Build It Burn It: Winter Solstice Burn

Three weeks ago I masterminded a Build It Burn It workshop at Backstreet Arts for those who wanted to build a little effigy to burn on the Solstice (Dec 21).

Of course it rained on the Solstice, then holiday funtimes intervened, and so it came to pass that I was not able to complete my mini-effigy and burn it until last night. It was, as usual, both a festive and a thoughtful time.

You may recall that I only slammed together a kind of chimney from 2x6’s at the workshop, since really I needed to be on hand for the participants.

After I got the thing home, I thought that it needed a little more complexity in order to burn more interestingly, like a spiral window cut into it. So I took it all apart and did some measuring stuff.

I had to go digging for this. This contraption, children, is a 30-60 triangle, used in the Olden Tymes to do blueprints and working drawings by hand. By hand, children. The decades-old masking tape elevated the triangle off the paper just enough so that the india ink on my pen didn’t bleed under the edge. Sometimes, though, the old ways are the simplest ways.

Et voila.

I added some “rocket fins” for a little more stability, and then began to fill the space around it, first with these broken pieces of 2x2 (from an unfortunate rain-related collapse event involving the greenhouse I built last month and had to replace with a much cheaper and easier commercial set-up).

Then I connected the uprights to the chimney with arcs made of these short pieces:

Like this:

How did it all go? Have a look.

(A reminder to my workshop participants to share photos/videos with us.)

One last photo: I rounded up all the trippy color-changing light sources in the house to go with the theme of “more light,” and this was what the bar looked like:

It was awesome.