Getting fed up with this!

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As I’ve mentioned a few times, I’m helping with the crew making props and scenery for the local pantomime, coming up in a couple of weeks. Preparations have been going on for months already. But now things keep going awry and the director keeps changing his mind, which is very frustrating. One scene is set in Munchkinland, which is decorated with sweets and little houses looking like cupcakes. I went to a lot of trouble to find some polystyrene packing ‘peanuts’ to stick on the house roofs so we could paint them in different colours to look like sprinkles (nowadays most packaging uses the biodegradeable cornstarch variety, which dissolves in water so couldn’t be painted). We did a test batch just to check, and that worked well, but now we can’t find the rest anywhere and it looks as though someone might have thought they were just rubbish and thrown them out Our main props person managed to get hold of a couple of yellow brick-patterned tablecloths, and I stitched them onto a length of brown fabric and spent a couple of hours painting bricks on that so that as the fabric is unrolled the bricks gradually appear, finally revealing the yellow brick road. It was quite effective – until our director just decided that should be a UV scene so of course everything just looks black and we will have to go over the whole 20 feet of yellow bricks with UV paint otherwise the whole thing is utterly pointless. Of course the entire scene only lasts a few seconds anyway. Sometimes making things is rewarding – but other times it just feels like an utter waste of time! All rights reserved. © Text and image copyright Fleur 2025.