So much for photographing my efforts step by step. I started this totem pole during the heat of the summer and abandoned it for other projects. It's an experiment in that I tacked an eight foot hardware cloth "tube" to a three foot piece of 4x4 instead of wrapping the hardware cloth around a 10 foot post. So the armature is basically a hollow tube of hardware cloth with two feet of wood at the bottom. This made the totem pole less expensive to make. I sculpted the faces with the armature laying under our big sycamore, and became worried it might crack under it's own weight when I tried to lift it. I could imagine it bending and breaking in the middle. It held together well though. I stuck it in the ground to finish the back, which meant more or less plastering it with papercrete and texturing it with an old butter knife. When I made the bottom three faces, I tried mixing all the ingredients (cellulose insulation, cement, and joint compound) dry in a 5 gallon bucket, t...
