One + 1 = Thr3e

This photo was taken only about an hour ago. Anyway, that's what the finished product looks like, very pretty when hanging on stage in darkness. But as I'm sure your all away, any form of beauty has its costs.

We thought the star curtain was finished. We had finished with the star curtain, until we saw what it looked like on stage, we weren't happy with the fact that you could see lines and it didn't look like random stars. So to fix this problem, why not add more fairly lights! So we did! Today we added about 600 fairy lights onto it. That was 2 sets of 300 fairy lights!!! Before I go any further into todays efforts, I might just explain how the star curtain is made.

Basically you have a massive piece of fabric, then you sew sets of fairy lights into it, in random fashion and make sure there are all in place. Then, you place another piece of fabric, the same size on top of these fairy lights, and then push the fairy lights through the holes. Well not push them through, but burn a hole through the fabric with a soldering iron, and then hot glue them into place. Now this is done for every SINGLE fairy light. Before today, there was about 1200-1400 fairy lights already attached to the star curtain.

Anyway back to today's efforts. Now, this star curtain was really only a two person job, so Reggie, fabulous ex theatre teacher, and I were the ones on the mission of completing the curtain, by adding an extra 600 fairy lights. In total, it took us about 7 hours to complete the job. So that meant that I was on my hands and knees, with my arse in the air for 7 HOURS! Thats the longest time I've ever been in that position and hopefully will remain to be the longest time I will be in that position. By the end of it, I was in quite a bit of pain, and it was a bit hard to be able to stand up again.

At least I've mastered the art of handling hot tools, now thats a selling point for myself if I hadn't heard one before :P I was in charge of the soldering iron and of the hot glue gun. So we would solder iron a set of lights and then glue them down. Now with hot tools, comes the lovely experience of burns!!! But to make things more fun, we decided to play a game with it and turn it into a competition. We were basically counting the number of times, we burnt ourselves, or were burnt by one another. Well, I couldn't be burnt by Reg, seeing that she was the one with the hands under the fabric, and I was the one poking the holes with the soldering iron! Needless to say, Reg won, or would you call it winning???, with 5 burns to 4. I liked my one of placing the hand into hot glue, after just doing it, that will be a memorable experience.

I don't think that it would have taken so long if we weren't working with such temperamental equipment. For starters, the soldering iron was being more of a bitch than what I am.... The star curtain, because it is so big, has 4 panels in it, and one of the panels of fabric is so strong that its hard to put holes in it, and for the reason the iron stopped whenever we got like midway through it. So we had to turn to other alternatives, for example, using a screw to poke holes with. That was extremely fun! The fairy lights were also being extremely painful. Mainly because if one of the bulbs blow, than the whole bank that they are on go out, so sometimes you may have strands of like 15 lights all go out, and you have to test each one to find out which one is the dud one. You can see from the picture on the left how big this curtain is, thats reggie doing some sewing, and you can just imagine how angry you would get when a bunch of lights don't work!
Anyway, I tired, I need my beauty sleep, I'm sure a lot of other funny things happened, but I can't remember them... I really need to sleep because I sense a cold coming on and I don't want to get sick!!

A.Mac
Good with Hot Tools