craftgrrl | your totoro update!

so I got to carving the concrete totoro today:

I did take his nose off! and made a new one! but no whiskers yet, i need to borrow a drill that can get through it.

carving was sort of ok. I didn't get to it until a week after doing the original concrete work. However, it has been very wet and humid, so it is not really terribly dry or solid yet, and carving wasn't too bad. I used various things, but most useful was a small putty knife and a hammer to carve off larger chunks .especially cleaning up around the base and his tail, making a new nose, making him way more fat, and also shaping up the ears. I was pretty conservative about it since I didn't want to whack at it and have his arm fall off.

I got a set of coarse woodworking files which I also used to smooth a lot of the surfaces. This turned out to be pretty difficult, since the concrete is not really hard it kept gumming up the file and I had to clean it frequently. Maybe a cheese grater would have worked better! but the file was really useful for taking off the very rough bits.