Pelican cloak: Caitlin

I finally got around to getting pictures of Caitlin in her peerage cloak and here they are.

A Big Piggybank

My brother in law is quitting smoking and has decided that he is going to collect all the money that he would otherwise spend on cigarettes and put them in the piggybank until it is full and then he will go somewhere warm for the winter with the money.  So he puts on his christmas wish list that he wants a big piggybank without a bottom opening, so that he is not tempted to rob the bank early, and so that in the end he can use a sledge hammer to open it up.

I decided to find him that bank... unfortunately after searching ebay, chinatown and many of the local stores. all I could find were these wimpy little banks that were at most 8.5 inches long, not nearly big enough. Until, I finally wandered into a store in Branford and stubbed my toe on a piece of lawn statuary while lookling at their Christmas ornaments. Looking down I saw this large green pig lawn statue that is almost 14 inches around grinning up at me.  Needless to say, I grabbed it and took it home.

I knew from the weight that it should be hollow, so I grabbed my handly Dremel motor tool and swiftly carved a coin slot in the top, only to find that it was filled with styrofoam. This was a minor setback, particularly as there was not enough room to chip it out through the slot, and I didn’t want to make a bigger hole. Then I remembered my highschool chemistry classes and proceeded to go buy a quart of acetone.  I used a funnel and poured it in and within two minutes the styrofoam was gone!  I carefully poured it out of the pig and back into the acetone container. Unfortunately the acetone dripped coming out of the pig and ate away a section of the verdigris paint around the coin slot.   What the heck, a pig should be pink, and acrylic paints are fairly cheap, so the piggy bank went from green to pink.

All in all I was rather happy with it and my brother in law was ecstatic.