, and cruel, but his son, Rotta, loves him!" Whew, it's just nice for me as a mom to know that all those crazy letters on the page are starting to make easy sense to him now, and that he's gaining in confidence every time he reads successfully.