When you have too much time on your hands

It was a small stall at a bazaar near my place. Curiosity got the better of me when I saw a small crowd of 3 or 4 people forming in front of a table of miniature buildings.

I stopped to look.

The young chap selling the ware forewarned me,"You have to make everything from scratch."

For someone who had made cards with tiny cut-out eyes and other painstaking details, I figured if guys could do this, it shouldn't be much of a problem for me. Hey, I was an Art student after all! Don't play play!

This was the mess that I opened up to. Well, it still looked 'no sweat'. 

But regrets started to creep in as I struggled to bend a less-than-one-cm metal stick into the required shape.

The horror of horrors: you really have to make everything from scratch!

 

Take for example, this wheelbarrow. 

These are the fragments in the packets.

I had to assemble and stick them into this:

 

It often took me anywhere between 1 to 1.5h just to make something like that. Other times, I took up to 2.5h to create one item.

Tedious? You bet!

 

This is a table with a vase of lavender on it. Pardon the tardy nails.

 

I started to wonder if too much free time has cranked my brains up. Why else would I subject myself to a torture regime like this?

I am not terrific in Hokkien but a Hokkien phrase came to mind: jiak ba bo sai pang, crudely translated as 'eat too full and got no faeces to pass' or simply means 'too much time on your hands'.

But since I had started the journey, I just had to grit my teeth, bite the bullet and soldier on ...

 

From these ...

 

to this.

 

I was seeing a house coming into fruition.

Every single item was built from bits and pieces. 

I almost died making the sofas especially as each miserable part of the sofas had to be cut out from a small piece of cloth and wrapped around a small piece of paper. The pink cushions too - I had to cut out a 1.5cm x 1.2cm-sized fabric before doing a triple fold and cutting it into three 0.4cm minute squares!

Other things that almost killed me:

 

 

The shovel

 

And the bench

Then I realised there were many other things that were pawns in a conspiracy theory meant to frustrate me to death.

 

But since I paid $26.90 for this, and $30+ for two other designs, I'd better suck it up and finish it well.

 

Ahh ... a respite from the awful minute makes.

What a renewed sense of relief when I finally completed this project!

 

Front view

 

Back view 

That's not all ...

It looks really pretty when it's all lit up!

 

 

 

Up close 

 

 

Well, you can't get everything perfect. I was given a piece of thin black paper to stick around the limped wires, you know? And to make things more difficult, I had to get the lamp post as thin as possible or I would face with the problem of not being able to stick it into the ground later. 

I started on this on a Tuesday night and finished it on a Friday night. 

The guy said it would take six hours.

I definitely spent more than 18 hours on it.

 Loads of effort and time! 

But proud of it :)

Don't stare at my tardy fingernail. Look at my petite creation!