Better get cracking on that game board...

Yes, now that's it's January, I best get going on this. We need to ship out Feb 1. So here I have a mockup of the board with some of the positions drawn in. There are 7 decks of cards to draw from, 3 decks of Market cards, 3 decks of Eatery cards, and 1 deck of Circumstance cards. Except I had to spell it 'EATFRY' since I had only 1 'E' and I wanted to stamp all 6 letters at the same time; and 'Sircum stance' since I only have 1 'c'...well, you get the picture.



Even though I hadn't been working on my game, I have been working on other projects. Helen and I are planning a combined workshop—participants make paper with her one weekend then gocco on the handmade paper with me the next. We hope it will be a smashing success!

And I've also been writing down project plans and such for 2009, reading about xhtml, and I admit it, goofing off too. I think it was during one of my goofing off periods that I suddenly realized what else I can do with sculpey. I did this book a few years back—



Those are rose thorns attached to the book cover. I've always wanted to another where the entire front and back are covered in rose thorns. I don't know if I got lucky that year where the thorns were unusually large and beautiful, or if I've just been unlucky since, but I have not been able to harvest thorns as lovely as these ever since.

Another problem with using actual rose thorns—after drying, the bottoms of the thorns become concave, which makes attaching them to the book cover very difficult.

But now that I have my new found medium of sculpey/preemo, I can make my own lovely rose thorns, with flat bottoms for easy attachment! Here's another shot, there are two circles of thorns—a small one at the top and the large one at the bottom. This shot is rather washed out: