BETHEL – Just in time for Valentine’s Day – or maybe a few days afterward – Bethel’s snowwoman is destined to get a heart to go with all her “sole”mates.
Musa Brown, the Bethel resident who helped knit a giant fleece scarf in 1999 for Angus, Bethel’s first world’s tallest snowman, has created a large heart from a piece of that scarf.
“I thought she needed something from Angus,” Brown said late Tuesday afternoon. “It seemed appropriate for this time of year.”
Volunteers shoveling and stomping crane-lifted snow into place with their feet have made about five layers of 4-feet-high snow, closing in on the snowwoman’s “hips.”
It is anticipated that two and then three layer-forms will be completed each day until she reaches her estimated goal of 120 feet tall, aided by Bancroft Contracting’s crane. A United Rentals 120-foot-tall lift is being used to lift stompers into place and will be used to affix decorations and apparel.
Brown’s stitched heart, which is embroidered to read “Angus, King of the Mountain, 1999” will be placed somewhere above the hips but below her “shoulders,” according to Robin Zinchuk, executive director of the Bethel Area Chamber of Commerce.
Brown said that when Angus melted and his scarf was retrieved, she and other women from her church cut and sewed blankets out of it for a SAD 44 collection for disaster relief.
“Making it into blankets was a wonderful idea,” she said.
One piece, however, was too small, so she saved it, then found a use for it with the snowwoman project.
“I wanted to tie them together,” Brown said of Angus and the snowwoman, who has yet to be named. A naming contest is under way by Portland radio station WBLM102.9.
Built atop a 20-foot-high snow base, she is solid right through to her core and totally snow, Zinchuk said via e-mail on Sunday afternoon.
For stomper safety, a 6-to-10-foot long center pole will be added at higher levels, but it will be pulled up as each layer is completed.
And, not only is Bethel attempting to best its 1999 world record for the tallest snowman, but Jim Mann of Mt. Mann Jewelers in Bethel has officially applied to the Guinness Book of World Records.
He’s making the snowwoman’s jewelry, a Maine mica snowflake pendant that will be 6- to 7-feet in diameter and hung around her neck from painted fire hoses. Zinchuk said Mann asked Guinness to consider it as the World’s Largest Pendant or Largest Maine Mica Pendant.
So far, the world-record book people have yet to respond.
“It sometimes takes four to six weeks to get an answer,” Zinchuk said. “It’s going to be as large or larger than the skidder-tire buttons.”
Construction on the snowwoman project is expected to be completed during the last week in February.
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