the king and his kubbs

perfect summer days

Yesterday and today were such perfect, classic summer days. I started yesterday morning with a nice long run to my school where I ran the track in the scorching California sun. After a nice cold shower, I went to a swim meet to visit the summer league swim team that I used to coach and swim on. It was so nice to see all my little swimmers again, who are actually not so little anymore. One of my old swimmers even brought me fudge from home. I got home and worked on my painting, and then my papa and I went to Lowe's, where we picked up flowers and materials for Kubb! For the rest of the day, me, my papa, and my little brother worked on making Kubb, which I will explain later in this post. After a long day making the game, we finally got around the actually playing it. And for a perfect finish to a perfect summer days, we ended with a trip to Yogurtland and a movie on Netflix. I don't think my day could have been more perfect.


As for today, it was a nice day with my brothers and papa playing kubb. I also finished my painting!

This is what we saw in front of Yogurtland. We were thinking, what happened? Someone must've got hurt. Think again.

Ahh, so this is what they do on the job.

This is what I do when I got back to Irvine. I go to Yogurtland and eat out of Hello Kitty cups and spoons.

And this is what I've been working on over the past couple of days, with a comparison below. It is the view of Sweden from the road outside of the station.

kubb

Kubb, also known as "Viking chess," is a Swedish lawn game played during the summer months. It is like a combination of bowling and horseshoe, making it an interesting and fun game to play. The goal of the game is to knock over the king before the other team does, but one must knock over all 5 kubbs before it knocks down the king.


The game is definitely coming up with my to Whitman. How it will catch on, I guess I will find out. I decided to make it yesterday with my family. We used one 4x4 that was 8ft long and one 1 3/8 in dowel that was 6ft long. In total, it was around $15 dollars + manual labor rather than $50 off of Amazon. And as for paint, I used acrylic paint that I will then coat with an acrylic top coat.


I used this website for instructions:
http://www.thisoldhouse.com/toh/how-to/intro/0,,20398029,00.html . So if you want to make a set, follow these!

The first step we did was make the decorative cuts on the king. In the instructions, this was not first, however, it is much easier to cut the king when it is attached to the rest of the wood for stability.

After cutting the king, we stripped the 4x4 to make it smaller for the kubbs. Then we cut the wood every 6" to make the kubbs. We ended up with 12, so we had 2 extra. To make the stakes, we used the scrap wood pieces that was stripped from the 4x4.

Shown here is cutting the dowel into 6 12" batons.

Next is sanding, sanding, and more sanding!

And now for the painting! I was going to paint flowers of different families onto each kubb, but after painting half a kubb, I realized it was too much work. And so, I've decided to paint half of the kubbs blue and the other half of the kubbs white. The king's crown is yelllo with two white stripes and a blue body. The body will hopefully be painted with different scenes from Sweden. I am thinking a maypole for one side, a windmill for another, trolls (?), and another undecided side. As for the batons and the stakes, I will decide those colors tomorrow.

This is the finished product! (unpainted, of course)