I failed this week & last week, consider me an overachiever! Last week, I tried methods of combining the pieces of plastic that didn’t work. But then I figured out that hot glue worked pretty well. Let’s go over this week:

First: I bought supplies (colorful Sharpies & black hot glue gun sticks)

Second: I sketched some ideas for the panels (took longer than you’d think haha)

Third: I dug through recycling on my floor(why did I find a plastic water bottle with mold in it??)

Fourth: I made a life-size model of the train out of paper and made an outline on it for the panels (took farrrr too long for how simple it looks). The train shape took some tweaking itself, too. (The last panel will be ocean themed, I just figured maybe actually making one will help with design).

Fifth: Trial and error on how to get flat sheets of plastic from plastic bottles:

-First, I tried using an old wooden box with holes from a previous class abd screwing the plastic in and using my hairdryer(this modelled this video I found the best). After probably 15 minutes of hairdryer, this is the best I got:

-I didn’t want the ridges & the time was pretty bad, so I took the same piece, and tried my straightener. Mostly got rid of the ridges, but it curled up a lot.
-took the same piece and hair-dried it again to get this:

-I figured there had to be a better way, so I took a new bottle and a leftover flat piece of wood with holes in it and screwed in about half the bottle. I then put my straightener over the whole thing(hence the flat piece). And it worked really well, really fast!

Next week:
Better ventilation, be a plastic melting machine, and start coloring and constructing panels!
Good news, I’ve been offered an entire garbage bag full of plastic water bottles, so no more raccoon trash digging or mold.