Yes! After long last, Peter finally has a functioning walker that actually looks like a walker. This evening I glued the front bars on, hitching up the two side pieces. I then added the tires.

The flaws in this walker are myriad: there are no perfect right angles; the wire hangers and dowels differ noticeably in diameter and they’re too thin anyway; the hot glue binding the dowels to the wires stands out; the sides of the walker are too deep; the tires don’t swivel.

As imperfect as the walker is, I don’t care, though. After failing at my lofty goal of a rolling walker with integrated seat, I have come to accept that a realistic 1:6 scale walker requires a level of effort that I don’t care that much to put in. I’m much more interested in realistic 1:6 scale electric wheelchairs. Therefore, I satisfy myself with something that looks walker-like enough for people’s imaginations to fill in the deficiencies.

This weekend I used some information that I got from Melissa Cook during the mini foods class I took recently and made rainbow doughnuts. I have 1.75lbs of white Sculpey and no motivation to spend more $$$ on colored polymer clays, so I have been mixing my own colors with ground-up chalk pastels. While I like creating my own personalized colors, I dislike the amount of time that mixing requires. I also dislike that I can’t achieve really bright, vibrant, saturated colors.

I shaped the doughnuts approximately by hand [hence the differing sizes] and created holes with the eye end of a large needle. I then textured the doughnuts by banging them with toothbrush bristles. Surprisingly, this simple step added an astonishing degree of realism, which I then mostly hid by adding white pastel for powdered sugar and then, on selected doughnuts, seed beads for sprinkles. The seed beads do not look very good as sprinkles, but, again, I don’t care.

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