Fair and Ballistic Gel Seal Anticipation Builds!

I needed to pick up some shelves and other display items for my craft fair booth yesterday and had a chance to briefly stop by the Fine Craft and Design Fair to check out the show and my booth space. This was my first time visiting the fair in the Arts and Culture Centre and I'm really excited now about joining the fair this week. The place was hopping! At 10 days, the fair is twice as long as it has ever been and the layout and auxiliary events create a big festive atmosphere. The Craft Fair fits into the space so well, that its almost like a new mall dedicated to craft has sprung up in the middle of St. John's. The show is closed Monday and Tuesday to switch over booths and re-opens on Wednesday November 11th at 4:00pm with a new set of craft producers.

But of course, the inside of my head still looks something like this:

(You can make make your own Wordle at Wordle.Net!)

I spent more time working on the ballistics gel seal model. The current version is the 3 layer pop bottle seal. There is a rawhide skin layer, the smooshy fat layer and the sinew laced meat layer. I cut the top end off the two litre pop bottle and used it for a funnel so that I could cut a relatively small hole in the bottom to fill it from. I stretched a wet rawhide skin from a soaked chew toy for dogs over the top, like a drum skin. I flipped it over and filled it up upside down. The initial gelatin pour seeped through the wet rawhide. It was kind of messy, but in the end it helped keep the rawhide rubbery and more skin like when the gelatin set. I used 5 packs of Knox gelatin for 700 ml of water for the fat layer. I did that twice, so 10 packs for 1400 ml of water would be the same thing. For the meat layer I used 7 packs for 700 ml of water and poured it in 3 stages. Between each stage I let it gel slightly and sprinkled soaked sinew strips into the mix. That gives me about 4 inches of "fat" and 2 inches of "meat".

That's as far as I've got. I'll know later today if they work and what changes need to be made.

Photo Credits:
Top, Tim Rast
Second, Wordle.Net
Third & Fourth, Tim Rast

Photo Captions:
Top, Earrings ready for the 2009 Fine Craft and Design Fair, St. John's
Second, Wordle created using the text from the past week's blog posts
Third, Filling the ballistic gel seal. If you expand the photo you can see the sinew in the "meat" layer.
Fourth, Ready to test!