12/12/2018

Moravian stars or The glue battle - The twelfth door


Moravian stars or "Herrnhuter Sterne" as they called in Germany were invented more than 160 years ago. The Moravian Church is a Protestant congregation. In 1722 Protestants fled religious persecution from different countries, most of them from Moravia and Bohemia, though, and went to Saxony where some of the refugees established the village Herrnhut which grew quickly (that's only a very short version).
They soon sent missionaries to far away countries. Those often sent their children back home when they had reached school age.
A teacher used stars to teach his pupils geometry, the children then used them for decoration during advent time and passed the tradition on to their families. The first stars were white and red, white standing for purity and red for the blood of Christ.
Nowadays you can get the stars in all kinds of colors, sizes and materials. You can buy them already put together or as a kit, in paper or plastic. Of course you can also make them completely from scratch.

I'm a fool. I thought it would be fun - for you - to see what a kit looks like. I'm not that much of an idiot that I would go for a big one right away because of my glue trauma. I know I suck at glueing. It shows time and again, but I was willing. I bought two mini stars of 13 cm, that's a little over five inch, one blue, one yellow.

Here are the sets in the box and the blue one out of the box. As you can see in the upper left hand corner, Ponder wanted to help me. He changed his mind soon. Probably he was afraid I'd glue him to the star.



Then I did something that doesn't happen often, I read the instructions. Of course there was not much to read, it's pretty self-explanatory. It did tell me to apply the glue sparingly. I knew then I was doomed. Sparingly is not in my vocabulary, simply because I can't do it.
It also said to take seven square points and "stick them along the seam of the body" after sticking the two halves of the body base together (and please imagine me saying "body" like the teacher does in this Mr Bean video ;-)).
I opened the glue and guess what. A big blob of glue with air bubbles attacked me. I was obviously doomed, but still willing.

I'll never read the instructions again. I did my round of seven, but the more points I glued on, the more threads of glue I generously applied over the table (it's a good thing it's so old and worn), on my hands and like a web between the points, and I didn't even know how to hold the star anymore. In between I took little breaks to give the glue time to do its thing, sometimes more inside the point instead of on its edges.





Did there have to be gaps?
Wait. The instructions said "The star assembly kit might be assembled under adult supervision and by children 7 years and older". I'm not really sure I am that old regarding anything glue related ;-)
Finally it was finished, though, and like this it didn't even look that bad (although I am still thinking I'd like to rip everything off and do it over).


I had learned something for the second star, however. Who cares about instructions?
This time I didn't start by going along the seam, instead I worked in rounds from top to bottom. Crazy! ;-) That way I could still hold the star at the bottom. It went like a breeze if you don't count the glue problems (I don't learn that quickly).
While I was working, I remembered that the bigger stars aren't glued at all, by the way, they use pins. Oh well, I wouldn't know where to put it, anyway.


And here's the yellow star now. I did it, yay!


2 comments:

  1. Nice! I have one minor comment about size though perhaps you just hit the wrong number. 1 inch = 2.54xxx cm. So 13cm would be around 5 inches.

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    1. Thank you! I think I was already ahead in the sentence ... one blue, one yellow ... of course it has to be five!

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