Rib-Tickling [green parasol #3]

So.  Those broken rib tips.  I googled and hunted and eBay’d and Etsy’d to no avail.  No tips I could find anything like the ones I needed.  Makey makey time.

Now this is not the sort of making at which I excel.  At all.  In the course of my hunt for rib tips, I found reference to a new product [well, new to me] called SUGRU.  It’s a mouldable goop, which sets to rubber, and seems to be intended for all sorts of mendy-fixy jobs, like broken handles, washing machine seals, toy dinosaurs [read the promo material!] and…I hope…parasol rib tips.  Maybe.

All very experimental, but it’s the sort of stuff that the missus is always needing for multitudinous little jobs, so I ordered a sample pack.

It comes in black, white, red, blue, yellow, and a couple of greeny/browny shades that scream ‘garden tools’ at me.  None appropriate for my parasol, but I found to my delight that it blends.  I got to work with the blue and yellow samples, and soon had  a blob of a green goop very similar to the desired shade.  Also green fingers, hey ho.

It is just like blu-tak to handle, but starts to pong quite quickly.  You have [it says] about half an hour to do your thing before it starts to set, then up to 24 hours for it to fully go off.

I made little cones, pierced them with a thick needle, poked another hole into the fat end, and gave them 5 minutes to start to go off a bit.  Then I squidged them onto the ribs. [I’d bashed off the bit of rib tip that had stayed attached, and found that the tips were bound in thread so that the plastic would grip better.  Clever!  I left it in place.]

I then left it propped up in a vase to set.

Next morning, three nice firm, slightly rubbery rib tips…now to attach the cover and hope the rubber is strong enough to deal with the tension.  Can you stand the excitement?

While I waited, I decided to polish my halo and do a couple of little repair jobs that [you know me so well] have been sitting around for more than a year…oh dear.  A double-ended dolly that I bought my daughter a gazillion christmases ago, and needed attention, and a tiny teddy which I knitted for my MIL a few years back, and had been attacked by her cat.  Doll hospital!