Metal Magic

We’ve received a wonderful surprise from kestrel. She’s making magic and has decided to let us watch the show. This is part 1 of what may be about 5 parts and I am just as in the dark as you about what’s coming next. Kestrel will reveal all one post at a time so make sure to tune in for all the updates. That’s just the way magic should be, full of anticipation and surprises. And now… heeere’s kestrel!

A while back, Marcus posted about some mokume gane he had made, and the exciting adventures he had making it. https://proxy.freethought.online/stderr/2018/03/27/mokume-gane/ I know it’s properly called mokume gane, but I like to think of it as MarcusMetal. (No doubt that will trademarked soon.) Much to my surprise, it arrived at my house early one morning. I immediately leaped up to polish part of it – away from the coffee, mind you – because I knew it was going to be very beautiful and I could not wait to see it. If you look carefully, you can see a pattern of swirls of copper against the nickel in the part that I polished. When I am done and I finish a piece, I will put a patina on the metal that will make the pattern show up in greater contrast.

©kestrel, all rights reserved

[Read more…]

Roses!

DavidinOz has treated us to roses today and they are grand. Just look at those crisp petals, that bright colour and all that beautiful light. Why, I can almost smell them. The photos were taken at the Renmark Rose Festival and the busy bee makes them positively perfect. They’re just the tonic I needed to banish the November blues. Thanks for sharing, David.

©David Brindley, all rights reserved

©David Brindley, all rights reserved

Jack’s Walk

Today you get voyager’s walk without Jack. I was in Toronto over the weekend to visit a friend so I thought I’d share some shots of Front Street. Everywhere you look the city is gearing up for all that mindless and debt-inducing Christmas shopping and this year it looks like Union Station is going all out Lego. So far they’ve placed 3 giant Legos in the square along with a totally Lego fireplace complete with Lego stockings hung with care. The large white board is also going to be all Lego and it has mind-numbingly small numbers. Lots of numbers, each one waiting for an individual normal size Lego block. It must take a crew of several people days to put it all together. I’ll ask my friend to send me photos of the finished project and I promise to share.

Front Street, looking east, ©voyager, all rights reserved

[Read more…]

Transformation

Kestrel has finally shared some of her jewellery making with us and it’s phenomenal. What starts out as a pile of horsehair becomes ordered and ultimately beautiful at the hands of a master artisan. I’ll let kestrel explain the process…

I’m working on my website and one of the things that needs to be done is to re-shoot all the photos. Since most of my work is custom (in other words, people send me hair from their own horse, and then I make stuff out of it for them) I don’t have things in inventory, and that means I had to re-make all the items in order to take new photos. One of the things I like about my work is being able to transform my materials, whatever they may be but in this case a messy pile of hair, into something orderly and worth having. 

©kestrel, all rights reserved

Some of the braiding was done before it occurred to me to take a photo, but that messy pile of hair is going to be turned into 6 bracelets: 3 that are an 8-strand braid, and 3 that are a 25-strand braid, one each of white, chestnut and black. In case you are wondering: that messy pile of hair is made up of 1,761 individual hairs. That I had to count. On purpose. I don’t usually sit down and figure out things like that, because I just really don’t want to know; it’s a little depressing. But, if one is going to braid hair, one must first count it. 

©kestrel, all rights reserved

Part way finished, you can see the 3 8-strand bracelets are done and I’ve just started on the black 25-strand bracelet. 

 

©kestrel, all rights reserved

All done! It looks very different from how it started out. Now what I have to do is take good photos of each product so that hopefully, people will want one of these made from their own horse’s hair as a keepsake or memento. Just another day (OK, actually it was about two weeks) in the life of a braider. 

Thanks for sharing, kestrel. I’m astonished at the precision and beauty of the finished product. I can’t begin to imagine the amount of work involved, especially the counting! These are surely cherished keepsakes. Why, it’s enough to make me wish for a horse of my own.

 

 

 

 

Tree Tuesday

This week we have glorious fall colour from Avalus,

Lets begin with some brightly coloured leaves from the first of October.

Golden walnut trees, red wild grapes and assorted green plants.

And it was quite good timing, just half a week later, the walnuts were all leafless.

Your timing was perfect, Avalus. All that deep, rich autumn colour shot against a clear blue sky. Thanks so much for sharing.

Herbstfarben, ©Avalus, all rights reserved

Herbstfarben, ©Avalus, all rights reserved

Herbstfarben, ©Avalus, all rights reserved

Signs of Autumn

 

The signs of autumn from Nightjar,

These are the four signs that I look for every year before I can safely declare autumn has arrived. Leaf colour, autumn snowflakes, mushrooms and green grass. I was able to check all four boxes by the end of October, which is good!

 

1. Leaves change colour and glow in the sun

[Read more…]

October Light

From Nightjar,

I took these photos in a mid-October evening when it still hadn’t rained enough and everything was still looking a bit late summer-like (meaning all dried-up), but illuminated with lovely golden autumn light. October light is the best, so I had to have some fun with it.

The light in these photos is downright magical. I love every single shot, but the 2 fluffy seed pods (dandelion?) caught on a single thread of spider web is my favourite. Thanks for sharing Nightjar.

©Nightjar, all rights reserved

[Read more…]

Youtube Video: Feudal Japanese vs Medieval European CASTLES

Shad of the YouTube channel Shadiversity is a bit peculiar fellow. His performance is a bit over the top, but that is his selling point and it has an entertainment value. He has some old-fashioned notions about gender, but that is sadly to be expected, because not only is he male, he is also a practicing mormon. Thus being another proof of the to me totally baffling fact that evidently intelligent and well-educated people can believe the most ridiculous, silly and multiple-times over falsified notions if those notions are under the guise of “religion”.

However his videos on medieval castles are very informative, educational and fun to watch, so I can recommend those with clear conscience.

Hoverfly

It’s another well captured critter from Avalus, who tells us that this hoverfly was enjoying the cucumbers that his mother had planted. I’m enjoying everything about this photo from the beautiful light to the sunshine yellow flower to the rich detail of the hoverfly itself. Thanks for sharing, Avalus.

©Avalus, all rights reserved

 

Resin Art is like Ogres

It’s got layers!

One of the things that I’ve learned so far is that when things don’t go your way, the answer is usually to add more layers (and time, sigh).

We (my BFFs and I) are going to participate in a one day small village Christmas market and I’m producing merchandise for this (i.e. I have an excuse to make a lot of resin stuff). As usually i have many ideas and sometimes they even turn out as planned, especially the second time.

First, a pendant you already know plus its failed forerunner:

Resin pendants

©Giliell, all rights reserved

As you can see, in the right one the leaf has been swallowed by the blue. Here I poured a layer of clear resin, added the leaf, and then poured the blue onto the wet resin. The best description here is “interesting”.

The rest is below the fold ’cause it’s a lot of pictures.

[Read more…]

Tree Tuesday

This week’s tree come to us from rq who says that she took the pictures while waiting for a light to change. It’s a wonderful talent to be able to see the beauty in an ordinary, everyday moment and then to use that moment to create art. I think the photos are serene and contemplative and I wonder if that reflects rq’s state of mind. Perhaps the artist will tell us in the comments below. Thanks for sharing, rq.

©rq, all rights reserved

©rq, all rights reserved

Making Kitchen Knives – Part 9 – Starting Again

As I said last time, I am going to make multiple knives in parallel, because I think that a non-trivial amount of time can be saved just by that. I had all my steel already straightened, so I could go right away to drawing, drilling and shaping. First thing to be done was to draw and drill one blade on one half of one steel bar. That I have subsequently used as a template to drill holes in the other half and in all the other steel bars.

©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

For the drilling I clamped the template firmly with the drilled steel bars and before proceeding to the other side I inserted a steel pin in the drilled hole so the bars do not shift and slide. This has saved some time, despite it being a step with negligible time in the analysis, but my main hope here is that this work on multiple pieces in parallel brings better reproducibility regarding the hole positions and and that better reproducibility could save me some time later on when shaping the handle scales.

I have learned two lessons, one of them rather expensive. First lesson was that for this I have to take the 6 mm drill bits as de-facto consumable material, because I blunted and subsequently broke one towards the end despite using copious amounts of cutting oil. And I do not think it can be avoided.

Second lesson was that I really have to buy a new drill press, and preferably one with continuously regulated speed at that. My jury-rigged press with a very old hand drill has only two speeds and both of them are apparently too high for drilling 16 mm hole in 1,8 mm steel. Towards the end of the work the step drill bit overheated and it got irreversibly blunted on the 16 mm step. Ouch. That drill bit costs 40,-€. I think this investment is unavoidable, if I want to save time I cannot take the bit out and dunk it in water after each drilled hole, slower rotations would be better. And I cannot buy 40,-€ drill bit for each dozen of knives I make – that money be best saved for grinding belts. Hobby or not, at this rate I would spend the price of an acceptable small to middle sized drill press (300-400,-€) on the drill bits rather quickly.

Cutting the blanks in half and roughly cutting the outlines of the blades with an angle grinder did not take long at all. and working on multiple blades in parallel seemed to work comparatively well. But for the sake of precision, next time I will halve the blanks individually – two came out somehow too short and two too long. Not by much, but it is noticeable. The end result were three stacks of four roughly cut blades.

©Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Before this step took me 15 minutes per blade, now it was 10 minutes per blade (teasing out broken 6mm drill bit and fruitlessly trying to drill a hole with blunted 16mm drill bit included). So I would call it a semi-success. I learned some do’s and dont’s and I achieved my two goals – the holes in the tangs align across all 12 blades nicely and I have saved some time without even really trying to.