The Jumblies
Idea
Nothing was coming to mind this month, so I started looking through my books for inspiration. I looked through Shel Silverstein, Mother Goose, and Aesop. There are several bookmarks in my copy of Edward Lear’s Nonsense Omnibus, which is a collection of several of his books. One of these is a poem called “The Jumblies,”, which is about some people with green heads and blue hands who sail to the sea in a sieve.
Design
Edward Lear illustrates his poems, and this is his for “The Jumblies”
The Jumblies.
To make a sieve like this, I used a nearly identical mechanism as I used for the July 2023 card when the mice had a pool party. Since they’re in the ocean, there is nothing on the outside like there was for the pool, but there are more things on the inside. I tried to keep the mechanism similar to his illustration. The Jumblies are about the same, and I used similar cross-hatching for the shading. He mentions a “crockery-jar,” which is shown in the illustration, but cylinders never are truly round in pop-ups, so I decided to omit it. The “tobacco-pipe mast” in his illustration has the bowl at the top, but I decided to switch it around and make it more like a modern pipe.
For the Jumblies, I made five rows of them, two on each side and one on the center fold. In the photo below, the center is already attached to the sieve. The four parts on the upper left go under the sieve with the rectangular tabs poking through the slots in the sieve. Then I glued the Jumblies to the tabs.
Ready for assembly.
The sieve and supports I cut out on the computer. The Jumblies were drawn and cut out by hand.
Here, the sieve is assembled, and the center is glued to the base. The blue shaded areas will be glued to the base to float the sieve about 5mm (~¼”) above the base. The pool part had the floating plane higher since it was the surface of the water, but this is the floor of the sieve, so it is lower. I made it as low as I thought I could and still have the Jumblies all stand up nice and vertical.
Glued up.
In the top view, you can see what I mean about cylinders not being truly round. For this type of mechanism, if the cylinder was tighter to make it more round, it would catch on the edges of the sieve’s floor.
Top view.
For the background, I tried to make it look like a map from an older atlas (are there new ones?). Most of it was printed. I drew the rivers, mountains, and swamps.
A simple mechanism this month, but a fun poem to illustrate. Looking at it now, I may have changed things a bit, but they look like they are having a fun voyage.
Cover
The cover’s background is pastel for the background, smudged with my finger. The Jumbly is drawn by hand, cut out, and glued on top. And the text was printed, then glued on top.
Build
- 9” x 6”
- The base is Strathmore 300 Bristol 100lb.
- The mechanism is on index paper, cut on the computer, except for the Jumblies.
- The Jumblies were drawn and cut by hand.