A few years ago I bought a few Metal Earth kits and started into the Hubble Space Telesscope model only to realize that I needed to start with something a little more simple. So I bought a couple more kits and... they all sat in a bin for a few more years. But I decided this was the year I was finally going to do them! And once I got into a groove (and bought a nice little tool set) I managed to finish all four of them. I got a better as I went along too!
The first kit I finished was The TARDIS which ended up being my "learning experience" kit. It came out okay, but I broke the part on one of the doors that allows them to open and close. So now that it's on the shelf - I'm not moving it! But, lessons were learned.
Next up is the Hubble Space Telescope that was the one that I originally started with but hit PAUSE on until I got a little better at these kind of kits. And you can see in this photo that one of the big drawbacks to the Metal Earth kits is all the fingerprints you end up with on your model! Another lesson learned on this one was to be careful with the thin parts that stick up - I broke one of the antennae off (which would be a big problem if that happened to the real Hubble!).
After Hubble, I did the Neuschwanstein Castle kit, which I was pretty pleased with. I had an issue joining the main two sections and getting them to lay flat on the base, but isn't too noticeable. And I didn't break anything on this one!
And last but not least - the final one I did was the Millennium Falcon! Not surprisingly, it came out the best since it was the fourth one I put together. There were still a few tricky bits and I'm glad I saved it for last since I was able to take into account things I learned from doing the other ones. Getting curvy parts into the right shape is - at least for me - the hardest parts of these kits so if I do more of these eventually I'm going to have to seek out some tips and tricks for that. (I suspect that molding it around another object might be the key.)
The other thing I finally tried was diamond painting! Bought a little kit in the middle of 2020 but I didn't actually start on them until right the end of the year and I completed them about a week into the new year. When I went shoppping for a starter kit I kept finding all of these huge projects that I really didn't want, so I ended up with the ones you see below, which are actually meant to be stickers. I put them on index cards and I'm going to glue felt and magnets to the back and put them on my fridge eventully. I couldn't resist this kit of mostly Marvel characters with Supes and the Bat from DC thrown in randomly. I enjoyed trying diamond painting and I'll probably do some more eventually, but probably not any of those huge pictures I see some folks on FlossTune doing. These little things are more my speed (and what I have space for!)
That's it for the January round-up! I have already done some stitching in February, so I expect to have a few things to show in the next check-in. I'm now all caught up with my Temperature Tree for the year so far and once I saw what the temps were starting to look like, I decided to switch to the "Hot Temps" color scheme so I will probably get to use all of the colors. We've had a few days where the high was below the lowest temperature color, but I don't expect we'll have a whole lot more. We're expecting another cold snap next week, but I still think that will only mean 2-3 days with the coldest color leaf. We went through a cold patch a few weeks ago (and had 2-3 inches of SNOW!) and then quickly rebounded back into the 60s and 70s. And I have a feeling I'll be using all of those 100+ colors once we get into the summer months! Of course, with my luck, we'll end up having a polar vortex blast in Dec. 2021 and I'll have a completely pink branch or something. But I'll have photos of Temperature Tree next month, along with a few other things!
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