Land, ho!

Look what sailed into our harbor this week:  The Dawn Treader!

We got a ton of snow last weekend, but it wasn't the "packing" kind.  So we piled instead, hoping that we could get it to compress and hold together enough for a "subtractive" sculpture. After a few hours of piling it on, we began to shape it.  One of our neighbors came over to help, and with a pile that big, we certainly needed it!  It was about 16' X 16' X 7' tall.

We left it overnight and started again the next day, refining the shape, creating some of the details (the standard and the mast), and coloring it.  Since we had trouble with details, we decided that an authentic standard might help identify her.  C. S. Lewis described the old Narnian standard as "green, with a red lion," so we went with that.

One man stopped to ask "when we were going to put her in the lake?"  That was awesome, because we were afraid that no one would even recognize it was a ship.  (Everyone kept asking if it was a dragon.)  We were limited to large, chunky shapes because the snow simply wouldn't stick together, and any fine detail quickly fell to pieces.  The head was really beautiful before a snowball shattered it . . .

We're only a few days away from above-freezing temperatures, and that means that she won't last long.  But what a ride, baby! 

Last year's snow sculpture was Optimus Prime;  the year before that we did Lightning McQueen, and before that, Darth Vader.