Pimp My Cluedo

Oh, yeah, baby.

Whatcha think? I'm pretty chuffed. I mean, the box itself is sloppy, but with a little bit of deco duct tape and a complete lack of concern for archival properties of your materials and you can make the thing turn out!

To be precise, I used these:

Duct tape in what the label called "Lace Vegas" (yeah, right) and a roll of contact paper in nearly matching black and white scrollwork flowers. The tape was to make the box square (you don't want to know the pressures some of those sides labor under) and the contact paper was to do this:

back my cards. They're printed on photo paper (which I will, eventually, laminate to protect the surface from scratches) and you can see through them. So I plopped them down on the contact paper, face up, and trimmed them out. I figure the pattern suits the semi-Victorian feel of the new Sherlock.

I went ahead and backed my weapon tokens and the little colored blots they give you for in case you decide you don't want to steal the pieces out of another Clue game to play, too. Trimmed and tucked up in the bunged-up box -- considering how poorly suited to the task the board I used is, I'm amazed it hangs together at all -- and the thing actually looks halfway good. Makes all the work I put into a properly made box feel a bit...overdone.

I actually had to make a...I don't know what to call it, but the lid was too large by about a half an inch in one direction. So I had to take two strips of board, tape them sideways (which together equals 1/2 inch) and then tape them into the lid of the box to make it fit properly on the bottom. I figure that's neither here nor there, considering I'm only doing this to keep my pirated version of Cluedo safe from kitty claws. I'm not handing this down to posterity.

Heck, grip it too hard and it crumples. I'll be lucky if I'm not making a new one in a year. If I do, though, I'm using better board. Seriously, this crap was torture to work with. It was like trying to build a model of the Golden Gate Bridge out of play dough.

In other news, I've had a very busy weekend so far. Went to a play last night. Not a play I'd normally attend, given my druthers, but it was pretty good. And the sheer wall of sound generated by a gospel choir with a back-up band shifted some of the swelling in my sinuses, relieving the vertigo I'm experiencing at present. If I'd known all it took was a huge drum kit and bass guitar to get that crap to shift, I'd have been playing Parliament's greatest hits at volume. Maybe some disco, too. That's got bass backing it up.

I also took a pet CPR and first aid class today. Tip for anyone out there thinking of taking the same class: Do not be kind or gentle with the creepy dog dummy that looks more like a decaying bear than any sort of dog. Well, come to that, don't be too gentle or kind when performing compressions on a real dog; you've got to push from your shoulder to get proper compression on the heart, which is apparently a slippery little devil in their chests and must be firmly spanked. But, yeah, from the shoulder, not the elbow, unless -- like me -- you want to be unable to close your hand properly for several hours. My forearm is sore.

I hope I am not rendered unable to knit by this injury. I need to get working on a gift for a friend, and I can't take the time to recover from repetitive CPR injury! Although I will confess, it was worth taking the class if only because we got to practice putting splints and bandages on a particularly compliant bulldog. I had to giggle at what we must have looked like -- I had the impression of two little girls, done with playing lame tea deciding to pretend to working in the trauma room of the ER, bandaging gang members, getting harassed by handsome cops who think we hear things in recovery, and maybe marrying doctors who we then divorce to become glamorous divorcees who go to parties and drink grown up drinks like martinis while wearing long gloves with sequins.*

No? Just me then.

Poor dog. I'd have felt sorrier for him if I hadn't thought he was secretly enjoying the attention!

*It's entirely possible that I watched too much television as a child.