More Indoor Projects

 More cold and more snow.  More indoor projects.  My garden fence consists mainly of hog panels.  With a top rail and a bottom rail, this give you a fence that is a little over four feet high.  Deer can easily jump that if they choose, so we added a single wire at about six feet.  

The higher wire is not very visible so my husband suggested I add some sort of flag to it so the deer would see it and sense the fence was higher.  For those of you who have ever kept horses, this is like going around and tying strips of t-shirt material on a wire fence so the horse can see it.  Horses have a pretty active imagination so a mental barrier works well.  Cattle have very little imagination and a lot less mental power, so mental barriers do not work well.  Deer fall somewhere in the middle.  If it seems like too much effort, or looks like a potential trap, they will avoid it unless they are starving.  They have never challenged this fence.  If they did, they would probably hit the top wire  and the wire would likely break.

When we were trying to think up a way to flag this mental barrier, my husband suggested I do something with my vintage seed packets.  The artwork on seed packets is very interesting, and the variety makes them fun to collect.  They can be addictive like baseball cards.  My brain immediately made the jump to vintage seed catalog art which is even more interesting.  I just clip pictures from the internet and print them out then laminate them with our laminator machine and presto, you have a plastic "flag" to hang on the fence.

I keep a selection of catalog covers and old magazine covers and even advertisements and poster art to print out.  The laminate lasts for two or three seasons if you do it right.  Some designs I print out over and over but there are always new ones to try.  And I really enjoy them when they are hanging on the fence.  They are like wall art.  And some of them I walk by dozens of times a day.  I take them down in the fall because the deer show no interest in the gravel filled garden when there is nothing growing in it.  That saves weather induced wear an tear on the laminate so I can get several seasons out of them.

I print out two pictures per page trying to keep the dimension and scale similar because....

I place them back to back so that there is a picture on each side.  I match up pairs with similar widths and trim them to size on a paper cutter.  For the laminate to be secure and water proof the paper you are laminating needs to be smaller than the laminate so it gets a good seal on all four sides.  I place two double sided papers side by side in one lamination sleeve with twice as much space between them than there is on the outer edge so when I cut them apart they will be centered in the laminate.

I run them through the laminator as a pair and cut them apart after they cool.

I leave a top margin of one inch or more because that is what I am going to fold over the wire and staple.  I put three staples in the top of each flag making sure not to staple in the paper area because that will let rain into the paper which will quickly delaminate the flag.

I threw out four flags last fall when I took them down.  I always make a few extra in case one needs to be replaced mid-season.  Now I am looking forward to May when I will put out my flags again signaling the start of garden season.