Each day spent working on the sculpture focuses on a different part such as shaping the legs or smoothing the arms.  I start by sanding it with coarse sandpaper to remove sand-like clumps on the surface and remove high spots.  Sandpaper works wonders by making the high spots appear slightly lighter in colour than the untouched low spots. It instantly shows how bumpy the surfaces are even though they were smoothed as best as possible with my fingertips when the clay was soft.  As I continue sanding, the light coloured high spots grow in size until eventually the low dark spots disappear.  However, I have to be careful because not all high spots are unwanted.  For example, throughout the process I have to keep reshaping features such as ankle bones so that they are not lost.  

Lee Lyon and her two daughters Chloe and Gracie offered to help build the princess sculpture months ago but the time slots available were already filled so they waited patiently for an opportunity to arise.  They had the privilege of being the first group to apply an icing layer to the bag.  They particularly enjoyed using their fingers to smooth the icing. 

As the sculpture approached its final form, the icing had to be applied very carefully because there are few future layers to fix accidental oh-oh's.  My daughters Ashley McCarl-Palmer and Sondra Burrows-Wolting along with her husband Justin Wolting-Burrows stepped up to the challenge.  Knowing how much I love my creations and how important details are, they were filled with trepidation at the start but by the end it had evolved into a typical family adventure filled with chatter, laughter and goofing around.