By the time this appears, the election results will be in, but
as I write, the election has not yet happened. Whatever the
results, I’m pretty sure everybody
– candidates, campaign managers, and certainly the
message-saturated public – will be happy for a diversion.
By the time this appears, the election results will be in, but as I write, the election has not yet happened. Whatever the results, I’m pretty sure everybody – candidates, campaign managers, and certainly the message-saturated public – will be happy for a diversion.
I found such a diversion in my preparations for Halloween. Actually, I needed a costume a couple of days before that for work.
For various reasons, I decided that my co-workers and I would be disguised as leafy wood nymphs, by gluing various artificial leaves and flowers to T-shirts. Since we didn’t want to permanently transform the T-shirts, we’d glue the plants to strips of felt and temporarily stitch those to the shirts. I volunteered to do the gluing.
It was time to buy my first glue gun.
I’d read about them in Martha Stewart’s magazine and in fact, I thought they were sort of a joke. I remembered a parody of Martha’s magazine showing her laboriously rearranging a Christmas tree by regluing its branches with – you guessed it – a glue gun.
Having tried projects in the past with white glue or rubber cement, only to have the results sag, droop or fall apart, I was ready to try it.
A glue gun is shaped sort of like a pistol. You feed solid glue into the end and as it heats it can be forced out by pulling the trigger.
Between two surfaces, like an artificial leaf and felt, the glue cools and hardens quickly, forming a firm bond.
That’s the technical version. In reality, it’s so much fun I can’t believe it’s not illegal.
Why fun? For one thing, the work goes quickly. My leafy creations took shape with little effort: no clamping, holding or waiting for things to dry.
Even so, if you make a mistake, you can snip through the bond with scissors.
So working with a glue gun really gets the creative juices flowing. As I look around the house, ordinary objects begin to look like possible candidates for glue-gun adornment.
For example, a few feathers might give my old jeans jacket a new life. Maybe I’ll cover my cardboard magazine boxes with colorful fabric.
And then there are all kinds of wreaths I can make.
Or a cool mosaic out of broken crockery pieces.
I will be dropping by your house to show you how easy it is to affix autumn leaves to your mailbox.
Glue gun glue really is hot, so it should not be used by children. But for an adult, weary of the noisy and contentious election just past, and apprehensively regarding the so-called holiday season already upon us, an hour or so of glue-gun fun can be therapeutic.
In fact, I’m surprised there aren’t glue-gun aficionado clubs, as there are for quilting, model railroads and scrapbooking. After all, I will need a skilled mentor to show me the ropes as I glue my Christmas tree back together.
