Got up early this morning, around 7.30am, had breakfast and then walked to post office and back. We caught the 11.36am to Ballymena and then on to Belfast. We arrived at 1.30pm and walked to the information centre where we left our bags for the afternoon. The afternoon was spent walking round Belfast before collecting our bags, returning to the Europa Bus Station and boarding the 5.10pm bus to the airport. We had a meal at the airport then waited to board the 9.30pm flight to the East Midlands airport. Arrived home at about 12.30am
Conclusion
I started to organise the jigsaw as soon as I got home and I soon realised it was going to be more involved than I at first thought. Everything had to fall into place first time, no room for error. After a couple of meetings with the jigsaw man ‘Rob Roy’ I was confident it would work out. I made my painting using watercolour pencils and felt tip pens and varnished the finished article with a solvent-based varnish. The next job was to glue the picture to an MDF board, as recommended by ‘Rob Roy’, for ease of cutting. Meanwhile Dave had been writing his poems, these were put onto computer disk and taken to a printer in Nottingham where they were enlarged and printed onto a board. So far so good! I then glued Dave’s board onto the back of the MDF, drew my design for the jigsaw shapes, in dry wipe pen, on the board. This next stage was the nerve-wracking one and while I had every confidence in ‘Rob Roy’ it was still worrying to see all our hard work going under the ‘knife’. Of course there was no need to worry he made a beautiful job of it and we were very pleased. Back home with the pieces I just had to do a little sanding and tidying around the cut edges and the jigsaw was complete. While all this was going on I had been on the look out for a box to pack and store the jigsaw in and had found one that it would fit in nicely also a bag to put the pieces in. I painted the box black and glued gold lettering and a jigsaw piece on the outside as you can see below and I also enclosed two photos of the completed puzzle for reference. Doesn’t sound too much reading it like this but all in all it took around three months to complete from our visit to Cushendall in October.
I started to organise the jigsaw as soon as I got home and I soon realised it was going to be more involved than I at first thought. Everything had to fall into place first time, no room for error. After a couple of meetings with the jigsaw man ‘Rob Roy’ I was confident it would work out. I made my painting using watercolour pencils and felt tip pens and varnished the finished article with a solvent-based varnish. The next job was to glue the picture to an MDF board, as recommended by ‘Rob Roy’, for ease of cutting. Meanwhile Dave had been writing his poems, these were put onto computer disk and taken to a printer in Nottingham where they were enlarged and printed onto a board. So far so good! I then glued Dave’s board onto the back of the MDF, drew my design for the jigsaw shapes, in dry wipe pen, on the board. This next stage was the nerve-wracking one and while I had every confidence in ‘Rob Roy’ it was still worrying to see all our hard work going under the ‘knife’. Of course there was no need to worry he made a beautiful job of it and we were very pleased. Back home with the pieces I just had to do a little sanding and tidying around the cut edges and the jigsaw was complete. While all this was going on I had been on the look out for a box to pack and store the jigsaw in and had found one that it would fit in nicely also a bag to put the pieces in. I painted the box black and glued gold lettering and a jigsaw piece on the outside as you can see below and I also enclosed two photos of the completed puzzle for reference. Doesn’t sound too much reading it like this but all in all it took around three months to complete from our visit to Cushendall in October.
It took a lot of persuasion from family and friends to get me involved in this project. They clearly had more faith in my abilities than I did, plus I’m a reluctant traveller at the best of times. I did a lot of research before setting off for Cushendall and even thought I could do my painting here at home! How wrong could I be? Very wrong is the answer! There is no way I could have done the village and tower justice without firsthand experience and the friendly, welcoming villagers and beautiful scenery made it all worth while. And to top it all we were voted winners of the Curfew Tower Award 2007. We still can’t believe it.
Thank you Cushendall!
No comments:
Post a Comment