Peg Nutcracker - Old Guard Construction

Christmas is firmly in the forefront of my mind now. As I am on a very restricted income these days I am trying to make a lot of my gifts, hopefully my family will enjoy the fact that I have made an effort (or they might think that I am just a big cheapskate)! 😂

Anyway, I am making a couple of sets of mini-nutcrackers which are loosely based on those traditional German fireside ornaments (see pic left) - here's a link to the real things, but prepare yourself for a bit of a shock as some of the prices are eye-watering: Erzgebirge Palace.com - Nutcrackers [Opens in new window.]

I've already completed my 'Pantomime Private' model and that went fairly well, so I'm moving on to something a little more traditional now with a Nutcracker Soldier. To recap (as I did some basic prep with a half-dozen dolly pegs for this series) I began by dressing the basic peg with some period hairstyles...

In a earlier experiment I did where I tried to work out how I would make a mini-nutcracker I followed the real example and did the hair using some synthetic flock to represent the faux fur hair. But this did not work out well and actually started moulting with little tufts of flock coming off. So I decided to sculpt the hair-pieces using good old Milliput putty.

Once the hair was on I then moved on to making various hats for my different nutcracker types. Here you can see the basic shape of my guardsman's hat (right), although they were not attached permanently at this point...

I then moved on to creating the shoulders and arms for my soldier. I drilled a hole though the upper body of the peg so I could pass a piece of dowel (a barbecue skewer) through...

And then I added the feet and a base to the peg (having sawn off the tips of the peg's prongs so they were flat). The boots were made of a couple of blocks of decorative moulding wood and I decided not to shape them as he is a regular soldier and leave him with big army clod-hopper boots! 😄

[I'm using Evo-Stik Impact Instant Contact Adhesive for these jobs. It's really strong and I don't end up sticking my fingers together like I used to do when I used super glue! It's also more economical.]

Finally, I made the arms and rifle. The arms were my usual flat designs cut out of some 2mm sheets of plywood. At this point there was a lot of head scratching as I was unsure exactly how I should go about how to design and attach the gun. 

With my short (50mm tall) peg soldiers I usually just make a proportionally sided rifle and stick it to the side of the peg in a grounded arms pose BUT because my nutcrackers have those long lanky legs a rifle to do a similar pose would be ridiculously long (I know, I tried it) and out of proportion to the soldiers body.

So, I decided to go for a 'sloped arms' pose instead, with the size of the rifle in proportion to the body of the nutcracker...

I also changed the design of how I usually do my rifles. Instead of carving out a stylised rifle shape from a single piece of lolly stick I made a two-piece stylised toy 'popgun' out of a elongated triangle of lolly stick and a length of barbecue skewer! I really wanted to emphasise the toy nature of this soldier.

And here is the completed nutcracker...

Generally I quite happy with the design ALTHOUGH something is still niggling me about the very crude way that I attached the rifle to the left arm. I may have to go back to the drawing board with that and come up with a more elegant solution.

But - in essence - this is the construction process for the soldier. Once I have solved the rifle problem I will them move on to priming the nutcracker ready for painting.