Going to penalties

OK, on this occasion I admit defeat. Hard as I tried, I didn’t quite make it – and the new football season kicked off this weekend without my fussball table makeover being quite complete. I have been trying to resign myself to this frustrating fact since about 6pm yesterday, and almost 24 hours later I still haven’t quite managed to let it go… So now seems like a good time to do just that: and, BREATHE…

On the plus side, I have made some progress. The handles, for example, now look like this:

Cream with a hint of gold. It’s not every day you see a fussball table with sparkly handles…

I then turned my attention to the other end of the rods. These started off looking like this:

Spot the one missing a black tip…

One of the first things I did was to try to reconstruct the missing tip. This involved paper, glue and some wrapping:

Renovation in hand…

I then sanded the glued paper down a bit to smooth the surface, and then covered it with the final Decopatch paper:

Tip-top (once the glue dried).

OK, so the replacement tip isn’t perfect and you can tell which is mine – but it’s a whole lot better than I thought it would be!

So the tips now look like this:

Can you spot my reconstruction?

At this point, it was time to wrap the rods themselves – almost the last job bar final, finishing touches and putting the whole thing together. This started well, but then the niggling doubts kicked in. I decided I didn’t much like one of the papers I was using, which then made me question my whole rationale for this element. I’d been alternating three designs over eight rods but started wondering whether I should have stuck to just one, or maybe two designs. But by this time I’d already wrapped four rods, so used all three designs. Aaarrgh.

You may remember the rods used to look like this:

Unwrapped, rusty rods.

After some work, some of them now look like this:

Funny how I thought this was going to be the ‘home straight’ and ‘easy’. Not. At. All.

After much deliberation, I decided to stick to the original plan and wrapped two more rods. But now I really wasn’t sure, so decided to sleep on it. My general sense of frustration at this point – made worse by the momentum of hoping to finish this weekend – wasn’t helped by the fact that I kept spotting patches on the men that need repairing (presumably injuries incurred while I worked on the handles and so on). Double aaarrgh.

And this morning I looked at it and decided I do need to reduce the number of designs used for the rods, which means re-wrapping two of them. And goodness knows how that will go, given it’ll have to be a second layer. Triple aaarrgh.

Just BREATHE.

At the moment, the more I look at any of it, the more imperfections I spot. (Really, anyone would think I was a perfectionist or something.) So I’m going to come back to it in a day or so, when I can figure it out in what I hope will be a calm, yogic manner, perhaps after a spot of pranayama.

And BREATHE…