We Built This City

I just couldn’t resist it. Throughout this project I kept singing this song and drove my husband mad.  Anyway… we built a city. Kind of.

Like my husband doesn’t have enough fun at office with the music band and free food, they ask the teams to describe their business process in creative ways. And while other teams opted to create PowerPoint presentations and videos, it was paper models for my husband’s team. I have this strange feeling that he must have edged them on knowing he has a wife at home who’s crazy for anything paper.

I spent my entire weekend recycling paper, inhaling thermocol dust, building models of non-existent buildings and cracking useless jokes with my apprentice a.k.a husband. The last time I mentioned him in a post, he was an assistant. And now he has successfully graduated to apprenticeship.

So here’s how our conversations rolled:

Husband: I think I’ll call this city ‘Constantinul’

(Yeah, he said 'Constantinul' cause he thinks, “Istanbul is Constantinul’ rhymes and sings much better that “Istanbul Not Constantinople. )

Me: What? Seriously? That’s so lame!

Husband: Can you think of something better?

Me: Yeah. Cityship.

Husband throws me a you-stupid-troll look. And I throw him a look-who’s-talking-you-man-who-married-a-stupid-troll look right back. Ok, my look was much longer and he might’ve turned halfway through thinking I’m weird for looking at his nose for so long. But you get the general idea… any idea? No? Nothing. OK… So moving on…

Here are the buildings I’ve been rambling on about. The picture clarity isn’t great. The roads and the sets were all done by my husband’s colleagues. My only contributions were…

The club house….

The hospital… (I did not stick that larger than life doctor there, in case anyone's wondering :D But gotta love the ambulance!)

 The green roof house…

      The purple hotel...

 And the red roof house and the grey hotel. 

The black and yellow office building was made entirely by my husband.

After all those less than perfect, hurriedly constructed buildings, here’s a beauty that just blew us away. My husband heard about a businessman who might be able to help with making model buildings. He churned out this beautiful building in wood with just 3 days notice. My husband describes him as an old soul. He constructed this building for us free of charge; just for the love of it. How refreshing it is to know that people like him still exist! Here’s the amazing building, the design of which is loosely based on a Larsen & Toubro building in the city.

Completely unrelated... I plan on continuing using song titles as blog post titles. For some strange reason “We didn’t start the fire” keeps ringing in my mind. I could wear a black suit, stand in front of my husband’s burning paper city and sing that song. Ohhh… with glares. I’d so totally pull off the look!

P.S: My husband and I maybe suffering from a slight obsession with the classics J But who isn’t right?

Recycling

Not technically… But storing and re-using decorations has proved cost and time effective.

Since I started work last June, I haven’t had as much time as I did earlier to craft at will when inspiration struck. These days I have to save my ideas for a day when I have the time, can bear the thought of spending that time on paper craft and be inspired… and the days all three coincide are next to never. It’s these messages that intrude into my inbox that remind me that I have a blog and a Facebook page.

And I make an effort to keep at least this hobby going, if for nothing else but my own sanity.

So about the recycling bit… I’m glad I kept those paper pom-poms from my sister-in-law’sbaby shower. Since then I’ve used them at a friend’s bridal shower, my father-in-law’s 60^th birthday celebrations and a farewell of one of the big bosses who retired at work.

Here are the pictures of the big boss’ decorated work space. Not good pictures as usual.

If you look closely you can see sparkly strings on the window blinds. Those are big round chumkis strung together on silver thread. It was the first time I tried it and it was such a hassle, first to thread it and then to unravel it before putting it up. But the effect was stunning.

The ‘Celebrating God’s favour’ banner was painted for my father-in-law’s 60^th birthday which I re-used here.

The coloured glass bottles, I’m happy to say, are true to the word, recycled. My husband insists on buying me Amul flavoured milk every single day. So I cleaned and kept the bottles. For decorating, I painted the bottles and used them as coloured glass vases filled with water and flowers.

We also used the ‘Blessings’ banner from my friend’s bridal shower. If you look for it, you’ll find it in this picture.

Paper medallions made for this occasion were hung overhead the aisle.