I am not a big fan of Christmas but I am a big fan of crafts and eating.
This leads to a reluctant love of parts of the Holiday Season.
The league I am on recently had travel team try outs which made a perfect excuse to make a gingerbread house to bring to celebrate all of the girls hard work.Except gingerbread houses are normal and really I already wanted to make a banked track this just gave me a reason to do it.
So instead me and the bf (hence forth known as Sweep the Leg Johnny) decided “Lets make a gingerbread bank track!!!! To scale!!!”
Our league is what you would call bi-trackual meaning we play bank and flat track roller derby. The banked track is one of the lovely Kitten Traxxtracks. A little while ago I wandered over to the Kitten Traxx site, during my visit I noticed that the basic measurements of the track pieces are available to anyone with Adobe Reader.
We ended up using this to help us make our version to 1/24th scale. While I was concerned about taste and look, Sweep kept worrying about things like structure and portability… so I left him to figure out the scale. He did a great job
To make sure that the track didn’t collapse while in the car, carrying it around, on its own with no one touching it..you know the usual suspects, we decided to not use the scaffolding and angle of tilt used on real sized banked track. We instead went with a base with flaps we could attach to the base.
I got busy making up the 5 batches of gingerbread we would need. Thing to remember for next time : when you split the batches into two trays the cooking time is less, you will need the entire amount flour. These are things I realized around batch 2… SUCCESS!!
Once we started running out of counterspace to house the gingerbread sheets Sweep the Leg started cutting the the gingerbread using the Kitten Traxx templates then layed the gingerbread to cut the OCRG logo out of the center. Next he places the banked pieces on the track base while I slaved away making ever more gingerbread.
Time to make the refs and skaters!! YAY!!! my favorite part. I got to make all of my favorite refs in marshmallow form. Unfortunately I didn’t get to make my favorite skaters because of the materials we used (premade gingerbread men) but mostly because of the time…it was around 2am at this point.
Time to decorate!!! The best part of the whole project!! Our supplies include, Reese’s Pieces, Hersey bars, Sweet Tarts, Bubble Tape, Licorice, Sprees, Hershey Kisses, Marshmallows, Candy canes, Cotton Candy, Icing, Cinnamon sticks, LED lights and tiny Christmas towns people. We were trying to give people diabetes.
Then we had to actually get this thing to practice. Luckily it just fit in the car!
Glad that everyone liked it!
Then the juniors got to it! eep!
Everyone enjoyed the track, we enjoyed making it and tryouts went well so all in all it was a good day!
If anyone has any pictures they took of it at the rink (that seems to be what I am missing) please send them to me!
Captain Hook’er
kneenja said:
Fantastic summary! I wish I’d had more time to appreciate it.