Photo Diary

Visual Journey of Gnome Discovery...

The gnome cast has arrived, ready to shape the gnomes of the future!

This is the latex mould that I bought off ebay.co.uk. It gets filled with a casting material.

I went to a craft shop and asked for advice about what the best material would be. The man suggested Herculite II, so I bought a bag of that, now ready for action!

The material gets mixed with water and carefully poured into the mould. I found it took between 30-45 mins to dry and then it was ready to come out of the mould.

I needed to make 10 gnomes but I also made an extra just in case. The gnomes were left to dry out for 24 hours and then the real fun began...

Helena came round with spray paints and we painted half green...

and the other half pink...

The reason for these colours is two-fold. Firstly we wanted them to be clashing and garish, we didn't want them to be boring! Secondly, Fred (Mr Pink) is a former rockstar and we wanted something to show off that side of him and Gerry (Mr Green) was a genius of the hedgerow- so we figured this is how you can see his green-fingers best!

The next excitement came in the arrival of our gnome transport (a set of cardboard boxes). 

They came flat packed so I had to assemble them.

With a little help from my old mate PVA they were nice and strong.

I then filled the base of the box with balls of newspaper to cushion the gnomes, as they are quite fragile. I put the tissue paper over that to cover them up and laid the gnomes side by side. I'd also bought some artificial flowers which I cut off the stalk and strewed them over the gnomes (to resemble some sort of garden environment.

All that was needed now was the letters that Helena was writing to accompany the gnomes in their boxes.
 It was after I had all the boxes ready that I found out that Helena was ill and would not be able to go to Manchester. Because of the amount of effort I had put into get everything ready I still wanted to go, but there was no way I could carry them all by myself. As you can see I could only fit 2 in my suitcase!

I had a little think about what to do...With the hand in tomorrow and not much time I decided to post them off to the agencies. I wrote out letters to put in them, took them to a printers to get them printed, chose a cream coloured paper to make it look more interesting and picked up some packing tape and bubble wrap. When I got the letters home I cut them down to A5 size.

The next step was to wrap the gnomes up in bubble wrap to protect them in case they got knocked around. Once wrapped up I put them back in the boxes as they were before.

On top of each pair I placed a copy of the letter.

I tracked down my list of addresses and wrote them out on the cardboard tags I had made.

I then taped the boxes down and tied them up with green twine with the tags. They were now ready to go!

Again I faced the problem of not being able to carry them all to the post office, but managed to drag my housemate Scooch away from the TV for long enough to pile boxes on him...

We then took a walk down to the post office and sent them off special delivery, at great expense. (It still hurts!)

And that is the story so far!