The last post

Well - we are all done now, so it is time to say goodbye. Thank you all for watching! In particular:

• Brian and Lizzie Sanders for increasing the amount of human happiness in the world
• everyone who has commented on Cardhenge, either on the blog or in person, especially unkle e for commenting beyond the call of duty
• English Heritage for selling the model to us in the first place and for deciding to put it back on sale again
• the makers of Copydex glue
• all those top people who make Lego
• our unnamed employer for lunchtime goodwill on an epic level
• neolithic humans for giving us the idea in the first place.

We may come back this way in the future if we get any more Cardhenge related ideas, but in the meantime all that remains is to load up one final photo, and to say bye bye, that's it, the end.

In the quiet of night

Here we see Cardhenge by night. An eerie silence has descended over the ancient site and it will not be long before equinox returns and the stones are cloaked in mist (well, dust actually). The lego men are safely tucked up in their beds but we hope to see them for the final time very soon.

Sunrise over the Heel Stone and Slaughter Stone

Hello! We have now made the Heel Stone and Slaughter Stone, and have positioned them at the correct scale distance from the centre circle. (This meant printing out lots and lots of extra grass and sticking it to the back of an old exhibition display board.) The completed Cardhenge is now almost as impressive as the real shebang.

What has proven to be well tricky is photographing a fake sunrise over the stones... This is the best shot, and even so it's not as good as we had hoped. It has proven impossible with our kit to get the main stones, the Heel Stone and the "sun" all in focus. Ah well.

More to follow!

Nearly finished

Almost there... I'm halfway through making the Heel Stone and Soo has almost completed the Slaughter Stone. These two stones aren't in the normal pack but were sent to us separately by Cardhenge's creators. They have even sent some grass to put them on!

The Slaughter Stone is a fallen sarsen, one of three originally guarding the northwest portal, while the Heel Stone is even further out, by the modern road. At midsummer sunrise the sun casts a beam of light across the top of the Heel Stone, past the Slaughter Stone and into the very centre of the monument. We may try to recreate this next week, before we finally wrap up this project and say our goodbyes.

Cakehenge

It was Alan's birthday on Friday and one of our colleagues (another Sue) thought that it would be a great idea if we could make a Stonehenge cake. Also, this seems to have coincided nicely with the completion of the offical Cardboard Stonehenge pack. Here are two pictures: one of me struggling to keep the trilithons upright whilst making Cakehenge and one of the finished edible monument. The cake is a Victoria sponge topped with green butter icing. The stones were also made of sponge. I coated these with icing sugar to which I added a little blueberry juice in an attempt to create a natural grey but the stones seemed to have turned out a kind of purple colour. In fact, the whole cake looks a little psychedelic. I expect it will be interpreted as being symbolic of the effects of 'cake' in the Chris Morris sense of the noun.

Beautiful summer sunshine

Today Soo and I added stones 43 and 31 which are the two last stones in the packet. So officially we have now finished! It is beautifully sunny here in the UK, so we carried Cardhenge out onto the verdant lawn in front of our offices to take the formal photographs. Here's a shot looking across the lawn.

And here's one looking the other way, back towards where we work:

The outdoors summer daylight casts a nice clear light on the stones, which until now had only been photographed indoors, lit by windows or by Soo's studio photographic lamps.

Here's the final shot, with Cardhenge on the lawn between Soo and myself. Can you guess whose shoes are whose?

So that's the end of the official packet, and it has been fantastic. But Cardboard Stonehenge is not yet over! - we have a bit more still to add....

We'll probably finish it next week!

Inded if it wasn't for work and leave we would probably have finished Cardhenge this week. We only have three of the pack's stones to do (31, 43 and 47) plus our two extra-special additional stones, so unless there's some urgent workload crisis next week, we're on the final run...

Yesterday Soo made stone 62, while I spent the day in Derbyshire looking at some of the real stone circles in the Peak District, including Nine Ladies, Seven Stones Close, Frogatt Edge and Barbrook. These are all on a much more personal and informal scale than Stonehenge - Frogatt Edge was almost hidden under ferns.