Digitprop – Papercraft and Stuff

Ok, I’ll admit it: I’m officially an old man. I know Beatlemania is long over, and society has moved on, but what can I do – I’m still a Beatles fan. And as embarrasing as it may be, I especially like their classics. Such as Lucy in the Sky.

And when you listen to that song, you can’t help but wonder about the imagery the lyrics conjure up. Such as the rocking horse people eating marshmallow pies. So, what do these ‘rocking horse people’ look like? I always imagined them as half-man half-wooden horse centaurs. And more precisely, half hippie, half wooden horse. Complete with bell-bottoms. Like so:

What’s that thing he is holding there, you say? No way that’s a marshmallow pie, you say! More like a marhsmallow cake. Well, you are absolutely right. However, do you know how hard it is to make an easily foldable convincing pie? So I decided to go with a piece of cake instead…

The hippie part is probably not very authentic, when you want to get close to what the Fab Four had in mind when they made the song. After all, the album was released in 1967, when the hippie culture was still in its infancy (or so I’m told – I am not that old). Anyway, I think it matches the atmosphere and folklore of LSD (wink, wink).

You will find the template to make one yourself at the bottom of the page. When you actually build the model, you have to be careful: It’s by no means balanced in and of itself, so I highly recommend glueing a small weight (such as a coin) to the inside of the base, like so:

The other shocking truth I should mention is that this is not really a rocking horse: It doesn’t rock. The reason is that it turns out to be virtually impossible to properly balance the damn thing, at least I couldn’t muster the patience to do it. So it’s extremely prone to falling over to one or the other side. Therefore, I decided to add little flaps to the skids, in order to make it stand upright:

This means you can’t tip it to make it gently rock back and forth. If you want it to be able to do so, just cut it out without the flaps and balance it with more / better distributed weights (good luck!).

Here is the template PDF file.