Cost – $40 – $50 depending on the car and paints you choose. We accidentally bought more paints then we needed, so watch out for that.

With dreams of an exquisite replica of a Shelby Mustang dancing through our heads, we decided to try our hand at building a model car. What seemed like a fun project quickly became our most challenging “Thing To Do” thus far. Although we came close to quitting many times, we soldiered on to create a model that looks great in strategically angled photos with the right lighting conditions.

____________________________________________________________________________________________

SHE SAID:

As I’ve mentioned before, I am a craft geek. I was mistaken when I thought building a model car would be like making a craft. Very mistaken. Don’t get me wrong, seeing all of the plastic pieces transform into a car was slightly rewarding, but the mental anguish we endured while waiting for the rubber cement to dry far outweighed any form of joy.

That being said, if you enjoy detailed tasks and precision movements, this is the activity for you. You will love propping minuscule pieces of plastic against a curved surface and hoping you applied enough glue so that it sticks, but not so much so that your finger becomes a hood fixture.

If you’re still up for trying this activity despite our warnings, consider the following before you begin to ensure a more pleasant experience than ours:

• Don’t pick a car that has decals. This just adds another layer of unnecessary frustration.
• Don’t paint where you will glue. This glue is like acid and eats away at the paint, creating a bubbly mess that resembles rotting flesh.
• Consider competing with your mate and building separate cars.
• Don’t set up on the kitchen table. This isn’t a one sitting activity. You need at least 2 weeks to complete this disaster, I mean, masterpiece.

HE SAID:
When I was a kid I put together a model of a fighter jet with my Dad. I still remember it to this day, mostly due to the fact that it was not the kind of thing myself or Dad would normally do for fun. When I think back on it I have visions of us happily gluing and painting this jet together until a pristine replica emerged.

Sometimes my memories lie.

I think when we were coming up with ideas for this website, making a model car was one of my brilliant ideas. Like I said, my memories of a previous attempt were all positive so why not give it a try? So we ventured out to Maritime Hobbies and Crafts (which is a pretty awesome place by the way) and picked out a Shelby Mustang.

Admittedly, we had no idea what we were doing, so things started going wrong pretty quickly. We would run into these little issues and I’d tell Susan that it didn’t really matter and to just keep going. Well, all those little mistakes added up in the end and made the final assembly very difficult. The mistake that put a stake in the heart of this project for me was gluing the windshield and windows into place. We had already painted the pieces that the windows and windshield attach to so when we applied the glue, the paint started to bubble and melt away. I put the windshield into place and waited the appropriate amount of time for the glue to dry. When I let go it all went downhill. The windshield shifted leaving a gooey mess of paint and glue on its edges. In my infinite wisdom I thought I had time to wipe it off and try again. No such luck. I was so close to dumping the whole mess into the garbage at that point it’s not even funny. Susan jumped in and convinced me that we needed to complete the task for the good of our faithful readers, so we carried on. The process of one of us giving up and almost trashing the car before the other lightened the mood and kept the project on track continued back and forth until the final pictures of the car were taken.

Ok, so now it’s confession time. We didn’t technically finish the car. If you were to pry open the hood you would see the most important pieces, but we didn’t end up getting all of the tiny little detailed parts in place. I feel so much better getting that off my chest…

Would I recommend you try this? Based on our experience, no. But if you already know you enjoy this sort of thing, then you don’t need me to tell you to try it. It may not have been so bad if it hadn’t taken us so long to complete. Our kitchen table became a constant reminder of the work left to finish. If you aren’t sure if this is your kind of thing or not, I think it might be too expensive and too time consuming to recommend. If you’ve ever put together a model car, plane, or anything else and succeeded or failed, we’d love to hear about it.

• Cost – Free if you get instructions online and use paper sitting around the house. Less than $20 if you choose to buy paper and a book
• Caution – may cause uncontrollable rage and feelings of inferiority
• Video instructions may be easier to follow than an illustrated book
• Don’t expect to master the art of origami in an afternoon, but expect to have fun along the way

This past July, it rained A LOT here in Nova Scotia. Actually, rain could no longer describe the incessant cloud of mist and humidity that prevented my hair from drying completely or the house from feeling like a barn. So when I woke up one morning and saw that there would be no sun again we decided we could either clean our home or find something to do. While scrubbing off shower scum together could conjure up great conversation, we were looking for something a little more fun, something to get us out of the rain funk. For whatever reason, origami was the answer.

We didn’t have any origami paper or instructions to begin, so we bit the bullet and headed out into the rain to get an instruction book from Chapters (in the Crafts and Hobbies section) and origami paper from Michael’s (which is actually NOT in the huge scrap-booking paper section).

We started out in the beginner’s section of the book and attempted to create an origami bird sitting on a rock. Our second attempt was the classic origami crane.

____________________________________________________________________________

SHE SAID:

Being the craft loving geek that I am, I was excited, yet hesitant about the fun to be had with ancient paper folding crafts. I had my suspicions that origami could be challenging and I was not disappointed.

I am not the type that can easily follow technical instructions with diagrams. I’d rather be physically shown. So when Brad suggested a book, I secretly panicked inside. Knowing how challenging origami could be, though, I obliged to make the experience more pleasant for him, since he is craft hesitant. We bought official origami paper at Michael’s, but if you don’t care about the neat designs, save yourself the money and grab a sheet from your printer or an old newspaper. Just make sure it’s not too thick.

Our first attempt was of a bird sitting on a rock. Other than a few wrong folds, it ended up looking pretty close to the picture in the book.

Note: be sure to make really good creases. Don’t wimp out. Drag that nail across the paper with no mercy! Also, don’t give up if it feels like you have King Kong hands like Brad that are always in the way.

Our second attempt at the classic origami crane began with the book. However, after one too many reverse folds gone awry, we – surprise, surprise – resorted to YouTube. This made life MUCH easier. We narrowly avoided failure and ended up with a cute keepsake of our afternoon.

The Japanese believed that if you folded 1000 paper cranes you would be granted one wish. Only 998 more to go!

HE SAID:

How hard could it possibly be to fold paper a few times to make a crane? That’s what I thought as we ventured out in the rain to buy our supplies. Little did I know that I was in for a big surprise. I decided that it made more sense to buy an instruction book to learn from rather than watching how-to videos online. I thought the pictures plus the written instructions would be a good combination for beginners like us. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize there was a whole new vocabulary to learn before the crane was to emerge from my paper.

One thing to know about origami is that not every fold is going to be used immediately. For example, you could fold your paper in half, but then in the next step either unfold it or reverse the direction. It doesn’t make sense at first because it seems like nothing was accomplished with that step. The important thing to remember is that every fold has a purpose, even if it takes a few steps to figure out what it is.

So after a few tries at a beginner level creation, it looked as if origami had won the battle. I couldn’t seem to wrap my brain around reverse inside folds, or the way the illustrations were presented. Somehow we managed to come out relatively unscathed. Then we moved on to the crane. Anyone who attempts origami is going to want to make a crane.

The crane kicked my butt.

After tossing my heap of mangled paper to the side I caved in and hit the internet for some how-to video goodness. We both found this much easier than the book. Once we found a video that was easy to follow, we were off to the races. The cranes turned out really well, and in the end we conquered origami.

Don’t let me scare you away from trying this activity out. If you go into it thinking that the process is the fun part regardless of the outcome, you will enjoy yourself. I liked the challenge, even though it was harder than expected, and the satisfaction of actually making something was worth it all.