The knights & horses are made using the clothes pins specifically for making wooden clothespin dolls. I get the pins from Michaels craft store here in the US. They usually have a small wooden bits section in each store & the pins are from a company called Woodies.
This year I added axes & great swords to the knights arsenal.
Normally, I'd have a picture of some knights on horseback too. The legs of the knights are supposed to be able to slip over the horses backs. But for some reason, the horses' backs were wider this year & the knights wouldn't fit.
In years past, I ended up drawing the horses eyes so looking tried, worried or sad. This year some how I made them look mad or mean. These 4 horses look like a bunch of thugs planning a "grain silo" job.
Ponyboy confronts the Socs.
At first I thought these 2 could be Spy vs Spy until I realized the white one looked like an angry Snowy from TinTin.
The biplanes are made from the old style wooden clothespins. It was tough to find these, but I finally tracked them down at an Ace hardware store.
The all the toys took about 10 hours total to make. In addition to the knights not fitting on the horses, I other problems this year. I usually use Sharpie permanent markers to color the knights. But either the formulation of the ink changed, or the white primer I used had some weird chemical in it, or I had the worst luck with buying new pens, because every new pen I bought ended up drying up within about 3-4 minutes of use. I bought (& returned) 10 silver pens & they all stopped working pretty much immediately. I used to only need 2 silver pens to finish all 30 knights. So I ended up just painting the silver using a bright silver miniatures page.
To give proper attribution for these project, I got all my ideas from the Penny Whistle Blog.
Looks great Nils!
ReplyDeleteVery cool- I love the horses! How wobbly are the knights?
ReplyDeleteCheers
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