Little Girl’s Assignment:
Build a longhouse or wigwam, using as many natural resources as possible.
She was determined not to use anything other than natural resources. If it was up to her, I don’t think she would have even used the hot glue to hold it all together. My girl is quite the literalist.
But no worries, the furs are fabric. Zan suggested skinning some roadkill, but for some reason, she didn’t like that idea. Back when he and Big Girl built her longhouse four years ago, some stuffed animals were sacrificed for the project. This caused an emotional crisis of mass proportion when both girls found out where the “fur” had come from. They still get teary eyed when it’s mentioned. I made him swear to let me take care of the supplies for that portion of the project this time. 🙂
A Half Hour a Day 
What a great assignment, and what an amazing result too looking at these shots… She certainly did put some serious effort in to it… I love the little details with the fur and bowls of fruit and drying leaves… And LOL at the source of fur too… With 2 girls myself I can only imagine the trauma… 😉
Wow, that is BEAUTIFUL! I love all the detail.
Nicely photographed, too! 🙂
Thank you. I am impressed with the amount of attention devoted to food and warmth. I think those are important myself. Challenging photo assignment, too!
Quite honestly, this was the most challenging thing I’ve photographed in a very long time. Of course, I remembered I needed to photograph it the night before it was to be handed in, so I only had the kitchen lights to go by. I found flash as hateful as ever…so, this was the best I could do. Trying to get inside the little openings was a bit tricky as well.
One good thing came of it though…it made me realize that I have to bite the bullet and buy an external flash AND learn how to use it. I am limiting myself by considering flash an enemy.
Firstly, WOW on the creativity! Little Girl has exceptional talent as this little house could be a decorative accessory seen in Pottery Barn or Frontgate!
Secondly, I think you photographed this house quite nicely!
Thirdly, I used to HATE flash as well (I still actually think of it as a nemesis at times). I only got better with it when I started to use a Gary Fong Lightsphere on my external flash AND dialing down the Flash EV by a min .7EV (for either the on-camera OR the extenal). I find i-TTL flash to simply be overpowering and by dialing down, I got much better results.
The detail on this is extraordinary!
BTW: I thought I had subscribed to your blog and would receive email notifications when you posted a new post, but today I popped over here and found 3 posts I hadn’t seen. Do you (or any WordPress users reading this) know what exactly it means when you click the subscribe button up on the WordPress toolbar that appears when you visit blogs while logged in? I’m going to try clicking that box down there that says subscribe to this site by email and see if that works! 🙂
Hi Karen, if you go to your “Manage My Subscriptions” section under your “My Account” tab, then you’ll find a column that lets you pick when and if you get email notifications. I found WordPress re-set a lot of mine when they made some updates recently to the subscriptions pages…
Hm, found this on pinterest looking for ideas for my kid, who has this same assignment to do. She likes this model best of the ones we’ve looked at. Your kid really paid attention to details! Maybe she’s graduated from high school by now . . .
I’m so glad she liked it! It was a pretty special project! My daughter is, in fact, just starting high school. 🙂 Time does fly.