#PuckLife

After a COVID caused postponement of the hockey season back in mid-March, hockey is finally coming back!  This warms my cold Canadian heart.

On my Shelf Of Awesomeness I have a figure of famed goalie  Ed Belfour wearing the white and blue of the Toronto Maple Leafs.  I decided I'd try to make an image to celebrate the return of hockey with this figure.

Goaltenders need a net to tend (hence the name) otherwise their just super awkward defensemen. I don't have a net, so I decided to make one (project!  insert manly squee sound here).

Looking at official NHL goal measurements I decided I needed the opening to be 7" wide by 4.5 inches tall (a regulation net is 6'x'4').  

Straws make good pipes, but plastic straws don't glue well, so I went with paper straws.  A few minutes, and several super-glued fingers later, I had the basics:

Next step is to prime it for painting.  So I grab a can of spray primer and head outside... to find a thunderstorm about to descend.  Nerts!

So I quickly get to work and spray the ever living heck out of the frame - rush job, but finished just a few seconds before the first drops fell.

I brought it inside to dry... which is fume-y, but not as fume-y as the spraying itself, so it wasn't too bad.

Once the primer dried, I hit it with some classic red.

The next step is to find something to use as the netting.  I looked high.  I looked low.  I even put a call out to fellow makers on the Internets.  I first settled on the net from the kids insect grabbing thinger.  IT was perfect.  It was white... It was... 2 inches too small.

Unfortunately that didn't become obvious until I already destroyed the grabber thinger... Oh well.

I eventually found the net I needed in a bag of onions.  Well, specifically it *is* the bag of onions.  Not the right colour, but the right size.  This is the "Do I have enough?" test fit.

With a clever application of an x-acto knife, the scissors from my Leatherman, and super glue, I managed to get the net formed over the frame.  

It does look dang good, doesn't it?   

NHL nets have padding along the bottom, and the back crossbar.  I think part of this is safety, and part is to hide some electronics, like the back-of-net camera. I used some paper to mimic this. 

I then covered the whole thing in a coat of Mod Podge to give the net some strength, then I dry brused on white to the net.  Some final touch-ups to the red and I had my finished net.

I made a rink out of a big piece of foam, painted white, with a cut out to accomodate the base of the goalie figure.

I then made some simple boards out of more foam. Then placed it all in my light box:

The rest is Photoshop magic, which led to the final image: