In My "Spare" Time

January Thirtieth, Twenty twelve, Did You Write?

2012-01-30T15:22:00.000-08:00

January Thirtieth, Twenty twelve, Did You Write?

While the month is not quite done, another week has passed us by. For those new to these notes, the idea is that you post here each week about what is going on in your life to get you to post every week, and to report how you did in your writing.
The hope is that if you keep posting that you failed to do any writing, the perceived shame will force you to open something during the week just so you can report that you did something. Doing that will become a habit and you will produce something after a period of time. Not all habits are bad. I will say that having to write these notes and say I did not write, really bothered me during a slow period. It is so much nicer to report positively.

How much you write is not important. It cam be one word or tens of thousands of words. When editing, your word count might not change much or even go backwards. While high word counts are nice, they might not be necessary to say you really worked.

As to what is writing, We all know that new writing is writing. Editing is also writing. I generally write by editing anyway. I get something on paper then expand it in many passes until it becomes something worth reading. Editing the work of others also counts as writing. Critiquing is a form of editing and therefore is also writing.
Poetry, technical writing, blogging, writing assignments, synopsis, world or character creation are all forms of writing. E-mails and board posts can be also writing if they are very wordy and pertain to story or writing. The real answer as to what is writing, if you have to ask, the answer is yes.

As for me, I did write. I only have a word count of 1250 for the week on my second Spirit of Vengeance story. I did a lot of editing on what I had. I also blasted out the plotting for my story to give me an idea of what scenes I needed to hit and get a better feeling for what the story is to accomplish.
My original concept for this story was simply the lead up to a big fight. When I wrote out my first story to a publishable level, the first story shifted dramatically. In order to include those changes, this second story had to change. My plotting made an even different shift in the story.
I took the second scene of my plot line and made that my first, where you see this story's bad guy up close. In the first story, I showed scenes from other characters, but this time I will spend more time, showing what is going on behind the scenes.
I have two major goals in this story. One is to have her nearly fail completely, and another is to have her solve some fairly minor problem or solve some mystery. The first one looks nearly impossible for me since my characters seem to walk through the problems untested.

ON the story idea front, My compost pile has 48 story ideas in it. The way this past week has gone, I don't feel like I dug into the pile very deep, but also don't feel like I came up with a whole lot of new ideas. I have a whole lot of good story ideas on the top of the stack to dig into. I would love to have a whole lot more really good ideas on the stack, but I generally come up with as many as I need all the time.
We have a 31 day month and today is the 30th. I already wrote and will post tonight idea 31.I might write idea 32 tomorrow. That would be a good start for the year. I love to have extra in case I run into problems and fall behind a month or two. It has never happened. The few times I was unable to post such as on vacation, I made up for it during the next month.

On the personal front, the dragon carving is finally coming out of the wood. It is different than what I pictured, but I was not sure of how it was within the wood.
I have told people over the years that master wood workers look into the wood and see the shape that was within the wood, and then just removes the wood hiding the form within. In the case of this dragon, There was interference with what I could see. I took out the paint brush and painted how the legs and tail were positioned and that allowed me to remove the wood fast. I was not worried about cutting wrong. The paint will go along with any natural surface.
Ths piece of wood is rather interesting. I had picked up a U shaped slab of wood that I could barely move. I cut it in half so I could handle it. I immediately knew I wanted to carve a dragon out of a piece of that wood. I then saw a bark inclusion in part of the log and there was a branch sticking out on the end of the inclusion. I cut the wood off at the crack and instantly saw the dragon inside the wood.
It is one thing to have a piece of wood that looks something like a dragon, and having something that is a dragon. I was a bit afraid of making the wrong cuts. Adding paint to show here the limbs were helped alot. I could just remove the wood where paint was not. Of course, because of the angle and position of the body, removing the excess wood is not as easy as it looked. This should be a rather interesting carving when done.
I have about six more weeks before I have my art show where I want to display this carving. I intend to give it a generally smooth finish for now, and then add details such as scales some other time after the show when I have a whole lot more time. It is exciting to actually have something that really looks like a dragon now.

As for me,

I can honestly say,

YES I DID WRITE

DID YOU WRITE?

Tales Of The Vagabond Bards on Youtube!

2012-01-29T18:03:00.000-08:00

Yep, those enterprising folks at Pro Se Press have done it again! They made a trailer for my latest book, a novel length, three story anthology. Why don't you come and check it out?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyDG9wXTbe0&feature=share

Let me know what you think, OK?
~Nancy

Week 629 Woodworking

2012-01-29T15:06:00.000-08:00

Year 12, Week 3, Day One (week 629) (January 17, 2000 was my first carving day.) 01-28-12 Saturday

64 degrees early morning, 76 degrees when I got outside. I forgot to check the temps when I left. The morning sky could be described as pebble puffs, spreading net and sand. The clouds got a bit heavier mid morning and then it mostly cleared up except sporadic patches of puffs more to the west, along with feathers and mesh up high. The breeze was mostly not noticeable, except a short period where it moved some sawdust and papers around. While there was a lot of sun, there was clouds in front of the sun often, though there was not much substantial clouds in the sky. This weather report is brought to you by the city Of Pompano Beach Department of Tourism.

We went yard sailing. One condo had a yard sail. they have them maybe twice a year. There is always good stuff there. We went in as they opened and I made one walk around the place to see what they had, then picked up a good number of things. A popcorn popper for five bucks, a whole bunch of knitting needles for five bucks, then a bunch of odds and ends for a buck or so.
At another yard sail, I got a game, a basket and some books. On the books, I wanted the herb book and they had three for a buck, or fifty cents each, so I got two other books that I might have a chance of reading I skipped the cooking books entirely otherwise.

knitting needles. Crochet hooks are by scissors.

Popcorn air popper. Chess and checker game

Tupperware bowls and lids Cookie cutters. The one in the upper left rolls

Fish hook sharpening stone. assemble heroes game
would be good for some of my gouges

Ice Cream Scoop. books.

Basket that will have crochet materials in it soon.

I finally got out back. I accidentally scared off the beast of the back yard when I had got out front to load the wagon with tools in the truck and I came out back he spooked when I showed up. He only ate just a little bit.

I had made an owl last week and the head was way too small for the body, and the body was the wrong kind for an owl. I removed the head and then took a piece of wood and turned a new head. this head has him looking more down his chest than my normal bird. I showed it to several people and they liked it.

bird with new head.

Mom had me cut a few branches off a tree. She said that it will grow just by sticking it in the ground. I filled a pot and stuck one branch into it and took it home. I will see how long it takes to kill it.

a piece of the tree mom had me trim. I will see if I can get it to grow.

I painted on the dragon carving where the limbs and tail would go. This gave me an unquestioningly visible clue. I painted one leg with one color, then painted over it with another color to move it to where I like it.

While the paint dried, I started untangling and untwisting some steel wire I picked up. They were cutting from some project or another. I came up with a great way to straighten the wire. It does not get it perfectly straight, but straight enough, and it is very easy.
I opened the jaws of the vise so it is about twice as wide as the wire. I stick the wire in to the first bend and apply pressure to the wire in a straightening direction. When you have multiple bends or even twists, you can shift the wire in and out slightly, and use the front and back jaws to hold the start of the bend to straighten it. I did quite a few before I realized I needed to get back to the dragon.

Painting the limbs and tail on the dragon. the left side view gave me more information on how I wanted the tail to to so I did not paint it on the right side.

My first project was to drill the hole in the center of the loop that the dragoon's tail makes. I used a half inch drill bit I quickly found that tomorrow, I need to do a battery charging marathon. None of my batteries have power. I had enough juice to get three holes drilled.
I used the dremmel to join the holes and expand the space. In my grinding, I found that the bark inclusion was causing problems, so I used the bandsaw to remove a bit of it. I also ground away a lot.
I ground away the wood between the front and rear leg on both sides, but have to do more.

I also drilled a hole above the rear leg and in the space between the body and the tail curling down. I ran out of juice with my battery powered drill (all five batteries) so I dragged out an electric drill to finish the job. I had the angle slightly wrong and nicked the leg, but since the leg will be heading a bit more inside, I will get all the leg thickness I am after. I ground some around the hole before I decided I was done for the day.
Looking at it, The dragon made big headway on coming out. Having made my decisions and committed to them, Wood should disappear quickly now.

Carving around the painted details to give the dragon form.

Tomorrow, I will straighten some more of the wire. I will carve heavily on the dragon to give it more shape and design. My brother is coming up so I might end up doing some metal work after he arrives.

I will see what I actually do tomorrow.

Year 12, Week 3, Day Two (week 629) (January 17, 2000 was my first carving day.) 01-29-12 Sunday

65 degrees early morning, 76 degrees by ten and stayed there. The weathermen had fixed the cloud cover as there was no break in them all day long. The clouds got a bit heavier at a few points in the day to the west, which made us wonder if it might rain, but all the clouds brought was themselves. There was a nice breeze which did gust a few times during the day. Otherwise, the weather was uneventful. This weather report is brought to you by the City of Pompano Beach Department of Tourism.

The beast of the back yard was out this morning and I got to pet him while he fed heavily. After I while, I took my wagon out to my truck to get some tools and when I got back, he was gone. I did not see him again during the day. I wish I knew what had spooked him.

I got all my equipment out, and settled down with my dragon. Using my dremmel to grind away wood. I used my drill to open up spaces to be hollowed out, the band saw and hand saw to cut away pieces of wood to save me grinding time.

There are people who are purists when it comes to carving. The master carvers from Austria have certification on their carvings that no power tool was used on it.
I am not a purist. I will use anything to get the job done. for me, removing wood is not the key to carving. Of course, with this dragon, the object is to avoid removing the wrong wood. Hand tools slow the process so it is easier to stop before a big mistake is made. Power tools make mistakes very fast.
The tools I use depends on the size and kind of carving I am doing. My fairies, which would stand twelve inches if they stood straight, is a combination of power and knife carving. My carved vases are all carved with power tools, generally the dremmel. This dragon is all power tools at least until I get near the final surface.
My plan is to give it a fairly glossy finish and leave it at that for the March Art show. After that I may decide to texture the surface to add scales and other things to it. For now, getting a really good looking shape is the aim.
I found out that I started on this back in August. I have pictures of where I made cuts on the original slab of wood to free up the dragon.

Left side view of the dragon

Front view of the dragon

Right side view of the dragon

My brother came and since I did not want to shower him with sawdust. I put my grinding tools away and then while we were talking, he was reading, I took out the little lathe.
I mounted a piece of bamboo into it and machined it down about half the diameter. I was only seeing if it would machine, not make it a particular diameter. I ran a file over it while it was spinning at the end to clean up the final surface.
I can see that I need more types of points for the tail stock. One idea is to have an inside cone with a point sticking out the center. That would keep the material centered and prevent it from splitting out so much as the cone would hold it in. I really need to come up with a live center, a ball bearing type system for the tail stock so the point would spin with the material.

When I got home, I decided to repair a wind-up flash light. I used one of those flashlights during hurricane Wilma were we went without power for about a week. Since I was alone, one crank light was perfect. I could crank it up and it would give me enough light to be able to do whatever I needed to do.
Later I tried to repair one and found it had a little battery in it. The battery was charged up when you cranked it, and then it discharged the power over time.
I found long ago that if I keep my batteries in the freezer, they will stay good for years. Since my crank light has a battery, I have kept it in the freezer door of my fridge.
Over the past few weeks, it somehow has slipped out and hit the floor. The knob of the crank broke off.
I tried to drill out the plastic of the knob. I found out after basically spinning it a while, that a patch on the top of the knob came off and there hid a screw. The handle had a shaft that went into the knob and the screw held it in place.
I found a screw head that was bigger than the hole at the top, just long enough, and a tiny bit smaller than my drill bit I was using. I first drilled a pilot hole with a tapered grinding bit. I was using a mini motor tool. I had gone all the way through with the point of the grinding bit. I then drilled for the screw. I did not go all the way through, but close. After a test start of the screw, I slipped it into the knob and screwed it into place until it was pushing on the plastic on the bottom. I figure I can reinstall the screw and go deeper into fresh plastic if I had to.
It works. I found a better place in the door for it to park. The big reason It was not staying in place was that when that bracket broke, I pulled everything out and got rid of a few things. It never packed together the same again.

Next week, I need to work a whole lot more on the dragon. I also should start on the face vase. For the face vase, I will decide which eyes will go together as the spacing is different all the way around, and then cut down below the eyes to leave a nose in between. I have learned that making a good, visible start on a project makes the whole project seem to go faster.

I will see what I actually do next week.

New Book News For Nancy!!!!

2012-01-27T18:23:00.000-08:00

Yeah, it's happened again folks. I have a new book out! This one is an anthology collection of three stories. So here it is:

TALES OF THE VAGABOND BARDS

This is a collection of three previously never released short stories set in the same world as FORTUNE'S PAWN but in a different time and area. If you like rousing adventures in a backdrop of a big fantasy world where magic and faith often collide, then this is the book for you. Available right now on
Createspace https://www.createspace.com/3778916 &
Amazon.com. http://www.amazon.com/Tales-Vagabond-Bards-Nancy-Hansen/dp/1469959909/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1327714297&sr=1-1

This is something you're not going to want to miss!

And along with this book, I am launching my Pro Se Press imprint HANSEN'S WAY. This is going to help me get into print all those short stories based in the same world as FORTUNE'S PAWN. I have 5 individual series that will be running under that banner, and right now the plan it to release at least two of those per calendar year, along with a full length novel. And you are really getting a bargain too, because those anthologies will all be novel length. Lots of good reading there, and perhaps down the road some guest writers will come play in my world.

Now if you'd like to know more about the book, you can click this link:
http://www.pulpmachine.blogspot.com/2012/01/latest-from-pro-se-fantasy-pulp-done.html and read about it. And if you'd care to read an interview with Your's Truly, take a peek at this: http://allpulp.blogspot.com/2012/01/all-pulp-interviews-pulp-fantasy-author.html

I have a lot of fantastic writing things going on right now.

Not too long ago, I was given a battlefield promotion and am now Assistant Editor for Pro Se Press http://www.prosepulp.com/ which you can read about here: http://www.pulpmachine.blogspot.com/2012/01/pro-se-announces-new-staff-additions.html And you should read it, because there is news on there about our one and only Lee Houston Jr. and his new position as well.

Lots of really awesome news these days!

Additionally, I just finished my second pass of the book that will be the sequel to FORTUNE'S PAWN today and turned it over to Lee's capable hands for editing. When it comes back, I will make one final read through and send it off. That book will be announced later this year.

And... Lee and I will be on a local radio program for an interview late next month. My understanding is that the show will be taped and archived for a while, and it's available online. So as we get closer to that date, I will have more information up here for you.

Additionally, Lee and I have both been nominated for some PULP ARK AWARDS this year. http://www.pulpmachine.blogspot.com/2012/01/pulp-ark-2012-award-nominations-closed.html If you read through the list you will see that both my novel FORTUNE'S PAWN and Lee's book HUGH MONN PRIVATE DETECTIVE have garnered nominations. Additionally, the wonderful Peter Cooper artwork from my short story THE SILVER PENTACLE: TO KINDLE A FIRE was nominated. And Your's Truly somehow got on the ballot for best author, which is a surprise and an honor, looking at the field of talent there with me.

And I've neglected to mention (because I've been so darn busy) that both Lee and I have signed on to do New Pulp versions of old pulp stories reprinted by Altus Press http://www.altuspress.com/. This new collaboration between Pro Se and Altus is being titled PULP OBSCURA, because we are bringing back to life old pulp characters that never had more than a few stories written about them—with brand new tales in multi-author anthologies. You can read all about that here: http://www.pulpmachine.blogspot.com/2011/12/pulp-obscura-announces-writer-and-first.html

So yeah, 2012 is starting out as a banner year, writing wise. Also a very, very busy one.

Wow...
~Nancy

We're Not Out Of Farm Fresh Summer Catchup Yet!

2012-01-24T19:19:00.000-08:00

Ah yes, summer, and the living was easy. So I have some more random summer pictures from the farm to show you. Most of these are from late July through August.

My view down the walkway toward the garden, first thing in the morning. It rained overnight.

We had a family of crows that came visiting at some point every day. They were noisy but fun to watch. No problems with them in the garden, they seemed to be most interested in hunting grasshoppers in the field.

My sitting area for midday reading and studying. That white lilac gives ample shade. My little companion dog Ariel often joined me on the glider bench.

I am fascinated with the sky here, because you can see so much of it. At my other house, the lot has a lot of big trees with a thick canopy of leaves.

On a nice summer day, we all feel like singing.

That line of white pines along the highway does screen out a lot of road noise. I'm told they were all dug up as seedlings on the hill above my pond.

Wildflowers are the star of the summer meadows and hedgerows. This is Bladder Campion. It has a pale pink tint.

The garden was well grown by then, even for having been put in late. Not much for weeds inside, but the edges were hard to keep up with. We used a lot of mulch, all grass clipping cut in the fields around the house.

Some Lantana and Million Bells I was late getting in. Surprisingly the Lantana did better sitting in the pots in the shade than it did in a flower box in full sun. I still have one of the Million Bells alive in its flower box along with a dragon wing begonia that is in bloom. They are in the dining room not far from my computer desk.

House sparrows are supposed to be nuisance birds and they are aggressive and quarrelsome. But I find them fun to watch because they are always doing something. They love the mixed seed in the feeder.

A good portion of the field around the garden. The pond is off to the right, buried in the brush. I spend a lot of time walking the perimeter with the dog. I guess you could say that this summer, I was outstanding in my field...

Common grackles. You see them fairly often here. They are a bird of the open land.

The summer squashes to the front right did very well, producing over a long season. The winter squash and pumpkins in the back to the right did too. The melons in the middle produced OK, but had no flavor. It was a rainy August.

The pepper plants are looking ragged, losing their lower leaves to some disease. The bell peppers never did well, nor did the frying peppers or eggplant. Only the hot peppers and some yellow banana peppers at the far end produce much of anything. You win some, you lose some.

The 19 tomato plants were late in ripening fruit and the blight disease killed them early, but they produced plenty and I was able to share. No complaints!

Our cucumber trellis decorated with a male goldfinch. The birds love these high perches in the garden where they can watch for insects and worms. We love to watch them dive in and catch bugs. We were overwhelmed with cucumbers and gave tons of them away.

A bunny on the move. They graze the field quite a bit but gave us very little problems in the garden, unlike the resident woodchuck...

A female house sparrow sitting on one of the tomato stakes.

I am told that a red tailed hawk nested up the hill from the pond. We saw them head up there quite often so that is likely the case. Love to watch them soaring—so graceful!

I think this little male house sparrow is keeping a weather eye on that hawk!

Synchronized feeding.

The tops of those pine trees are another favorite lookout perch.

Eat and poop, eat and poop... What a life!

My little wild corner by the door. No I did not plan that, it's a tough area to mow and the weed whacker was broken. Late summer Queen Anne's Lace, brown seed heads of common dock, wild grasses, goldenrod budding up and in the far background, orange daylilies. Nature likes to plant Her own gardens.

Typical one bowl harvest. The tasty fruits of my labors. I only had two basil plants but they produced amazing amounts of fragrant leaves.

A male house sparrow in an autumn olive bush. That stuff grows wild all over this property and it is quite invasive. It has tons of fall berries that the birds love, so gets replanted prodigiously.

You can't get more peaceful than this.

Basking in those last golden rays, at the end of the day. Robins hunt from sunrise to sunset.

There must be one more bug in here somewhere! Poor little things, they work so hard to feed their ever-hungry brood.

Must be quite a life when you spend half your time expecting something to jump out of the bushes and try to eat you. And we humans think we have stress!

The shadows are long now, the sun is going down. Time to wrap it up. But there's always the possibility of that one last worm or beetle...

Plenty of sunshine still up here, and you can see all over the place. A male redwing blackbird showing off his luscious plumage.

Hey, what's he doing up there? A robin and three starlings.

Dusk finally falls and the sky begins to color up from the setting sun.

Sunsets are often magnificent here. As it sinks below the horizon, the sky glows around it. And you know what that means...

THE END!

Catch you next time,
~Nancy

Did You Write? Jan. 23, 2012

2012-01-23T15:29:00.000-08:00

Did You Write? Jan. 23, 2012

It is that time of the week again to tell about what is going on in your life and what is going on with your writing, and what life is interfering with your achieving your goals.
The idea is that if you post regularly, you will be able to use the perceived public shame to force you to develop good habits.
We don't care how much you write. If it is more than you would have before you started posting, the better we like it. Just opening a project to read is sometimes enough.

What is writing is not really important. We all know new writing is writing, but so is editing, even if it is the work of others. Critiquing is a form of editing and that also counts. Poetry, blogging, articles, writing assignments, Synopsis, Query letters, technical writing, world or character development are all writing. Even E-mails and Bulletin board posts can be writing, as long as they are very wordy and pertain to writing or story. If you have to ask if it is writing, the answer will always be yes.

I have had a lot of life interfering with my writing. I accomplished very little. I did write a two page plot line for my Spirit of Vengeance two. My original version was basically the moments leading up to a big fight. No real story. I started writing a new version based on things that developed in the first story which I sent off to the publisher. I saw that it was going to need more guidance than just writing it out, so this week, I wrote out a two page plot for the story. It is not quite right but is close.
The problem with my writing, which I have always had, is that I never give my characters a chance to fail. they aim for the problem and then skirt it and come out happily ever after. In this plot line, I want to be a bit sadistic for my character so that failure on a number of fronts will be possible. I am after having the most pressing problem solved, but know that there are other problems to deal with. I don't want TO BE CONTINUED, but also have "expect more."

I am keeping up on the story ideas. I am now running late so I don't have time to do a compost pile count. I know it is over 45 but am not going to count to find out how much more.

As to the question of the day

YES, I DID WRITE

DID YOU WRITE?

Week 628 Woodworking

2012-01-22T15:23:00.000-08:00

Year 12, Week 2, Day One (week 628) (January 17, 2000 was my first carving day.) 01-21-12 Saturday

57 degrees early morning, 80 degrees around noon. Blue skies with some puffs here and there. A light breeze that was barely noticeable. This weather report is brought to you by the City Of Oakland Park Department of Tourism.

THURSDAY.

During the week, I sanded and finished the bird I made a few weeks ago. I added about ten coats of varnish and came up with a gloss, even though it really needed to have a lot more sanding that it did not get. I dug out one of the bird ornaments I made that was similar to the big one I made.

My stylized birds the small one was an ornament I made this year.

The turning club meeting happened. Other than remembering to bring something to show off, bringing my camera, and myself, I forgot a whole bunch of things. We had gone two years without a newsletter and want to get it started again. I needed to make a list so the guys could write down what they brought and what it was made of, and we would put it into the newsletter. I forgot about the list.
One guy made a chess set. That was something I had considered doing several times. He worded it perfectly. “The first piece is fun. The other 31 pieces are a lot of work.”

The demonstration was on finishing, using wipe-on poly. he did it differently than what I do. It was good to see. One big thing is I don't sit and sand. The only thing I do is sit and play on the computer. If it is not fully sanded when it comes off the lathe (which is unlikely), it barely gets sanded again. I break a whole bunch of other rules when it comes to finishing and that is just where my lack of quality starts.

SATURDAY.

We did a little bit of yard sailing. at one yard sale, I picked up a pair of toaster oven pans.

pans for the toaster oven.

At another, I picked up an unopened package of DRAGON NATURALLY SPEAKING. This is a speech-to-text program. I had an much older version of the program and had difficulty remembering the editing commands. It really won't help me too much as I type faster than I talk. It does read back to you and that is sometimes useful in editing.

DRAGON NATURALLY SPEAKING voice to text software.

I did no woodworking today. We heard about a "city wide" yard sale and an art show at the same place. We went down there. The yard sale was not spectacular, not big. There were about ten or twelve booths.
We then went in to the art show. All I can say is,,,, WOW! It was fantastic.
It was the art of the HIGHWAYMEN, which were Black Florida artists who in the 50s, could not get into galleries to sell their work. They would set up on the side of the road and sell their paintings of the Florida landscapes. A reporter gave them the name of highwaymen.

Robert L Lewis, one of the highwaymen artists, with the painting he did while we were watching.

About the highwaymen
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Highwaymen_%28artists%29

for pictures of their work,
http://www.ebay.com/sch/items/highwayman%20paintings?_dmd=1&_sop=12

One of the men painted a scene of a BALD CYPRESS pond scene. While watching him work, I realized I did everything wrong in my last attempt to paint. From the time he started applying his colors for the sky, to the moment he put his signature on it, it was a pretty painting and needed nothing more. It was impressive to watch him work. Of course, my camera was in the car.
Someone wanted to purchase the painting before he was done. He had a fun banter, told stories, joked around while he worked. His shoulder was bothering him so lifting his arm for the high corners was tough on him.
I ended up purchasing a mouse pad and had him sign it. He had paintings that were extremely impressive with the colors he had, but I decided on a more muted colored mouse pad.

Robert L Lewis painting printed on a mouse pad, autographed to me

After he finished the painting, we went directly back to mom's house and after I took pictures of my stuff, I went home. I needed to recover from being up well past my bed time on Thursday.

Tomorrow, I MUST work on the dragon. I now know how I want it to be. I now have to remove the wood to show everybody else the dragon inside it. Besides the face vase, I have four other projects I really want to work on, and about ten others in mind.

I will see what I actually do tomorrow.

Year 12, Week 2, Day two (week 628) (January 17, 2000 was my first carving day.) 01-22-12 Sunday

64 degrees early morning, 75 degrees when I got out back, 80 degrees when I left at two. Skies were feathers and mesh beneath a blue sky, but puffs showed up and got heavier and heavier as the day went on. it was mostly sunny though. The breeze was not really noticeable until it gusted, sending sawdust all around. This weather report is brought to you by the City of Pompano Beach Department of Tourism.

I had every intention to work on my dragon. I kept looking at it, planning on painting where the limbs and tail was going to go. I just had to take care of a few things first.

The beast of the back yard has been flighty as of late. today, He decided to want attention, and I decided to give him quite a bit, though not as much as he really wanted. he showed his beast-hood by swatting at me a couple times later in the morning when I was giving him attention when all he wanted was company.

I decided to quickly modify that ring I made last week when I made my sanding disk. Since the disk was smaller than the blank I had, I had cut through the wood to release a ring, saving the wood.
Today, I decided the ring was way too thick on the circumference so I wanted to remount it on the lathe. I got the bright idea of taking a disk I had that had a glued on tenon, and trued it up and then tape my ring to it.

The original form of the dream catcher ring.

I worked on the front of the disk and got it nice and flat, though I had some ripples in it, and I trued up the wobble on the edge, and was cleaning up the back a little. the glue was not really well done which was why it was wobbly. I applied some extra pressure on the back side and it popped off and went flying. The glued on tenon was still in the chuck.
I still wanted to mount the ring. I did not have another blank with a tenon on it, so I went to plan be. Since I had flattened the face of the board, and I saw the crossed lines that I had drawn when it was still a square twelve by twelve board, I opened my chuck wide, and stuck the point of the tail stock on the center of the crossed line. After I slipped the ring over the tail stock and moved it so it was out of the way, I cranked the tail stock in as hard as possible so there would be little or slippage or movement of the blank. I then trued up what was once the back side, and then held the ring to the blank while drawing lines to indicate where the ring needed to sit and be centered.
I messed up slightly on the alignment but not enough to see when holding the ring. I used double sided foam tape to hold it in place. the squares were a bit old but tacky enough.
I cut in on the inner edge of the ring, creating an inset from the front. I just about had it the way I wanted. I needed to make the inset a bit thinner front to back.

Dream catcher ring mounted on the lathe with some of the reveal already cut away.

All the sudden, the ring flew apart. I had noticed a shrinkage crack across the center of the disk I was using and half expected it to be what broke, but it was spinning nicely on the lathe.
I picked up the visible pieces and laid them on the work bench to glue them together, then had to go get one more piece to make it round. It had broken into five pieces. two long side pieces, one medium piece on the bottom, and two short pieces on top.
I glued them together as straight as possible and placed weights against it on the sides to clamp them together since regular clamps would not work without gluing it in sections first.
I later filled the gaps with sawdust and glue. I then drilled little holes around the inner rim that I will slip thread through. this will need a lot of sanding before it will be ready to finish up.
After it is finished, I will string a spider web and dangle some carved leaves that came from a carved bowl I broke. it will be sort of like a stylized dream catcher.

Dream catcher ring, glued back together, drilled fr string, with the possible arrangement of the pieces of leaf bowl set in it. The rest of the bowl is outside the ring.

A friend suggested that I try that stylized bird but as an owl. I decided to test the idea. I had a yellow pine four by four and cut a piece off. I first made the cone that would become the tail. I then shaped the body. I almost had the body and made it smaller as it was just too big.
When I started the head, I cut it way down as it felt way too big. I made it a horned owl so I did a partial cone to create the horns.. Once I took that off the lathe, I used my disk sander that happened to have 60 grit to cut away the bottom of the cone. It is a lot safer than the band saw. I then shaped the head on the disk sander.
I drilled the head and body for a skewer to hold them together and that was when I saw that the head was really a bit too small. I glued the head on anyway. I then decided it needed a different base. Digging through my wood pile, I found an old piece of weathered wood, I am not sure what it was. I trimmed off the end with a few knots from broken branches and since it was a splitting, I cut the wedge off to create a flat bottom.
I decided to have two legs rather than the one leg of the original design, so I drilled into the base of the body and added bamboo skewers. I then drilled matching holes in the base and glued it in place. The head is really too small and I really need to add a beak.
It is not bad, but I may well replace the head, making it bigger. I will see.

Owl. Needs a beak I may make a bigger head also.

I have a metal hammer with brass insert pounding surfaces. I use that on my lathe to tighten the tail stock since the handle broke. I pound on the side of the remains of the handle to tighten or loosen.
The brass heads were always unscrewing themselves. I had the waxed paper from the double sided foam squares, so I stuck a piece of that into the threads of the heads and screwed them on. I had to clamp the head on one and twist the hammer around to tighten it. they are not going to want to come off any more.

I received some coal for Christmas and decided to experiment. I took two pieces and soaked them in varnish. I did not know how deep it would soak into the coal but was worth the try.
I intended to place it on the mini lathe and machine it. Since I had the dremmel out, I placed a cutting disk on it and cut some pieces off it to make it easier to work with.
While coal looks pretty, it is a soft material. the black powder that came off the cutting disk stuck to everything. The varnish did not soak in very much by the looks of it. Soaking it in super glue might be better.
After I shape it, I would give it some hard finish to protect it. I will have to see how it works on the mini lathe later. I know I will be cleaning up a mess.

Original pieces of coal with varnish on it

coal after I cut up one piece.

I really needed to do SOMETHING on the dragon. the day was late and I was having to make a couple stops on the way home, so I cleaned up and left without touching the dragon. I did not touch the face vase either. My only excuse I can claim is that the ring is all work to be done at home and the bird was a test and will be home finishing also.
Next week, I MUST do work on the dragon. I don't have very many weekends left and it has to get close to looking finished long before time so I can get the finish exactly the way it needs to be. The finish I am planning is going to take about a month.
The face vase also needs to be done the same time. Faces are not really easy to do for me so it is going to take some time to get that done.
I must not procrastinate any more.

I will see what I actually do next weekend.

January 16, 2012 Did You Write?

2012-01-16T16:15:00.000-08:00

January 16, 2012 Did You Write?

I am short on time so I am making this short.
The idea of this note is to entice those of us who don't write regularly to try to develop good writing habits. By posting at this note every week, the urge to write during the past week so you can report well will become stronger.

I generally list things that can be writing in these notes. The essence is that if you have to ask if it is writing, it is. And we don't care much as to how much. It could be a goal of opening some work in progress to writing thousands of words during the week.

As for me, my writing has been slim. Long work days and home stuff that needed to be done got in the way. I am getting a better ides as to where my new story is going. I should do a story idea version of it to act as a guide, but I tend to actually try to write first.
I have a major problem in my stories. the best stories have where the character is at the very edge of failure and somehow pulls it out. My plots never get my character into that situation. I noticed it in something I wrote recently. I cannot seem to give my character a chance to fail. I have to work on that. I have come up with a problem my character has to solve and it is going to relocate one of the scenes I already wrote to near the end of the story. That requires re-plotting again in my barely designed guidelines (plot).

On the story idea front, including what I am posting tonight, I have 51 story ideas in my compost pile. I came up with four ideas just tonight. A lot of the new ones look like they will be good to write. I like that. I prefer ideas that are in the stack because I have not had a chance to write it, not that I decided to write something else.

I made some visible headway on one of two carving projects intended for the art show in March. One of the projects is a dragon carved in wood. I have a long way to go on that. I am sort of afraid to make a mistake so have been hesitating too much.
The other project is a vase with five faces carved on it. I just had to get myself to mount the wood on the lathe to make it into a vase. I have more to do on hollowing the vase out, but I have the outside formed and can start carving the faces. I now just have to decide what the faces will look like based on my carving skills.
Of course there are small fun things that I need to work on too. The dragon is both the easiest and the hardest piece to work on. The wood gives me the basic shape, but I have to make sure the limbs are in the right position and that is the hard part. Once I get it going, it should go very quickly, other than my power carving creates dust and I get quite covered on bad days.
I started woodworking Saturday, January 17, 2000. This last weekend was my official celebration of my wood start of woodworking. Too bad my work does not look like I have all those years in it. I only work on weekends and holidays so it takes longer to accumulate real hours of woodworking compared to doing it as a serious hobby or as a profession.

Using the above as a story idea,
He made religious icons.,They had to be made very carefully, using the proper chants to get the magic right. Sometimes he might take a standard type of wood and make the shape out of that, or he used wood that resembled the final shape, which was extremely powerful.
Using the shaped wood was also dangerous. One had to get the shape out of the wood right or it could turn on him. He once got in trouble when he found a piece of wood that resembled a lion. He got some of the detail wrong and it came alive and attacked him. He had to cut it apart to stop it. He then had to find all the bits and pieces and dispose of them using the proper chants to destroy the demon spirit that had entered it.
at the moment, he has a piece of wood that resembles a dragon. He has a deadline to get the dragon done, but he is in panic to get it right. Dragons cannot be stopped by carving tools.

As to the question of the week,

I can honestly say, with some shame of how little,

YES I DID WRITE

DID YOU WRITE?

Week 627 Woodworking

2012-01-15T16:07:00.000-08:00

Year 12, Week 1, Day One (week 627) (January 17, 2000 was my first carving day.) 01-14-12 Saturday

53 degrees early morning, 56 when I got out back, 64 when I left at noon. high and bright pebbly clouds in almost complete cover, though some blue shown between the pebbles. A nice breeze strong enough to move a little bit of sawdust and take the heat away from you if you are not bundled. Tomorrow morning it is supposed to be even colder. This weather report is brought to you by the city of Pompano Beach department of tourism.

Tuesday is the 17th. This weekend is the twelfth anniversary of my starting in wood working. Before then, I would go to Mom's house with my laptop computer and write. I would also sit at the kitchen table and make buildings for my model railroad.
For a year or two, my dad kept asking me to learn carving. I had no interest. One day it dawned on me that my dad was in his 80s. I decided I did not want that "I wish I had said, I wish I had done," feeling after his passing. On the 17th, I borrowed one of his knives, and took a piece of wood (I think it was shaped to make shingles for bird houses).
I remember when he was learning carving, he had difficulty in getting out of the square of the wood. He was afraid to dig into the wood for fear of making a mistake. He essentially surface carved the wood on all sides. By this time, though, he was doing good carvings.
I was determined not to make the mistakes he was making, and I dug deep into the wood. I gave my character a big nose and cut in for the neck and body. He was supposed to have a brim going all the way around his head, but it kept breaking off. It ended up being more like a flat topped ball cap. When I was done, it looked like a french Foreign legion soldier.
My next two carvings were from boards. I know one was a sailor, but I will have to check tomorrow what the other one was. I am thinking like a cowboy, but am not sure.

This is my very first carving The brim of the hat was supposed to go all the way around but kept breaking so it ended up off center.

This is my second carving.

This third carving was from a cedar board I grabbed. Cedar is not a good carving wood as it splinters easily.

This fourth carving I posed myself to get the position right. I messed up on the arms and I also learned I don't like sanding with this carving.

At this time, my dad loved to do characters standing straight and tall with their arms down their sides. My forth carving was a kneeling man. I positioned myself to find how to put everything. I messed up on his arms but otherwise he was very well made. What I was after in my carvings was do something different than what Dad was doing.
The style of carving that dad did was an Ozark style where you could see the knife cuts in the form, basically different planes of the surface caused by the knife cuts.
My style is based on that, but because I sort of shave rather than cut my way through the wood, I lose that Ozark style in the translation. My style of showing the planes are a bit sloppy.
When I started wood turning in 2003, Dad thought all that could be done was spindle turning -- baseball bats, candle sticks, chair legs, etc. I learned later that he was really impressed that I could make bowls and plates and other non-spindle things. I know he would be impressed with the turning I am turning now.
My dad died five years ago and I am happy he passed on his love of wood and carving to me.

I am really self taught in carving. What my dad used to do was, "I would show my dad my carving and he would pat me on the head and say 'very good, do another one.'" He taught me some things around carving but the actual carving was on my own. made my own designs and patterns for the carvings I did.

DURING THE WEEK

My boss brought in some pots and pans and let me take them. His wife decided these were just too heavy to use any more and let them go.
These are ceramic coated cast iron pans. Being STAUB made in France, these are not cheap.

Pan set with trivet and baking pan that cooks slices in place.

I had sent out my entry fee the previous week for the art show. I forgot to mention that last weekend.

Saturday

We went yard sailing. At one yard sail I got a plastic display rack. It expands out to nearly double the width. I will make use of it for the art show in March. I have a bunch of stepped wire racks but this covers quite a distance and has good surfaces for setting things.

This display shelf is two parts. the second part that hides inside can be pulled out to make the display twice as long.

On the way home, I stopped at another yard sale and picked up a pair of rachet tie downs and a couple tooth paste squeezers.

I picked these up for a pittance.

Also on the way home, I picked up some ink for the printer I got last week. That was expensive.

Last weekend, I got some foil mini loaf pans. They worked nice and fit in my toaster oven. I had considered getting some metal ones which were a bit more expensive but would last for years. Foil does not hold up.
It then dawned on me that I have this mini loaf baking unit. It had eight mini loaf pans connected together. The foil pan holds two cups while these hold only one cup. The weld had broken on the wire holding them together. Years ago, I had considered cutting the wire to split them up but could not bring myself to do so.

The baking pan set The center weld on the left had broken. this set was just too big to fit in my toaster oven.

I relocated the pans and took them with me. I showed my mom and said I have the choice of having my brother weld it back together, Or I could cut them apart. She said, "Cut them apart." She wanted me to leave some of them together. I decided having them all separate makes them more useful.
I dug out the dremmel and went to work on cutting apart the welds. These pans are aluminum so the metal is soft. I took shortcuts on the process by cutting most of the weld and then twist the pan to the wire to free it. On the ends of two pans, the weld was more extensive than the others. Most of the welds were just between the side of the pan and the wire. On those two pans, the weld also connected to the lip of the pan. I broke the lip off in the process of removing them.
I had to pound the dents out a little bit. I used the vice for some of the work to flatten the bends out.
What I like about these little pans is that they are a good serving. Just enough.

This is the set after I cut them apart. The wire is behind the pans. the two pans on the right shows the left edge broken where the weld went deeper than on the other welds.

Since it was cold, I decided to do some wood turning rather than sit and carve. The turning would have me moving around and I would stay a little warmer. Remember, I am used to having lows in the 80s, not 50s.

The original log I was making the face vase out of.

I mounted the face vase log on the lathe. I was not totally sure which way the knots were oriented in the log. The branches of Norfolk Island Pine grow pointing up slightly. As you cut into the wood, cutting away the ends of the knot, the knot will drift down toward the base of the wood.

The face profile completed. the center ring is the tip of the nose. the ripple on the right is the lips

I was not completely sure which end was down. I took some measurements and then started cleaning the surface of the wood. The tree had received damage and there was a layer of pitch beneath part of the wood. I needed to cut beyond that for most of the carving. After I cut away some of the surface, I re-measured the knots. I was working on the downward end of the tree. That was perfect as that was the way I wanted the knots to go when I carve the face for the eyes.
I shaped the outside, leaving the end of the nose near the original surface, sloping down to where the eyes should be, coming back up for the brow and then to the lip of the vase.
I turned the piece around because the "banjo" the base of my toll rest would not fit beneath the wood, and I shaped the bottom of the nose and then added a bulge for the lips, then cut in and back out for the chin. All of this was well below the nose and where the cheeks will be. I also shaped the bottom around the tenon so that all I have to do is to flatten the bottom where the tenon is to finish it up.
I finally turned it back around and started hollowing on the inside. I decided to leave the tenon in place in the middle so I can turn it around again if needed. Since this is a nice and big piece, I just cut beside the central tenon.

Starting to hollow it out

One of the big problems with this kind of vase is that I am not totally sure how deep I will have to carve to get the looks I am after. I am turning it thick and hope to re-mount it on the lathe after the face is done and finish the interior and the ends.

two views of hollowing out the vase. the center column can be used to hold the work in the chuck and I may try to save it to make something else out of it later.

Because I worked on the face vase, I feel like I accomplished something substantial. I can point to it and say "See what I did?"

Tomorrow, It will be colder. I plan to finish turning the inside of the vase to reduce the weight so it will be easy to handle when carving the faces. I might also turn something fun while I am at it. There are several designer bowls that I have seen made that I would like to try.
I should do some carving on the dragon. A little bit will add up over time.
I will see what I actually do tomorrow.

Year 12, Week 1, Day Two (week 627) (January 17, 2000 was my first carving day.) 01-15-12 Saturday

46 degrees early morning, 58 when I got out back at eight, 68 degrees by ten and 74 in the after noon. The sky was a soft blue with angel feathers laying high up here and there. They were moving fast. Some small puffs zipped by but mostly the sky was wide open. A brisk breeze had some gusts that sent sawdust really flying. The sun sure felt good, my brother and nephew set up their chairs so they were right in the sun for most of the time they were out back. This weather report is brought to you by the city Of Pompano Beach Department Of Tourism.

I got my equipment out with my first intention of finishing the hollowing of the face vase. I then was thinking that I should carve. My plans changed.
In the olden days, they would have a dead center. Basically a nail in the tail stock that the work spun on. The problem is that the nail would make the hole a bit bigger in diameter and one would lose accuracy the more it spun. Also it would drill its way into the wood which would eventually require regular tightening of the work. It left a big mark in the work where it was riding.
The advent of ball bearings allowed for a smaller effect on the end of the wood. It dug in less, or not at all, and it reduced the friction with the wood and making the hole bigger.
The ball bearing of my tail stock has interchangeable points. It has two kinds of cone points, one point is a cone that extends to the shoulders. Another steps to a shaft and to a small point. this one is missing. I have five other points, a cup that is a reverse cone, a cut that is straight in, a hollow that has a hole going all the way through for drilling, and a point that has a sharp ring and then a tiny point in the center.

I have some baskets that has tools, parts, and junk in. I decided the missing point was in those baskets. I decided to do something about finding it.
I took the baskets off the cart and unloaded them on the table. I sort of separated the stuff as I went, materials for making tools went in one area, parts in another, pieces in another, and tools some place else.
I found many things that disappeared, sinking out of sight. I then restocked things in a different arraignment.
I have small sections of PVC pipe that act like tool holders on the side of my lathe. I have copper fittings that will act like the ferrule for tools to hold the wood together in a handle where the tool fits into it. I have small pieces of copper pipe that I picked up with the idea of making them into plug cutters by filing saw teeth into the ends of them and using a drill to drive them. I have tubing for other uses I may well have forgotten about.
I have metal rods that will eventually become cutting tools, or tool holders. I also have lots of handles or wood that started to be handles. I also found a bunch of cutting bits in need of handles.
In my digging, I found several tool posts that fit on my lathe. One is a flat bar with a bolt on one end to be used ti leverage the tool into the side. I have two others that are jointed for getting the right angle inside a piece of wood for good purchase of the tool. I could have used one of them yesterday.
I have a four jaw chuck where you move each jaw separately. It is usually used in metal working where you can adjust it to the exact center you are after, to thousandths of an inch. I figured out that I can use it for off center turning. I have used it once for that and that was an experiment. Another jaw I have has what is called a cole jaw. The Cole jaw are flat plates that attach to your chuck and there are a bunch of holes in it. It comes with rubber-bumper screws. One can place the lips of a rather large piece in it and clamp it down. It holds work far larger than normal jaws could hold. I also have a bunch of face plates, some were for holding rails in place. The threads are messed up on them, but I do have a threader for that. My brother returned a face plate to me that is a real heavy one with eight screw holes.

Once I had the baskets under control, I decided to take care of two supposedly quick projects. One was to use the face plate to make a sanding disk for the lathe and the other was to use one of my high speed steel metal pieces to make a ultra thin parting tool. I had a handle that it should work with.
I started with the cutting tool first. The handle was Sea grape and it had a shrinkage crack in it. My first step was to remove the copper fitting that I used for the ferrule. A bit of pounding of a hammer on a screw driver along the edges of the fitting to drive it off.
I then ran the band saw through the shrinkage crack, stopping where the ferrule met the handle. I forced the thin blade into the saw Cerf and then drove the ferrule back on. The blade was not fixed in place. I drove some shaved bamboo skewers on each side of the blade into the slots to lock it in place. I then dribbled a lot of super glue into the cracks from every angle. I also used a filler for super glue in the shrinkage crack to fill it in.
After that had set long enough, I mounted it in the lathe with the chuck locking down on the ferrule and cleaned up the handle, sanding it through several grits. I gave it a single coat of varnish. I will give it a few more to protect it and make it look a bit better.

thin parting tool with a sea grape handle.

My second project was to make my sanding disk. I had some yellow pine disks I had created for making plates and bowls. I centered and screwed the face plate in place and then mounted it on the lathe. I trued the edge first, then flattened the front, checking with a ruler to see if it was flat all the way across. I was surprised I got it first try.
I then measured for my eight inch sand paper. I had a couple inches to spare. I could have just turned the excess wood into shavings, but I remembered a project I wanted to work on a year or two ago. I made the excess wood into a ring, cutting a slot near the edge of where the sandpaper was going to go. I rounded the ring so only where I cut through would be sharp . I used my parting tool on this. It worked well but it decided to dig in here and there, partially breaking through at those points while leaving other parts kind of thick. I cut a partial groove on the back side where I could see the holes in the groove. I took it off the lathe and used my carving knife to cut through the rest of the way.

Yellow Pine ring cut from disk

I trued up the edge of the remaining disk, removing some gouges I put into the face and angled the back so the edge was about an inch thick. I stuck my peel-and-stick sand paper onto the face of the disk and it fit nicely. I then got some rubber cement. I put rubber cement on the edge of the disk, and more rubber cement on a strip of emery cloth that I measured to fit on it.
I planned on have an ever-so-slightly overlap between the ends. The top of the disk comes down towards you. I planned on having the end overlap the lead to guarantee that the edge would not catch. I made a second cut and the ends wound up exactly in place.
The I had let the rubber cement dry a little so it was just a little tacky and then put the two pieces together. this is how you make the strongest bond between two pieces. It becomes like contact cement.
My first test of the sanding disk was to use it to clean up the rough edges and interior of the ring I had made. It worked nicely. I used the top to sand inside the circle and get the back corner.
My nephew was needing to sand something and I let him use the lathe sander. I took the tool rest that had the bolt in it and that gave him a flat area to act like a sanding table.
This was a successful project. My lathe is not as fast as the disk sander, but I can adjust the speed, run it really slow when I have to do careful work or run it quite fast when I need it.

Sanding disk in use

I took out my mini lathe after I cleaned up the big lathe and decided to see how bamboo machines. I made a mistake and applied too much pressure to the tail stock and it split out the bamboo. I did see that it will machine some. I did not do enough to find out if there are any real problems. I can see where it would be nice to bring bamboo down to a specific diameter.

My brother and nephew came just before lunch and my nephew decided he wanted to make a brass guard for a sword. He needed to make a wooden pattern for it. He took a piece of wood, drew a design on it and cut it out on the band saw. He used my lathe sander to clean it up some.

We mostly talked while I cleaned up the area, discussing sword design and composition, machining and science.

Next week, I have to work on the dragon foremost and then on the face vase. I can carve on the face vase as it is now since I removed a lot of the weight from it. I have plenty of wood inside so I can dig in as much as needed. I will then finish hollowing it out and make any corrections in the turned outside that is needed.

I have a turning club meeting on Thursday. I only have the turned bird to show off this time. I might dig out some of the bird ornaments I made and show them off with it to show how they look big and small. I have some sanding and more varnishing to do on that bird.

I will see what I actually do next weekend.

CROCHET

2012-01-14T15:24:00.000-08:00

I've not been doing too much on crochet as of late. I finally finished a piece I worked on in the truck. When I first learned Granny Squares, I decided to make one using triple crochet to see if it would work. I did not go very far with it. I located that attempt and made a double crochet granny square around it. It turned out to be a bit floppy inside, but I kept going. that piece is finally finished.

My latest granny square. the yellow center was triple crochet and I did not adjust for the extra size so it is a little floppy.

I now need to get off my duff and start assembling my little blanket as the mother that I am making this for is due in a couple months. These are not all the same size so I figure I will adjust for that when I link them together.

All my finished squares laid out.

My plan is to make the whole thing bigger by building a single color field around all the squares. I planned on using navy blue for my background color, but I laid out my blue and my red yarns, and found I had a lot more red yarn to work with.

My red and blue yarn together. Notice I have ore red yarn than blue yarn.

I do not know how much yarn this will use so I will go for what I have a lot of and see how it comes out. I have several skeins of yarn of a close but not quite right red that I can also use if needed.

All my red yarn, including off color yarns I can work with .

Since my squares are not all at the same size, I will adjust with the border between them. For a baby blanket, it really does not have to be much bigger than it is.

I have some small squares that I will work in the car to make them as big as the others. I figure I will have them done before I get the blanket finished to a point where I will need them.

small squares I need to enlarge.

Did you write? 01-09-12

2012-01-09T15:41:00.000-08:00

Did you write? 01-09-12

It is another week. It is time to report what is going on in your life, and in your writing. The idea is to report here every week, whether you write or not, and hopefully, start feeling guilty for not meeting goals, or not writing at all.

As to what is writing, it can be anything. New writing is writing. So is editing since we seldom write perfectly the first time, and editing of other people's works also counts. Critiquing is also writing. so is Technical writing, writing assignments, blogging, world and character creation, synopsis. Even board posts and E-mails can be writing if they are very wordy and pertain to writing or story. In essence, if you have to ask if it is writing, it is.

How much writing is not important either. It could be one word, or it could be ten thousand words. It is the act of trying to create the habit of opening some work in and applying effort to them each week and hopefully it will become a daily habit.

AS for me, I did not do near as much as I had hoped. I worked late quite a bit during the week so had very little production. I only added little over 1300 words this week to my SPIRIT OF VENGEANCE TWO. A real pittance compared on what I was hoping to add. I did write a big blast, then went over it several times, editing it to make it a bit better, but still, my word count was not what it should be. I will say that I have a better idea of what is going to happen in this story and how it is going to happen. It is the process of getting there will be the big project.
I am completely rewriting my second story. Other than portions of a fight scene and a couple characters, the first version will not be used. I really did not have a story there. My first story had changed so drastically from what I started with. This second story had nothing of the changes. Starting over was the easy way to go. All the new story lines, characters and situations that the last version of the first story gained, has to be added to this new one. I am still surprised at how the first story had changed so much from the original story Idea I based it on.

ON the story idea front, I ran into a little problem this week. I was writing a story idea and my computer threw a fit. I lost it. I wrote it over again and put it in my saved file where I hang onto the story ideas until I post them. When I was getting ready to post, I somehow overwrote the story with the one before. THEN, I rewrote the story, and when I put it in the file, I saw it was the same idea as the one before it, the one I had used to overwrite it.
I finally go that story idea written and tonight I got caught up for the day. Sheesh!
I do have 51 stories in the compost pile not counting what I am posting tonight. I like having loads of easy to post ideas such as I have now.

I picked up some hand saws this weekend at a yard sale. they were dirt cheep so I got three of them. they had been left outside for a while. I had sanded the rust off and decided to give them a try. I cut a piece of soft wood and they did a very good job. The saw wandered a little when I changed from one end to the other on the wood and ended up having to use a power saw to finish the cut. I was quite satisfied with the results in spite of that.
I have to admit that this was the first time I had actually done some real cutting with a hand saw. I am not in the shape to want to do it too often, but it was an interesting experiment. Another nice thing was that it cleaned up the blades really well.

Using the above as a story idea, he had worked with the old time energy tools quite often. his workshop was cobbled up of tools that he got cheaply. Modern energy tools did a better job of making things, but he did well enough with what he had.
One day, he got his hands on really old technology. He got some saws where the blades were not pure energy, but instead had a solid plate to guide the energy of the cutting edge. It was so old school. He decided to give it a try.
He assumed the energy teeth would slide down the panel that made the frame to do the cutting. He quickly found that the blades just sat there and burned into the wood. He actually had to work the saw back and forth for the energy teeth to do their cutting. He had seen it on vid-image and heard tips of using these kind of saws.
He worked with it, pushing and pulling it across the wood and watched as it slowly sunk through the slot created in the wood. He knew his technique as bad as it was not straight cutting down. He finished it off with one of his more modern energy tools where the energy parted the wood cleanly.
He could see the lines caused by the old saw. His new saw showed no such lines. the actual cells of the wood pulled apart as the energy passed, making a polished surface from the cut.
He had no idea when he would need the old saw, but he hang onto it, setting it to the side for that time he would need to use it again.

As to the question of the day,

I can honestly say

YES, I DID WRITE.

DID YOU WRITE?

week 626 Wood Working.

2012-01-08T16:43:00.000-08:00

Year 11, Week 52, Day One (week 626) (January 17, 2000 was my first carving day.) 01-07-12 Saturday

54 degrees early morning, 60 degrees when I got out back, 74 degrees as the high. Blue skies as far as I could see. In this weather, at least in the morning, it is easy to spot the natives and the Snow Birds. The Snow Birds dress like they are in the tropics... This weather report is brought to you by the City of Pompano Beach Department of Tourism.

Yesterday, I stood half the day making blueprints and my feet decided I was on them too long. Today, I could feel it to some degree all day long. Last week when I was on my feet all day long, my feet recovered the next day. I guess I was on my feet more yesterday than last weekend. My feet seemed to mostly recover by the end of the day.

We went Yard sailing. Actually only one yard sale. I spent more than I should have.
I picked up two stylized dragons. They were pretty and I decided to get them. I spent far more on them than I should have. I think they are pretty.

Two dragons. I had to re-shape the legs for them to stand properly.

I got some audio cables, not that I am desperate to use them.

Audio cable

I then got a printer/fax/scanner. The printer I have been using has some problems with the print head. It is gummed up. I got it working once but it stopped up again. This printer was very inexpensive, cheaper than the ink at the store. I have needed a printer for a while and like having the scanner function. It also will take camera memory cards too. Now I have to make sure I don't drop it on the floor like I did the other really good printer I once had....

This is the new printer set in its little cubby hole. I still have to clean up the mess caused by moving stuff around to make room for it as it is bigger than the one I was using..

The shelf bracket of my freezer broke this week. You would be surprised at how much space you lose when that happens. I picked up some ARM AND HAMMER BAKING SODA and dug out my super glue.
Refrigerate your super glue. It will stay good for years or even decades. I had gotten a super glue kit at around the year 2000, and stuck it in the refrigerator. Just recently, I started using the glue.
The plastic of the refrigerator did not conducive to super glue. I had to add accelerator to the joint, the glue on one side and the accelerator on the other and held them together till it was solid. I then added the baking soda and glue, layering it up thick. The baking soda becomes like concrete with the super glue. It is hard to get a stronger joint than this.
I built up the soda glue mixture on both sides, but not in a way to interfere with how it locked into place on the door.
I since installed it back in the freezer and it works nicely. It feels as strong as the other side that was not broken.
I have another bracket that needs repair and might do that tomorrow. Will see.

The freezer bracket with the broken end.

Two views of the repaired bracket. the roughness that can be seen are not in a place to make a difference in its use. That it fits and it holds is all that I care about.

I decided the sand paper on my disk sander needed to be replaced. I had picked up some sand paper last week. The previous time I replaced the sand paper, I had problems with it staying on. This time, I struggled to get the sand paper off. I basically shredded the sand paper in getting it off. It was some work. I finally got the disk clean and installed the next sheet of sandpaper.
I like the course, 100 grit, sand paper for most work. 60 grit is even better for two reasons. Usually, we are horsing off wood to get something square and straight. The other is that when the sandpaper gets clogged, the course sand paper will continue to sand a whole lot longer.
I drew "fingers" on the dragon wings, then used the new sandpaper to remove the drawings, twice. I wanted to see if I could get the surface smoother. Nope.

I finished another granny square in crochet. I need to lay out all my granny squares to see what size baby blanket I can make and to see whether I need to make more to square it up. I also like to need to figure out how much needs to be filled in between the squares.
I started a new square today but messed up, it was not coming out square because of a small error that caused more errors on later rows. I pulled it out and will try again later.

Since I am working on Fridays now, I went to the Antique shop today. I disassembled my display completely, swept the floor around it, and set up the display differently. I don't particularly like it, but it is different and that was what I really was after. Changing it around each time makes it look new again.

The display at the antique shop. The image on the left is the way I had it last month. the right hand picture shows how it looks today. Not really much different now that I see the two pictures together. Just a few things were moved around.

At the thrift shop, I saw a drill press attachment for a Dremmel for twenty bucks. I have to talk to my brother and if it is something he would make use of. It would be nice to have, but not really useful as we have small drill presses and big drill presses. I am thinking that it might be useful with the lathe, holding the dremmel while we machine stuff with the grinding bits. I will see.

I played around all day today.
Tomorrow I must start carving on the dragon. I could mount the face vase on the lathe, but I am thinking more that the dragon is farther along and will take a bit of time. Also I get to sit all day long too. I must get some production and now. I don't really have that many weekends to have these two projects done and they are time consuming.

I will see what I actually do tomorrow.

Year 11, Week 53, Day Two (week 626) (January 17, 2000 was my first carving day.) 01-08-12 Sunday

54 degrees early morning, 65 when I got out back, 76 degrees late in the day. Blue skies, sunny, fibrous wisps of clouds soldering across the sky. If there was a wind, I did not notice it. This weather report was brought to you by the City Of Pompano Beach Department of Tourism.

I set up the printer last night and it works wonderfully. It is one nice machine. I found out that each of the inks costs more than the printer. I did not have enough money on me so I held off on getting more ink. I will have spares soon while I have some money to spend.

I stopped at a yard sale on the way to Mom's house.
He had a dozen or so bow style hand saws. He said he left them outside a little bit. I ended up with three of them. When I removed the plastic blade shield and the protected side was in good condition. I sanded the rust off the exposed side on all three blades.
I then took a piece of Norfolk Island Pine wood and cut a slab off it as a test of the blades. Using the saws to cut some wood really cleaned the blades up. I sprayed them with WD 40 and put them away.
I have used hand saws before and this was the best test of the blades I have done. It is still a lot of work.
The blade wandered a little while I was cutting from different sides and ends, so I finished my cut on the band saw.
Three saws with blade guards. The still had plastic held in part of the handle.

The saws I got at the yard sale

The saw in use cutting a slab off a block of Norfolk Island Pine.

The slab of wood and the bock of wood it came from
That layered section was where I used the band saw to finish it off since the saw had wandered.

He had some weight lifting weights. I gave my brother two ten pound disks and a five pound disk which he may machine into face plates for his lathe. I kept two plastic covered lead weights of five pound each. they will end up beneath my lathe to help hold it down when turning off center wood.

These are the weights I got. The three metal weights went to my brother, the two large ones are ten pounds, the three small ones are five pounds.

I got some storage jars with the bail clasps on the lids. I have uses for that kind of container.

These jars will be put to use fairly quickly.

I got to Mom's house and fed the cats and the female pigeon that comes over. she has gotten used to us and will come quite close, though she is wary when she does.

I started carving on my dragon wings. I marred the surface t show what had to be cut in, and then decided I would RE-SAW the wing to make it two thin sheets I drew a line about half way all the way around the edges and then set it up on end on the band saw and carefully followed the lines as I pushed it through. I did quite well on the cut. a quick sanding on the cut side showed that there was no really noticeable wandering. Since the wings will be carved on both sides, any variation of thickness or blade wandering will disappear.

The re-sawed wings and the original mating wing. The two wings with a tiny bit of carving done on them.

I had bit that I had machined the shaft to fit into my Fordum. I found this morning that it would not go into the dremmel chuck. I took out several of my grinding disks for the Dremmel and turned the piece in my hand while waving the grinding disk over the shaft to cut it down. Some grinding disks get eaten up faster than others. When I finally got it to the size to fit the Dremmel Chuck, I put it to use.
this bit has sharp long spikes that eat up wood nicely. It is also broad which covers more surface area that it cuts. It was doing great at cutting into the wood, and shaping it. I am not exactly sure how it happened, but it like got a catch and bent ever so slightly and started vibrating badly.
The metal of the shaft is not designed to be that thin for the forces the bit goes under. It was originally to be used in a fast drill. I will have to straighten it out before I can use it again unless I use a very slow speed.

I carved a bit on the dragon but not enough for anybody to notice. I have that worry that if I do something wrong it might be very difficult to correct. Once I commit myself, the carving will go fast.

Mom had trimmed back a tiny Cleardendon tree that had gone through the bottom of the pot. The main trunk died, but several of them came up from the root. I cut the main trunk off with a jig saw and then carved a little man out of part of it.

Little man made of Cleardendron. I sprayed it with WD-40 to bring out some of the colors of the wood.

I did not accomplish anything like I had hoped. My feet bothered me a little from the past few days of being on them too long so I did not do any turning which might have had more to show for my day.
Next week I MUST get production on my carving. both the face vase and the dragon are going to take a number of weeks even if I am very efficient in my carving. I don't have enough weeks to waste.

I will see what I actually do next week.

Painting Greeting Cards

2012-01-04T16:25:00.000-08:00

Many years ago, I had picked up a teddy bear stamp and decided I was going to stamp my Christmas cards that year. After a very short attempt, I realized that it would be easier to paint the cards. I did like eight cards at that time and while the results were well below what I imagined, they came out pretty good considering that I had not painted in a few years. I skipped a couple years and then started painting cards again and have enjoyed it ever since.

These pictures are slightly out of focus, but you can see what the teddy bear cards looked like.

I give people at work some cards, mail others out, and give some to family. I tend to need two dozen cards for all my giving. The hardest part is to come up with an idea to paint.

The way I work, is to paint one color on all the cards. For example, I will paint a background color. When that dries (I am using acrylic paints), I then add the next color, and do this on all the cards at the same time until it is finished.
I have tried painting something with several brushes each of a different color on each card. That that turned out to be a chore. It is easier to do one color to all the cards at the same time, unless it is something like Christmas lights which are simply dots.

A birthday card for my brother. He liked metal working and was teaching himself how to weld.

Some Mother's day cards I did.

I painted a bunch of these duckling cards and my boss purchased them from me.

My the number of how many cards I can do is really limited to how much room I have to lay them out to dry in. One could do hundreds of cards if one had the space. I don't have space.

I always find that my second batch of cards is always better than the first. I am warmed up to the design and I figured out what I did wrong on the first one. I've figured out how do it better

As these cards are done quickly, the quality of the actual painting is not a professional artist's level, but I have had many people think they were commercially done cards.

With many of the cards, they look like children's paintings until I get deep in my painting. The teddy bear cards were horrible and I considered stopping seeral times, but continued till the painting crystalized.

First and second batches of cards painted in 2009. On the second batch I decided the stringers running down was not needed.

Year 2010 painted Christmas cards. The cornucopia was one that I thought I made a mistake with until I had them nearly done. I made the presents of the second batch look three dimensional.

The first batch of the Year 2011 Christmas cards. These were all given out within two days of being done.

These are the last batch of Christmas cards for 2011. There was a whole lot more I wanted to do to these to make them snap, but I attached them to the packages I had already wrapped and delivered the presents two hours before they were needed. It would have taken more than two hours to make them better.
There were four more cards not in this picture. With two, I set them in the wrong place and they were skipped for later steps. Two needed just a bit more signing and finishing work. I will finish them so I have something to show others later.

Because the Christmas cards are production made and done under pressure, they are never as good as I picture them. If I had done one as a finished painting, it would never reach those goals either.

More Catchup Please!

2012-01-02T21:55:00.000-08:00

From my summer archives of photos, some early July 2011 pictures.

Yeah I am that far behind!

Lots of kewl bird pictures this summer. The birds here are fairly tame and content to go about their business with me sitting nearby, snapping their pictures. I had so much fun watching these guys during my breaks from gardening, I would forget to read the books I brought with me.

Everyone is in a hurry, scurry mode during the nesting season.

You'd swear they were posing on purpose!

The skies are open and magnificent here, it is a very sunny lot. Sun streams in the windows of the house all day long. The garden was just getting going here but for having a late start, it did exceedingly well.

My moon shot, the best one I got all summer. Not bad for someone who is not a real shutterbug. I ♥ digital cameras with nice zoom lenses.

At night, sleeping in the living room in my bed across from the fireplace, I could hear birds in the big chimney. I know we had swifts in there and likely barn swallows too. I had to take a bazillion shots to get a few that were fairly clear.

The swift family groups would swoop around the chimneys in flocks later in the season. The swallows were in the garage and barn too, and they liked to land on the roof. I love watching their aerial ballets. One of the first things that made me fall in love with this place almost 30 years ago was the swallows that zipped back and forth restlessly all day long.

I love the artsy, moody pictures you sometimes get in the late day light, where everything is silhouetted against the sky.

And of course, more of the red winged blackbirds who were with us well into the fall. The feeders brought them in close, and I really enjoyed their company in the garden. It was worth some seed.

Some of the sunsets are dramatic and inspiring.

The tomatoes on their stakes did very well until the heavy rains and blight got them. We picked more than our share, gave a lot away, and ate them until we were sick of them. I'm not complaining!

We got a lot of summer squashes until late summer, when the older plants started to give up the ghost and the younger ones took over.

Did not do well on eggplant...

...or peppers even with the early blossoming. Some sort of plant disease made the leaves fall off, and except for the hot and sweet banana types, the peppers were a flop. Oh well! That's gardening.

I dried a lot of basil from these two plants. The marigolds throughout the garden stayed pretty right up until the first killing frost. They were like a beacon welcoming you in. I've always had marigolds in the garden, they just seem so cheerful.

The vining stuff really takes off once the summer sun gets hot and the days are long and humid. This is cantaloupe...

...and these are watermelons, and yes we did get some of both. The cantaloupe were very prolific but had very little taste. The watermelon had few melons but the ones we ate were really good!

Yep, the tomatoes were setting very well, but you can already see some disease.

I bought a couple sick looking 6 packs of lettuce late in the plant sale season and it did OK. We actually got to eat some of this and it was quite good.

Tomatoes on their stakes and cukes on the trellis in the background. We picked dozens of cucumbers, and let others in to pick too. We gave bags of them away. They were very good most of the summer. One variety lived through the disease season and made it to fall, I think it was the 'burpless' kind.

Trusses of cherry tomatoes setting. I love these little guys for salads and snacking with cheese.

My grandson's pumpkin that he started from seed by himself. It did very well.

All our winter squash and pumpkins did very well, and covered that entire area out into the field. They were holding hands with the tomatoes and cucumbers by season's end.

The last tomato plant I bought and set in was the tallest. My all time favorite variety SUNGOLD, an orange cherry with a winy flavor that I can't get enough of. Love those little globes of liquid sunshine.

Down by the corner of the cucumber trellis a variegated red and yellow marigold held hands with the grandson's nasturtium all summer long. Both seemed to thrive.

Cucumber blossoms setting.

We have vines galore, and baby cukes even!

If sunshine and happy thoughts were a flower, this is what it would look like!

Well we tried to grow some bush string beans...

...but the woodchuck that lives under the office trailer wouldn't stop eating them. So we got nuttin!

A spectacular sunset can make it all feel alright though.

There are baby butternut squashes on the vine!

And when you look up just before it gets dusk, and see this, you know that tomorrow is going to be just fine. I can't have anything in my life that is impossible to deal with if the beauty of the world is still all around me to lift my spirits.

The winter squash and pumpkins backed up by cucumbers, backed up by potatoes. The potatoes weren't well cared for and didn't produce much, but I was given some and they were tasty.

That's a mulch bucket. The cut grass comes out of the vacuum cart on the riding tractor in those buckets and goes around the plants. Because of that grass mulch, I only had to water plants a couple of times and weeding was minimal. Saves my back, and it improves the soil because it draws earthworms and breaks down to humus later.

At this stage, a couple days brings a lot more growth. Too bad the grass and weeds around and in the garden manage to keep pace! This was the main crop of summer squash.

I'm a busy writer and I am also doing a lot of editing. This kind of labor saving mulch is going to help me a lot with the 2012 garden at the farm too. This was my backup crop of summer squash.

Toward evening, a doe would often come calling by the pond. It's amazing how they can just suddenly appear and just as quickly melt back into the brush.

She was wary but if we were quiet, she would stay and graze a while. I think she had fawns hidden in the brush. We see them now, twins that are full grown.

Sometimes I would just sit out there and revel in the peace and coolness at the end of the day until the mosquitoes drove me indoors.

Hard to snap a picture here without getting a bird in it. It's rather a comforting feeling, never being alone. I like to think my dear friend Bev, who used to live here, is up there flying on those wings in all that sunset glory.

Can you feel the peace?

See any far away or ancient lands in those clouds?

There are galleons in the sky, bringing gold to the other side of the world, while the serpents and dragons swim and fly all around them.

I have a writer's soul and this place is such an inspiration.

While the barn is not anywhere as old as the house, it has been there for decades. Looking at the sky over it, I wonder, how many generations of people who loved the land lived here and saw these sights? I hope they all felt their hearts lift lightly into the heavens too.

If you look closely, you'll see another bird. That's my soul flying free with thoughts of places I could go, and things I could be...

An inky dusk, like the ink stained fingers I often have, taking notes for a story I want to write sometime as I sit and contemplate the world at the end of the day. If you want to write too, keep paper and pen nearby and jot down all the random ideas you get. You never know what will spark a story.

"It's a good thing clouds don't weigh much, or we'd all be squished flat."

A long time ago, a little boy who is now a grown man told me that. He was right you know.

End of the gardening day, all the plants tended, and the last of the mulch getting spread. Physical labor brings that sense of accomplishment our forebears must have felt. A job well done is its own reward.

We have quite a few wild bunnies on the property. This one out by the driveway one morning is showing us why they are called 'cottontails'.

They did minimal snooping and very little damage in the garden, so we let them be. They love the new soft grass and clover that was easier to get to after mowing.

Good morning garden!

A robin sitting on the old fence post where the land drops off by the barn.

Looking down toward the office trailer and garage.

Birds in the shade...

Birds in the sunlight too!

I don't know, maybe the pictures are repetitive and so sort of dull to you. But to me, this is a place that is just beginning to feel like home. I still love my other house, the one surrounded by forest land at the base of a rocky wooded hill, right above a river. It has been hard to say goodbye to it, because that has been my home for over 29 years now. It was the first home I ever owned. I am glad that my sons still want to live there, and that it is not going to strangers. This past year, 2011, I have been able to bid it a long, drawn out farewell... So many memories in that place.

But as this year has gone on, and I have lived at the farm—mostly by myself—this place has gone from strange to familiar, from someone else's home to mine. We are gradually making new memories here. Now when I come through the door, it doesn't seem odd and slightly uncomfortable to be in a different house. It's no longer a shock, seeing a different vista than the one I have grown accustomed to when I look up from my writing or chores and glance out in the yard. Everything here looks familiar now. And when I drive in each time I've been away for a while, I feel like I'm home again. Home to where I will spend the rest of my days.

The renovation is ongoing but the pace has slowed now that the cold weather is here. We had family holiday gatherings here twice, now that I have a lot more of the amenities of everyday life around me. I've been able to at least take a lot of my cooking supplies out of storage and the cabinets are filling up. I've baked pies and cheesecake in the kitchen and put up vegetables from the garden for the freezer. I have herbs and a windowbox of plants from the porch wintering over in the sunny dining room windows and birdfeeders in the yard. I even have a little dog of my own now. Yep, the farm is now home.

And home is a very fine place to be!

Go happily into 2012 with peace and contentment,

~Nancy

01-02-12 Did You Write

2012-01-02T14:30:00.000-08:00

01-02-12 Did You Write

Wow, where did the year go? It came and went like mad.
We get to do double duty with this post. Not only do we get to tell about how we did this past week, we also can tell about what we did this past year.
Many of us won't have great numbers to mention, but others will have great things to report. I found I forgot about a lot of what I did this year until I added it up.

One new year's resolution you might try to make, is to post to these notes every week, even if you do not write. The hope is that you will feel ashamed about not posting that you are writing and will open something just so you can give a positive report. Make that a habit and you can finish things.

How much to write is up to you. It could be "THE RIGHT WORD" or it could be tens of thousands of words. It is up to you and your goals.

What is writing is pretty much up in the air. We all agree that new writing is writing, but so is editing, even if it is the work of someone else. Critiquing counts as editing and is therefore writing.
Poetry, blogging, technical writing, writing assignments, world or character development, synopsis and query letters are all writing. Bulletin board and E-mails can also be writing if they are very wordy and pertain to writing or story. In essence, if you have to ask if it is writing, our answer is yes.

As for me, I finished SPIRIT OF VENGEANCE ARRIVAL, and fired that off to the publisher. It will be a while before I get word about it.
I started this morning SPIRIT OF VENGEANCE TRAP and have written three pages and 1250 words. I actually wrote a couple hundred words more, but had to change how the story was going to fit the first story better, and to make the action logical. I doubt anything of my first version of this second story will be used. it has a good fight sequence but the way I picture it, it is not going to happen in that kind of location so that will go by the wayside.

I have not done a word count, but it looks like I wrote about ten stories this year, four or five actually had THE END as part of them. It is not bad.

On the story idea front, I have 53 story ideas in my compost pile. I have had a good time coming up with ideas faster than I have posted them. I like that. I also STOLE some story prompts someone posted and added them to my list even though they are not counted. Some of them are good seeds for concepts.
For the Month of December, I posted 31 story ideas in a 31 day month, coming to page 40 with 18095 words. I almost posted an extra story for the month but could not quite work out a handle on the idea so It ended up being the first idea of the year, having to do with the effects of a problem that happened at the Y2K change-over.
I did quite well for the year. for the 365 days, I posted 371 ideas, that was six ideas more than the days of the year. It would be nice to do better than that, but I am not going to complain. I would only complain if it were less ideas for the year. Those 371 ideas covered 415 pages with a total of 241,578 words of pure drivel. I count that as two books worth of writing.
One nice thing about the story ideas this year is that one of them ended up being the work I fired off to the publisher before the first. While it had something of the same sequence as the story idea, it was not the same story. That is one reason I have no problems posting my ideas on line for other authors to use. If twenty of us wrote from the same story idea, we would have twenty different stories.
I will say that a good number of the ideas are worth writing, it is strictly finding one that catches one's attention. Years ago, one of the boards I post my ideas had a major crash. I spent time copying old ideas back onto the board. I found myself having to take the time to read one or two of the ideas of each month's production. I look at that as a good indication of how many of the ideas are actually worth writing. Of course, you have to look at all of them to find the right ones.

For the upcoming year, I aim to write two Spirit of Vengeance stories, and two Waxy dragon stories. Hopefully something else of interest will show up along the way too. I will continue my story ideas, though I expect to continue to post them in batches like I am now.
There is an art show I will be part of on March 11th. I have two main projects to get ready for the show. One is a dragon that I am carving out of a wood who’s form suggested it was a dragon. The other is a large vase that will have five faces around the outside. Once they are done, anything else I work on is just additional.

As to the question of the week,

I can honestly say

YES I DID WRITE

DID YOU WRITE?

Week 625 Wood Working

2012-01-01T16:29:00.000-08:00

Year 11, Week 51, Day One (week 625) (January 17, 2000 was my first carving day.) 12-31-11 Saturday

60 degrees early morning, 66 degrees when I got out back, 78 degrees when I left in the afternoon. Clear blue sky with a barely felt wind. This weather report is brought to you by the city Of Pompano Beach Department of Tourism.

DURING THE WEEK.

I had finished a short story I've worked on the past couple months and fired it off to the publisher. I don't know if it is worthy of accepting but they have it now.
I decided to paint a scene based on the story. I am using Acrylic paints and I started by adding a light wash of colors. I was thinking of final surface, but after my first session where it was not looking great, it dawned on me that what I started and what I need to continue to do, is a sketch showing tones, and then do my final painting over top that.
I have not done anything else beyond that first session as I have worked late each day and have not had time to work on it any farther.

Saturday

After breakfast, we checked out a couple yard sales. I ended up getting an ironing board for a dollar. This ironing board is designed to be set on a table, by folding down some small legs. Every once in a while, I have had to iron something, be it patches on pants or heat transfer of something. I decided I might be able to use this ironing board. I also thought that if all else failed, I could use it for holding my stuff I am varnishing. for a dollar, it was worth taking it home.

table top ironing board

I am now in "get ready for art show mode". The LIGHT HOUSE POINT YACHT CLUB art show will be March 11, 2012. I don't have much time to get ready for the show.
I have two main projects to get ready for the show. Anything else I do between now and then will not be of great importance.
One project is a face vase with five faces on it. I have the wood and need start turning the outside shape, leaving the nose high, cut in for the brow, cut in even deeper below the nose for the mouth and chin. I then hollow out the inside leaving just enough wood to allow for carving of the facial features.

My other project is a dragon I started. I decided that was going to be the project of the day today.

Scarland Dragon and Woodley Dragon, Woodley with his wing blanks.

I started by taking a plush dragon named Scarland, that I got up in Connecticut. He has roughly the right kind of body shape to use as a guide for the wooden dragon I am making.
A few weeks ago, I humiliated a piece of wood to get a block that would be my wings for the dragon. Today, I looked at the piece of wood and decided I needed to flatten it and clean it up.
To do this right, I decided to dig out the thickness planer. Now this is a major project. It is buried in the back of Mom's garage with all sorts of wonderful things stacked around and on it.
I went in there and gave it a long look. I decided it would not be quite so hard to get it out if I work logically. I moved things across the pathway that is left in the garage. There were flattened boxes and some boards to shift, then I found safe stacking places for other things. I freed up the planer and pulled it out and took it around back

.
Planner with some black walnut set inside to show it in use.

I have not used this thing in a couple years and my brother used it early this year. it does not get a lot of use. It was one of those "I want it so bad I could taste it" kinds of things where you get it and seldom use it. The fact that it is buried aids in it not being used.
After the first couple passes in the planer, the block of wood that the wings were in, needed to be trimmed. I accidentally pulled the band-saw blade off the wheels twice. Reinstalling the blade is always a "fun" project.
I decided to use a chisel to remove some cut pieces of wood and then when I returned to the bandsaw, I removed less wood to make the planing work a bit less.
Using a push stick, I made several passes with the planner, flipping it over, until I had two flat faces. I then trimmed one side so it was generally square, and then ran it on the side through the planner until I had two parallel sides. I trimmed the ends and then gave the wood a good look.
My intention was to tip it up on edge and cut it at the top corner on one edge and the bottom corner on the opposite edge to create matching wedges. Mom pointed out that I have part of the center of the tree and it has created a great pattern. I decided to cut the slab in half.
My band-saw is a low power one and the blade is getting dull, so it took some time to "re-saw" or cut in half the slab. I then ran the two pieces through the planer. One piece caught and a corner of it broke off. I finished planing both pieces, each at the same setting s they would end up the same thickness, and then cut both pieces so the missing side matched on both of them.
While these wings are blocks right now, they will be heavily carved, with lots of depth and design to them. I will try hard to make them match each other when done.

Planed oak staves and Norfolk Island Pine wing blanks.

I have some Black Walnut that was out in the weather and was showing some signs of rot. Since I had the planer out, I ran them through the planer, not trying to square them, but just to get rid of the damaged surface. That cleaned them up nicely.

Back Walnut, before and after planing.

A while back, the metal bands failed around a half barrel that Mom had a fountain inside. After messing around, I ended up with the staves.
Since I had the planner out, I decided to straighten them out. The staves are arched, bowing to the outside. I ran the first couple with the outside up first to flatten that side, then I flipped them over and while holding the end down, I started the inside through the planer and then pressed down on the other end as the wood finished. this knocked off the ends first.
After the first few, I looked and saw there was still a bow in the wood. It was then that it dawned on me that the wood would flex as they went through the planer.

Oak staves, before planing on left, after planing on right.

The planer has a pair of rollers to draw the wood through the machine with the blades in between. The rollers have to push on the wood at a certain pressure to guide the wood through.
What I figured out to do, was to send the wood through several times at each setting. The pressure on the wood with each pass would be less and the wood would take on the natural bend rather than being flattened.
When I was done working both sides, there was still a bow in the wood, but not as much as when I started. They were a whole lot thinner too.
I flattened about a third of them so I can put them to use immediately. I now just have to come up with the right projects.

accumulated sawdust after finished working

planter with some old sawdust before, and filled to top after clean up of planing

I got some gift cards for Christmas. I had a $25 gift card from either last Christmas or my birthday. I cannot remember which. I got a $50 card this Christmas. I decided I needed sand paper for my disk sander and decided I would get a couple other things while I was at it if they had it. I wanted to use up the old gift card at least.
While looking through the tool isles, I found the nine inch sand paper that my disk sander uses I noticed they had eight inch sand paper, with a few more sheets at the same price.
My brother gave me back a face plate that came with the big metal lathe I purchased year before last. My brother was going to modify it and never got to it. He gave it back to me last weekend.
It dawned on me that I can make a good sanding disk for my lathe very easily. I then realized that the face plate would be perfect for this project. I would mount a piece of wood onto it and bring it down to the diameter of the sand paper. I would then have a sanding disk on my lathe whenever I needed it. I can slow it down or speed it up as needed. Now all I have to do is to make a table to fit on the lathe to hold the work at the right height.
I also got some metal grinding bits and a cutting disk set for my dremmel. the set which has like a hundred pieces was just over twice the price of one tube of cutting disks.
I stopped at Lowes and realized that I have Home Depot cards so I held off on my purchases. I think I have what I wanted anyway. I will see tomorrow.

nine inch and eight inch sand paper, cutting wheel kit, flap sander and milling bits

I was on my feet nearly all day long, at the band saw, at the planer, along with the stores. I had not been on my feet that long for a long time. My feet were tired. I used to have serious foot problems before I got some medical inserts for my shoes. Now I only hurt if I over-do it like I did today.

Tomorrow, I need to start carving on the dragon in earnest. This is one of those projects that is going to take a couple months to finish. I want to start on the left hind leg and tail tomorrow. The hind leg was something that has giving me problems on getting the position right for the way the wood is shaped. this was a naturally occurring piece of wood that I am correcting to become a dragon.
There are a couple projects I would love to do for the turning club. One of them is the bird ornaments I did this year, but I want to do it a bit bigger.
If I have some stainless steel rod of the right size, I might make it into a turning tool. Some grinding, drilling, and threading will be involved in that project.

I WILL SEE WHAT I DO TOMORROW.

Year 11, Week 51, Day two (week 625) (January 17, 2000 was my first carving day.) 01-01-11 Sunday

60 degrees early morning 64 when I got out back. I forgot to look at the temps late in the day but they predicted 80 degrees. It felt good. wisps of cotton clouds meandering across a deep blue sky with a really bright winter sun. There was a haze everywhere in the morning. I should have stopped to take some pictures along the way but was in the wrong lane. This weather report is brought to you by the City Of Pompano Beach department of Tourism.

I overdid it yesterday on my standing. I stood at the planner, at the band saw, walked several stores all with little breaks. Last night and this morning, my feet let me know they did not like that. after I got going in my morning, though, the soreness of my feet disappeared, completely forgotten.

I went to bed at my normal time last night, and was waken periodically by loud reports of fireworks. I work fifteen minutes before midnight so stood on my fourth floor porch and watched fireworks from my fourth floor porch. I slept in this morning but that was not enough.
I went to Mom's house and after feeding and petting the cats, I laid down for a couple hours. I was still tired and not at full energy but decided it was time to get to work.

I petted the cat some more, then dragged out the lathe I decided to do something simple. I looked over my woods and decided on a three by two and a half piece of wood. I can never remember the name of the wood. I fist lopped off a length off the end sufficient for the project I was doing. I was making a big version of the Christmas ornament birds I made.

I mounted it on the lathe so after turning, I would have a square piece, then realized I should use the bandsaw to square it, save me some turning time.
There is a rule of thumb in metal working and it works for woodworking also, though I tend to ignore it often enough. It says THE MORE TIME YOU SPEND AT THE SAW, THE LESS TIME YOU SPEND MACHINING. The saw is your best friend. In metal working, it takes time to machine metal. Harder the metal, the more time it takes. Using the saw to remove waste materials will save you a lot of extra time when actually making the final cuts.
I use this with my Christmas ornaments all the time. I will use the lathe, bandsaw and other tools to remove waste wood so my actual carving is on the surface rather than removing excess wood.

After cutting a slat off the wood, I re-mounted it in the wood, rounded it roughly, with some of the flats still showing, and made a tenon so it could be held by the chuck. I turned it around, mounting it in the chuck and rounded the end for a distance.
I then pulled the tail stock back and started hollowing the end, making it a cone for the bird's tail. I used the long spade bit drill I got at a yard sale, held in a tool handle I won as the BRING BACK prize in the turning club. I bore it out a depth. I then turned to my turning tools to make the inside a cone going to a point deep inside I tried to make it even as possible.
I sanded that and then started on the outside, roughly matching the inside angle. I went just past the end, and then formed a ball to be the body. I made this one slightly oblong on purpose.
Now as I was working, a crack formed in the cone and a piece broke off. In many cases, that would be a disaster, but in this case, I will be cutting away some wood anyway to make the bird. This just decided for me where I was going to do it. I continued on as if it did not happen.
About the point I was going to part the work off, I started another ball for the head, slightly smaller than the body. Once I had it partly formed, giving me good access to the parting point, I sanded between the two pieces and then parted off the body and then finished the head, making it oblong and the part at the chuck had a slight taper. I finally parted it at off after I sanded it also.
Now I needed to shape the tail better. It would be nice to have a jig for this but I am too lazy to make a jig. I am not sure where I would keep all the jigs I need. I drew a line to show how I wanted the tail to be cut. Since the place where it broke off was fairly flat, I set that up against the bandsaw blade with my finger partly beneath the body ball which is smaller than the cone. I started the bandsaw and while holding it in that position, I cut the cone about on my line.
I touched up both pieces with the dremmel. I carved the meeting point between the tail cone and body ball. I was quite thick on the tail so I feathered back the edge so it looked thinner.
A piece of oak slat I worked yesterday, became a good piece for the base. I measured and cut squared and sanded the oak square. I drilled a hole in the center, though the hole ended up with a slight tilt. I did not use the drill press.
I was going to carve a piece of oak and that was not working so I mounted a piece of oak in the lathe and after knocking the corners off with a knife, I started turning it round. I guess I had a catch as the piece broke. I will work them with the little lathe later.
For the beak and leg, I ended up using a skewer. I also drilled a hole to mount the head to the body and glued everything together.

The bird needs sanding and then finishing.

Finished bird

I have tomorrow off, but since I was not feeling right today, I decided to stay home and do some work around the house tomorrow. I got a whole lot less than I planned to do this weekend.
I do have wing blanks for my dragon. I had my plush dragon with me and saw how I will design the wooden dragon to match the natural shape I already have. I also have something to show at the turning club meeting this month.
Next week, I really need to get some work done on the dragon. If I can make some serious headway on it, that will be good. I have a lot of work on it and three months is not going to be a lot of time. I still have the face vase to turn and carve.
I also need to visit the Antique shop and see what was going on there. That is a Saturday trip unless things really get slow at work on Friday.

I WILL SEE WHAT I ACTUALLY DO NEXT WEEK.

Did you write? 12-26-11

2011-12-26T14:12:00.000-08:00

Did you write? 12-26-11

Where has the year gone? I am still preparing for Easter and Christmas arrived and passed.
This note is intended to give you a place to tell about what is going on in your life and in the process, to brag or cry about your writing. If you post regularly, it will help to keep you writing or to keep to your goals. Repeatedly reporting failures does a lot to get one to get to work.

As to what is writing, we all know that new writing is writing. Editing is also writing, even if it is the work of others. Critiquing is a form of editing and also counts. Poetry, writing assignments, articles, technical writing, blogging, world and character creation are also writing. Bulletin board posts and E-mails can be writing if they are very wordy and pertain to story or writing. In essence, if you have to ask if it is writing, the answer is yes.

How much writing does not matter. It could be the RIGHT WORD, or it could be half a book. the fact that you open something is real key.

As for me, I have has most of the week with no writing at all. I am editing my work in progress, about to submit it. Preparations for Christmas got in the way, leaving no time to write. It hurt as I am so close. I was off today and was able to spend some time on the project. I figure I will finish this pass tonight, and will try to do one more tomorrow since I am off tomorrow too.

On the story idea front, I am happy to say that after last week's mistake of overwriting the file I store my posted story ideas and some un-unwritten notes, I was able to recover the all the notes. I had copied the directory to a CD a short while back, and finally remembered about the copy after looking elsewhere. Finding them, and having a good week of coming up with ideas gives me 52 ideas in my compost pile. I will have some good writing for a while before I get to the top of the permanent compost pile.
It should be noted that in December 1997, I started posting my story ideas. I have averaged at least an idea a day ever since.

It is a good idea to start looking over your work this year and get your statistics.

Over the past week, I finished one set of painted cards, and painted a second batch. I got a lot of comments about the results of the first batch of cards, several saying it was the best I had ever done, and others saying that it was professional quality. I also worked late losing some home time that would allow writing, and tried to get gifts all packed. I hated not getting back to writing. I am so close to finishing it.
As for Christmas, I gave "right" and got well. I had a pleasant time with friends and families. this was one to remember.

As to the question of the week,

YES I DID WRITE

DID YOU WRITE?

Week 635 wood working

2011-12-26T06:16:00.000-08:00

Year 11, Week 50, Day One (week 624)
(January 17, 2000 was my first carving day.)
12-24-11 Saturday

I have no idea what the temperature was this weekend. I am thinking it was in the high 70s. The sky was partly cloudy, about half blue sky, some sun and some shade. There was a light breeze. Quite comfortable over all. This weather report is brought to you by the City of Fort Lauderdale Department of Tourism.

DURING THE WEEK

I finished my first batch of nine Christmas Cards. I decided to give them out early. It was good as I had forgotten about one person and had to give his card the next day. I got a lot of compliments from everybody in the office saying it was a professional quality card or that it was the best I had done. I gave my brother one of the cards and he said essentially the same thing.
I started my second batch of 16 cards and ended up working most of the day Christmas Eve trying to get them finished. They were not as good as I had hoped, but came out pretty good. Everybody who got them really liked them. White card stock of the first batch is so much easier to work with than the brown card stock of this second batch. I have a few that have to be finished. They got skipped because I did not put them out to dry in the right place and forgot about them. Just a short bit of time is necessary to finish them. I will end up with four spare cards, actually five because I kept one.

I had to use creative boxing of several of my presents I gave out. With one, I took the box apart and refolded and taped back together for a fairly flat but large package. The wrapping paper I was using did not come in a solid roll like most rolls come in. They had curled cardboard that the paper was wrapped around. I took one of these and folded it in half and was able to use that as hard containment wrapping of that present. the wrapping paper then covered the cardboard.

SATURDAY CHRISTMAS EVE.

We have the tradition of opening our presents on Christmas Eve so the kids can play with their toys all Christmas morning rather than having to wait until everybody gets together. That meant I had to rush to wrap packages and finish my cards.
Most of the presents I gave out were thrifted from yard sails over the year, especially the past month or so. A couple things I gave were things I already had, but found lower quality replacements for them that I would keep instead. It seems like everybody really enjoyed what I got them. One of the last presents I packed was for my sister in law who I had almost nothing for. Ages ago, I somehow got hold of a cracker cheese server. I cleaned it up and pack it. She really liked it, commenting that she was thinking about getting one but never got to it. Talk about good gifting.
I also gave members of the family some of my ornaments. With my nephew and his wife and with my brother and his wife. I split the ornaments of the year between them so I did not have to give two sets.
One of my nephews is learning blacksmithing. I had a decrative cookie box I got from work and stuck some old charcoal into it. I then made a card from SANTA that said inside "YOU HAVE BEEN SUCH A BAD BOY, I BURNED ALL YOUR TOYS." giving him the bag of charcoal instead. He really got a kick out of that. He was happy to get the charcoal anyway.

I decided that a knife would work better for cutting wrapping paper than scissors. I had cut a sheet of paper and sort of waved the knife. It nicked my finger on my left hand. It was like I hit my juggler vein. It kept bleeding. I had to change Band-Aids four times before it finally decided to stop bleeding. It was such a small cut too. It barely went below the surface of the skin. It did not even hurt.

I got gift cards, a manicure kit, and a AS SEEN ON TV hamburger maker. They will all get used.

SUNDAY CHRISTMAS DAY.

I got a late start. I planned to bring some coffee and forgot that, and I forgot my camera. It ended up that I would not have taken any pictures anyway. I just hate having it just in case.

I arrived early and settled in back and carved while my brother did some sheet metal work. I helped him in several stages. I carved a turkey ornament. I could have carved a couple other ornaments but one was enough. I used a different design plan to make it and it came out all right. Paint will tell people what it really is, just like the other three of them I made.

The project my brother was doing was to make a metal box for his sockets. The body was already done, but I helped him with the top. I helped him bend it with the bender. I watched him while he brazed it sealed. He brazed the hinges in place. after sorting his sockets to figure out what he needed, we tack welded it together. It was quite a project. It will last longer than the plastic box he used before. The technique to build it was actually quite easy.

I spent much of the time playing with my PALM PILOT. Yesterday, I found the battery was dead and lost the data on it, so I put new batteries in and used the sync on my computer to put the data back on. I decided to play with it some.

Christmas dinner was excellent. I over ate and did not care.

I have to wait a week or so before I can post pictures of my second batch of Christmas cards. they are going to get mailed out this week and I want to keep it a surprise.

I have the next two days off. I have a lot of work around the house, re-arranging things and straightening up. I want to be able to find project materials. I have a story I want to send out this week and have to finish editing it, and I have some painting projects to do.
Next week I have loads of projects to work on. I need to make some more ornaments so I am caught up on what should have been made. I have a dragon and a five face vase to make. I have a couple projects I would love to try my hand at, such as a popper fishing lure, a winged bowl, a couple more of the bird ornaments, but bigger, just to name a few.

I will see what I actually do next week.

CHEAP CHRISTMAS DECORATIONS

2011-12-21T15:21:00.001-08:00

Hello Everybody!

Guess you're surprised to see me posting, especially upon such a subject as "Cheap Christmas Decorations".

Well, just because I've been extremely busy with other creative endeavors doesn't mean I'm totally out of the loop on this blog, and the fact that I'm a guy doesn't mean that know nothing about decorating, let alone decorating for Christmas.

I've been a bachelor my whole life and know first hand what living on a (tight) budget is like, so here are some thoughts on how to decorate for the holidays without spending a whole lot of $.

THRIFT STORES

Now, Nancy is the Queen of doing this, but this time of year at places like Salvation Army or Goodwill, there are always Christmas decorations (or potential Christmas presents) that someone has donated. Granted you may not find exactly what you are looking for at your first stop or visit, but over time you might find some cherished item or nick-knack that becomes part of your holiday decor.

Besides, the money you spend at those establishments goes to worthy causes and I'm sure there will be other holidays through out the coming year that you might be able to find something for.

HANG UP THOSE CHRISTMAS CARDS

A couple of pieces of string to drape all those cards of Christmases past upon will do wonders to brighten a room. Just be careful to chose cards that don't have handwritten messages inside that are either too personal or too embarrassing for anyone else to read.

THE PHONE BOOK CHRISTMAS TREE

Believe it or not, this was something I had to do the first year I was living on my own because I could not afford an official Christmas tree, real or artificial. So I made my own.

This could also be a fun project to do with your children.

01. Take an outdated phone book that is still in relatively good shape. Sizes vary between towns and cities, so choose carefully, especially in relation to Step 2.

02. Start dog earring the pages. Fold one corner of a page until it is pointed towards the center of the phone book. Obviously, the bigger the phone book, the more pages you will have to fold, but try to make the dog ears as uniform as humanly possible. A smaller dog ear will give you a wider tree while a bigger dog ear will have the opposite effect.

03. When you have dog earred everything, including the covers or the outer pages if any of the covers are gone, open the phone book until the farthest outside pages/covers meet.

04. Find some way to attach those ends to form a somewhat circular object with the phone book when viewed from above. You can use glue, tape, staples, or whatever else might be available, but try and make sure whatever you use is not visible from the outside if possible.

05. You should now have a basic tree shape roughly outlined.

06. Decorate your tree. If you're really ambitious and have the supplies available, you can spray paint the tree green first. Otherwise, you can cut out decorations from construction paper, magazines, or whatever else is available.

07. If you need/want a tree topper, you will notice a circular opening at the top of your tree from the phone book pages being fanned open. Attach your topper onto a pencil or Popsicle stick if it will not fit on top on its own. The pencil/stick will sit inside the circular opening on top.

08. If you want to preserve your tree after the season passes, you will have to put it in a box as if it were a hat or some other precious item and store it until the next Christmas.

Unfortunately, I changed apartments between that Christmas and the next, so mine didn't survive the move.

GIFT WRAP FOR THE YOUNGER SET

While there are more specialized designs amongst all the wrapping paper that is available for purchase/use, if you are wrapping a gift for someone very young that what the paper looks like won't matter, you can always use previous editions of the Sunday Funnies from your local newspaper.

It is colorful enough to keep the baby's attention while still ending up where it was destined to go (hopefully a recycling bin) anyway.

The Sunday Funnies gift wrap idea can also be used at other times of the year, depending upon the gift and the age of the person receiving the present.

HOLIDAY CHAINS

We've all made them at one time or another when we were in elementary school. Or at least I did in the first grade. Another fun project to do with your children.

01. Take a couple of sheets of construction or computer paper, at least two different colors, and cut them up into strips. For Christmas, most people use red and green. Cutting them width wise in relation to the size of the paper will give you more strips, cutting them length wise will give you bigger strips.

02. Take a strip of any color, bend (do NOT fold) it around until the two ends meet, and then attach those ends with tape, glue, a stapler, or whatever might be available. You have now created one link of chain.

03. Take a strip of another color and repeat step 2, but be sure to put that strip THROUGH the link of chain you have already made BEFORE connecting the ends.

04. Keep repeating the link making process, alternating colors, until you run out of color strips.

05. You now have a decorative, home made chain to hang or drape somewhere.

More appropriate colors can be used to make chains for other holidays like Easter (yellow and green), Halloween (orange and black), etc.

I certainly made plenty of those over the years with my younger sisters, usually because I was the only one my mom trusted with the scissors.

In any event, there you have it folks.

Some inexpensive decorating ideas for Christmas and, in a couple of cases, beyond.

Whether it's Hanukkah, Christmas, or Kwanzaa; I hope everyone has a happy holiday season!

________________________________________________________________

Lee is the author of Hugh Monn, Private Detective from Pro Se Press; available via Amazon, Barnes and Noble online, or CreateSpace, and is the Editor-In-Chief of this blog's sister site: The Free Choice E-zine at www.thefreechoice.info

Dec 19, 2011 Did You Write?

2011-12-19T15:48:00.001-08:00

Dec 19, 2011 Did You Write?

I am having to make this extremely short.
The idea of this note is to give you a chance to tell about what is going on in your life, and in the process, tell about what is happening in your writing. The hope s that repeated posts of not writing or not meeting goals will force you to open something just so you can report positively next week.

I give long lists of what is writing. In essence, if you have to ask if it is writing, the answer is YES.

As for my writing, I have not had any time. I spent half of one evening looking for a grammar checker. I cannot remember what that was hammed so I cannot find it. I did run my story through another one and mostly what it found was that it did not like my character's names and did not like conversations.
In my reading editing, I got only to page 14. I expected this to be completely done by this week. Where did the time go? I ended up adding ten words to the piece. Word reduction is not a bad thing. Getting it right would even be better.

On the story idea front, I do have some bad news. In a moment of not paying attention, I selected SAVE AS rather than OPEN, and overwrote my December story ideas, including two ideas I had not posted. I was able to recover the posted story ideas and then sat and recovered the two lost story ideas since I still had the papers that they were based on and I remembered what I wrote.
The bad part was that I kept 10 story ideas at the end of the file, which were ideas I got by E-mail or something else on line, and never transferred them to paper. those ten story ideas are long gone. I do remember two were by picture prompts and know where I can look to find them, though they will take quite a long time to find. Somewhere, I know I have a copy of those ideas, but they did not show up in a couple quick searches.
Since I lost those ideas, I cannot count them. I have had a good week of coming up with ideas, but I am a couple days behind. As it is, right now I have 35 story ideas in my compost pile.

I am nearly done with my first batch of Christmas cards I painted. I have to do another batch. I have a bunch of stuff to mail off. I also need to get a bunch of things boxed and wrapped. I am exactly where I needed to be at the beginning of the month. Even so I could use another week to get prepared.

As to the question of the week,

I can say

YES, I DID WRITE
(though nothing like I was supposed to)

DID YOU WRITE?

Week 624 Wood Working

2011-12-18T16:10:00.000-08:00

Year 11, Week 49, Day One (week 623) (January 17, 2000 was my first carving day.) 12-17-11 Saturday

70 degrees early morning, 78 degrees in the afternoon. Some weather just in this area before breakfast and it became less and less threatening as the day went on. It turned out to be a pretty good day, except there was no blue sky, let alone any sun. Otherwise it was nice. This weather report is brought to you by the city Of Pompano Beach department of Tourism
DURING THE WEEK

I started painting my Christmas cards I think my design will work out nicely. the background went fairly fast, except for waiting for the paint to dry. I am now doing the figure on the front. I think it will end up looking pretty good. After this set of nine is done, I have to grab another pack of cards and start another set. Since many get mailed out and given out before Christmas, I have a lot of cards to make and send out. My biggest problem is that I am now very busy at work. That is killing in my crafting time.

I did some touch-ups on the vase with the scene inside. I added a star shaped bead on top the tree, placing it point down into the tree. If I had more time, I would have run a wire through the bead and put it into the tree the right way. It still looks good in spite being upside down. I was worried about the weakness of the tree, in spite the fact that I had doweled it in place. I gobbed glue around the base, and then added all sorts of shapes of beads around the base and against the tree. I figured it would add strength to the tree. I also found it added something to the scene.
If I had time, I would have made little houses to put into the scene and maybe a few other scene elements to really make it nice. It turned out to look good. I got lots of comments from my family, from those at work, and at the turning club.
I ended up selling it to my boss. It was far lower than what it was worth, but the chances of selling it elsewhere at any higher price was slim. I like his money more than I like my wood.
Now that I have done that with this vase, I can see opportunities to do it with other works should they be of the right kind. To protect the tree, which could still be broken off, I cut the bottom out of a paper cup, then cut a slit down the side. With a little overlap, it fit into the mouth of the vase, protecting the tree nicely.

village vase as seen at the Turning club meeting

THURSDAY

We had the turning club meeting on Thursday. We have a video camera and TV set up so that the audience can see details you cannot see unless you are right next to the machine, especially since they are on the opposite side of the lathe as the operator.
The demonstration was of winged bowls. One takes a board, mounts it on a screw chuck and turns the underside of the board. One forms the outside of the little container in the middle, and then curves the rest of the board, deep at the center and curving toward you as you get closer to the edges of the board.

the edge view of the winged bowl just turned.

One then turns the board around and matches the surface to the underside you already made. You then turn the inside of the cup, following the outer bowl you had made on the first side.
He makes a lid to fit the piece.
He then draws out and carves the "wings" of the bowl in interesting shapes. It is something I might try when I get some time. I do have wood for it.

Several finished winged bowls after they were carved.

Me holding the village vase

me holding a Norfolk Island pine vase and the vase itself.

Me holding beaded cups.

I had won the bring back prize last month, so I had to pass on my creation to the next winner. The winner was a young lady that is just learning to turn. She seemed to like my present a lot.

The bring back prize and me with the winner

One of the members cleaned out his garage and brought in a bunch of small tools. I ended up with quite a few. some will become presents for someone else. Others I have a good use for.

SATURDAY

I visited only one yard sale. I picked up some lidded jars with the metal clasps. I have a use for those in my kitchen.
I also picked up some JINGA blocks. I don't play the game, but do see how they can be made into carved and turned items easily. It was cheap enough to make full use of them in my wood working.

storage jars

Jinga block game

The cat was a sweety today. He was a bit irritated at me in that I did not stay seated as long as he wanted me to, and I was not giving him the attention he felt he rightfully deserved. He did get some, though.

I saw a wood turning program where they made a turned bird. The technique was simple and the results were pretty good.
I decided to give it a try. Not fully sure of the full technique, I chose to make it small, using two by two wood rather than the large pieces he made his from.
I mounted the piece in the chuck. My chuck closes down enough to hold the two by two in place on the flats. If that does not work, I can turn the wood some and hang onto it where the jaws dig into the corners.
On my first piece, my gouge slipped and I dug way too deep. I took that piece of wood off and tossed it. I mounted a second piece of wood on and this one worked right.
I rounded off the corners first. Then I hollowed out a cone into the end. I made that the way I liked it, and then turned the outside, following the inside, making the wall fairly thin.
About at the point of the cone, I turned a ball for the body. I parted it off after I finished sanding.
I turned a second ball that was smaller than the body and parted that off.
On the TV show, the host used a band saw for this cut. Since I was working small, I used my dremmel with a grinding wheel. I marked and cut away the underside of the cone, creating the bird's tail. where the tip of the cone met the ball of the body, I ground a transition so the cone inside blended into the body ball shape.

The completed bird and the parts of the bird.

ON my first bird, I mounted a piece of oak from a wine barrel into my little machine lathe and machined a pointed stick which became the base, and a rod that became the leg of the bird. I drilled holes into the head and onto the body and put a dowel into the holes to mount them together. I glued the beak into a hole on the front side of the head, and drilled a hole in the bottom to mount the leg. I also had a square base and mounted the leg into that.
ON my second bird, I took a large skewer and shaved the ends to fit into the holes. I used the pointed end of the skewer for the beak. This ended up being much faster.
I like the size of these birds. they are going to be Christmas Ornaments. If I work in production mode, I can make quite a few of these quite quickly.

A couple weeks ago, I had started a Cornucopia. I finished carving the fruit today. I just needs to be painted.

finished pieces for Saturday

Because I was playing around with the birds, I did not get much done. I was also planning on leaving early, which I did since I had a bunch of stuff to do.

Tomorrow, I need to make a couple more turkeys, and a few more of these birds, and really need to make more of all my other ornaments from this year. I won't be going to Mom's house next Saturday, so I need to make up my carving basket so I can work on Christmas day at my brother's house where we will have Christmas Dinner.
I basically have a month's worth of work to do in less than a Week.

I will see what I actually do tomorrow.

Year 11, Week 49, Day Two (week 623) (January 17, 2000 was my first carving day.) 12-18-11 Sunday

75 degrees, blue sky, strong breeze, some clouds around the horizon, especially over the Everglades. Early morning sky over the Atlantic was pastel reds with distant clouds looking like mountains. Very pretty. I did not take a picture, though. This weather report is brought to you by the City Of Pompano Beach Department of tourism.

Mom saw some flowers on sale at the nursery so we went to get them. I got one flower, a begonia, I think. I liked the color and velvety texture of the petals. I have a pot at home where the plant died so I stuck the flower in there. They had the plant under the shade roof area so I think it might do well enough on my porch. I will see how long it lives.

My new flower

On the way home from the nursery, we stopped at several yard sales. They were sales that were not put out yesterday because of the weather. I picked up a set of four metal end tables. I will use these as work tables here at home.

Metal coffee tables.

I also picked up a real long spade bit. I guess electricians use these. Later, I mounted this in the handle I won in the bring back prize last month. I made use of it on one of my turned birds. I will likely leave the bit as it is for now, but I plan on re-grinding it as a turning tool later. NO rush on that. I have plenty to work with now.

Drill bit in package, drill bit in tool handle.

After petting and feeding the cats, and setting out my equipment, I dragged out the lathe and made three of my birds. I turned the body first, making the tail the cone, and then the ball of the body. I parted it off after a good sanding. On the third body, I was using too long a piece of wood and a slight catch would send it off center. I ended up taking that off and using shorter wood.
I then made three beads, balls for the head, out of the same piece of wood. I would make one complete, part it off then make the next one. I could have made all three, but this way if I messed up and had to go bigger, I was not wasting a partially done bead.
A bit later, I shaped the tails, drilled and doweled to put the heads together. With these three, I did not add the base. I can do that later but not right now.

all my birds,

I made one blank for a polar bear and cut some wood for turkeys. I started turning one and it came off the lathe after a catch. I decided I will do them with the knife entirely.

I turned a blank for a polar bear and selected several pieces of wood to go into my carving kit. I won't be going up to Mom's house next weekend so I wanted my carving kit with me for the Christmas day Dinner.

During the week, I have to finish my first batch of Christmas cards, and then start a second batch. I have a lot of stuff to pack, some of it is being mailed out. They will get there late but they will get there. I will be picking out a bunch of my ornaments to go.
We have a practice of opening our presents on Christmas eve so the children can have all Christmas morning to play with their toys. I expect to spend all of Christmas Eve, Saturday, packing and wrapping things.
I am about two weeks behind where I need to be.

I will see what I actually do next weekend.

A Flash Fiction Friday piece...

2011-12-16T22:11:00.000-08:00

There's a wonderful site: http://www.flashfictionfriday.com/about/ that posts writing prompts. These are the folks who turned out The Lost Children Anthology that I was privileged to be part of. You will see a link for where to purchase that to the right of the blog.

Anyway, they posted a prompt this week that spoke to me. I've had a couple of days where I've been so busy running errands and shopping, I've had no time to write. Tonight on Facebook I saw that a new prompt had been posted and decided I wanted to do something for that. The prompt is here: http://www.flashfictionfriday.com/2011/12/16/f3-cycle-60-tom-waits-for-no-man/ and my story is below.

~Nancy

I Hope That I Don’t Fall In Love With You

It was Friday, before Christmas. I walked in from the rain, shaking it off my coat before I tossed it over one of the hooks by the door. The Last Stop was the name of the place, a little watering hole-in-the-wall before a long stretch of dry towns. Incongruously plunked down in a middle American bedroom community called Exeter, it stood out like a purple mashed thumb on a hard working hand.

I was coming from a book signing in some former mill city trying to reinvent itself, driving a rent-a-buggy on the road to nowhere, when I stumbled across it. It didn’t appear too promising, with nothing but a YES, WE’RE OPEN sign and garish blinking Christmas lights around smudged windows. There were a few cars in the lot. I was hungry and thirsty, and they had cheap bar food.

I don’t turn heads. Writers don’t have to be glamorous, we spend most our time behind a keyboard anyway. Only the books have to shine. I travel alone a lot, so I don’t want to attract attention. When I’m on the road, just jeans and a tee shirt mostly. Granny boots with block heels give me an edge on height. I keep my hair up in a pony tail, out of my face, and I wear big glasses because it makes me look like a librarian or Sunday School teacher. I know what I am—a burnt out, near-sighted, self-published hack with somewhat of a following.

I shoved my way through the loungers on the battered padded stools. “What can I get you Miss?” the guy behind the bar said as my soles crunched on peanuts. Bunch of older dudes around me, balding and midlife crises hanging over their belts. If the one on the left patted my fanny again, I was going to smack him.

“A cold Becks and a plate of hot wings,” I said, tossed down some cash, and went to find myself a seat at one of the tables. Green bottle, red sauce. The comforts and joys of the season.

A perky blonde in red leggings and a candy cane striped sweater brought my stuff over. She smiled and said she hoped I enjoyed it. I just nodded. I don’t like talking to people when I’m not behind a book and pen.

Three more stops and I could go home. Three more friggin' stops…

Two independent book stores and a mall with a big media outlet. That’s what they call them now, the chains. They sell all kinds of stuff in there, and most of them have a café. Glitzy and chic, well dressed people carrying tablets and six dollar coffees. And me, the humble mystery writer, sneaking in the back way so as not to be noticed before I had to walk out there, read an excerpt, answer some questions, and look like I enjoy this. It gets tiresome. Smiling and scrawling platitudes to people I will never know. Gotta hawk my wares if I want the sales though.

I relish the quiet anonymity afterward.

Just my luck, amateur night. A couple of middle age ladies did a duet on The Sound Of Silence. Simon and Garfunkel they weren’t, but being able to sign along with the song made it interesting. While several more tuneless renditions of country oldies droned on, I pulled out my pad and pen and jotted notes for a story based on a singer who was murdered backstage and the only witness was a deaf mute fan who disappears mysteriously.

I was considering titling it ‘Killing Me Softly’, when some guy with a guitar and a battered fedora strode up. Must have been a local, and well known, because there were cat calls and whistles, though everyone was gathering around.

He plopped onto a stool and strummed; then opened a vein. With a voice like a gravel pit, he sang about small town life and the harsh unforgiving city lights. Girls that done him wrong, things that didn’t belong, and being alone at the end of the day with nothing but a bottle and cigarette for company. I let my food get cold but I had another beer, and gave him my full attention, because as harsh as this guy’s growl was at times, it was the most honest damn bunch of songs I had heard in ages. And he had bottomless blue eyes I wanted to get lost in.

“Who is that?” I asked the guy across from me. He glanced over like I was some alien species. Which I guess I was.

“That’s Old Tom. Nobody knows who he is; he just comes on in and puts on a show one Friday a month.”

“Guess I was lucky to be here for it,” I said, not realizing the song had stopped and my voice was a bit too loud.

“No, you was drawn to me by cruel fate,” Old Tom said, taking a drag from his cigarette and crushing it out on the floor. “I got a song about that too.” He got to his feet, and setting the guitar down, shuffled over to an old piano, launching into something about being too shy to talk to a girl in a bar.

I fell in love with him that moment. We were kindred souls. Except he was too busy being a singer, and my mind was wrapped up in creating stories about who he was, where he was from, and what kind of experiences compel a man to walk into a bar with a guitar and a hatful of songs one Friday a month.

You know how time gets away when you’re busy. Old Tom sang his set, tipped his hat, winked at me, then strode out into the night. I tried to follow, but the fog swallowed him and I was alone once more.

Never saw him again. But I got a damn good book out of it. So maybe that was fate's Christmas gift to me.

Did You Write? 12-12-11

2011-12-12T16:01:00.000-08:00

Did You Write? 12-12-11
Neat date.

This is a place to tell about what is going on in your life. In the process, you may also tell about what is going on in your writing. the hope is that posting here will become a habit, and seeing that you did not write, or did not meet your goal, will shame you into being more diligent in your writing. Many among us will write once every couple months unless ridden to do so.
By their posting here, it reminds them how little they are writing so they will open their work in progress or something new and get some words on paper to develop a habit of writing at least once a week. While writing each day would be a laudable goal, once a week is far better than once every couple months.

How much writing is unimportant. It could be one word or a whole chapter. It is more about actually opening the work. for those among us who do write regularly, one might be aiming for a word count as their goal and reports of not meeting those counts will remind them not to slack quite as much. Their reports are also great for those among us who write less, letting us know we could also do that too.

As for what is writing, we all agree new writing is writing. Editing is also writing, even if it is the work of someone else. Critiquing is editing, so it counts as writing too. Poetry, blogging, articles, writing assignments, technical writing, world and character creation, synopsis, are all forms of writing. E-mails and board posts can be writing if they are wordy and pertain to story or writing. In essence, if you have to ask if it is writing, our answer is yes.

Several people recently reported that they reached THE END on their work. Fantastic. those are magical words. that is the first goal of every writer. Getting published is the second.

AS for me, I caught a cold Monday, waking in the morning with a sore throat. I was luckily this time that the cold was not a sloppy one, the most mild cold I have ever had. It did knock me off kilter a little which reduced my writing. Full weeks and busy weekends also reduced my writing activities. I am doing a READ OUT LOUD editing system at this moment. If you trip over a sentence, you know it is written wrong. I am catching as many other kinds of corrections as badly written sentences. In my first real editing session I got to page three. On my second session, I started at the beginning again and got to page four. Not good for getting this stupid thing finished. What also has happened is that I decided I need to do three scenes from another point of view, or at least show that point of view among that of the others. I also realized a couple scenes could be fixed. I might do those changes, before I resume my reading editing again. I need more time to write so I can get this thing done soon.

On the story idea front, I have, including the idea I am posting tonight, 41 story ideas in my compost pile. Not spectacular but the new ones seem to be interesting.

On the personal front, I am now in holiday mode. I am setting up to get things done. Tonight I added the very first color on my first batch of cards I am painting. In the past several years, I have painted my own cards. It started several years ago when I picked up a teddy bear stamp and was going to do stamping on the cards. Several technical issued made me realize it was faster to paint my cards than it would be to do the stamping. the first set of cards were pretty good. I skipped a year or two then decided to paint the cards again and have done so ever since. It is one thing to pour over the cards on the racks to find the right one. It is something else to actually create your own. There is more of you in them than if you just picked one off the rack. Over the years, I have had several people mention they thought the cards were commercially done. that is a pat on the back.
I am still making my ornaments. I had poor production this weekend as other projects got in the way. One such project was a vase I made where the interior cut through the outside of the wood. I decided to make a tree that came up out of the mouth of the vase and put little people around the tree. the open sides became like an amphitheater. Everybody who has seen it really liked it. I had thought of something like this for several years but had the materials and opportunity to finish it up. I had another vase I was planning on carving to hide chips on the lip. I changed my mind and cut the mouth of the vase down past the chips. The vase actually looks a little better now.
I had other projects going on so few ornaments were made. It was a productive weekend. what made it nice was I barely noticed I even had a cold. Today at work, I was reminded a bit more but doing well.

As to the question of the week,
I can honestly say,

YES I DID WRITE

DID YOU WRITE?

Week 622 Wood Working

2011-12-11T16:13:00.000-08:00

Year 11, Week 48, Day One (week 622) (January 17, 2000 was my first carving day.) 12-09-11 Saturday

76 degrees, heavy clouds moving fairly quickly. The wet morning ground dried out quickly. The clouds thinned out a little as the day wore on, with some blue sky showing, more to the north. This weather report is brought to you by the city of Pompano Beach Department of Tourism.

DURING THE WEEK,

I caught a cold. It started with my waking with a sore throat on Monday. I started treating it with the over-the-counter medicines that I had found to have worked somewhat before. That and lots of broth and soups. This cold never got to the sloppy mess most colds get to. I am now in the "clean up" stage of the cold, not having hit a peak. I do half expect to get blasted by it a short time later.

I sold four of my ornaments. My price has not changed since I started in 2003. Ten bucks a piece, four for thirty bucks. My boss picked out a dangle which is an ornament simply designed to dangle, a polar bear, a palm tree, and one of my spinners which I made for a spinning competition in the club. This one was hollowed out and then pierced. I now can buy some more tools!!!!. I am actually way behind on my hobby paying for itself. Over the past three years, I have made far less than what it cost me.

My ornament display at work

SATURDAY

We went yard sailing. When I got up in the morning, it looked like it might not be great for yard sales. Once I hit the road, I decided it would actually be a good yard sale day.
We hit quite a few yard sales, but really only purchased at a couple of them. At one yard sale, I got a set of seven bar clamps. The price was excellent. I now have another item in my Christmas list filled. I then picked up a meat pounder for a dollar. I am thinking of a use for it.

bar clamps and meat pounder picked up at yard sales

At another yard sale, I picked up some toy soldiers. when I got home, I dug out all the others I have. I am thinking of making a display using them. I thought I would take something I turned and use it like an amphitheater for them. I will give it some thought. I have a bowl that I have considered for this before. I think I can fill in another space in my present list.

ornaments picked up at yard sale

I had to leave early so I was not planning to get involved in something spectacular.
I photographed my findings and my ornaments. I petted and fed the beast of the back yard. He was not being of good behavior and actually swatted at me twice. He did, though, sleep at my feet later in the day which I always love. I read recently that cats are vulnerable when asleep so when they sleep with you, they are trusting you to protect them while they sleep.

all my ornaments laid out on display

I decided to carve a couple more turkeys, which I carved an experimental form last week. I decided to see if I could do better this week. My first one came out pretty good. The head needs a tiny bit of work.
On the second one, I accidentally lopped off the top of the head. Instead of the head "riding high", his head had to be reaching out. Of course I had to cut back the shoulders more to make it work. I was at the last part of shaping the head and made a cut with the grain rather than against it and it split the wood. I tried to glue the head back together while it was still attached, but the glue seemed to squeezed all out of it each time. then the top of the head came off and I was able to re-locate it among the shavings and glue it back on. I will have to finish both heads before I can paint and finish them up.

Two carved turkeys. A little touch-ups and they are ready for painting.

I left early and got nothing else done other than cleaning up. I did grab a piece of wood that I can cut the wings for my dragon out of. I have to do some heavy cutting to get to the blocks that hold the wings. Even then there will be a whole lot of cutting to free the wings out of the wood.

I have a couple more projects to finish to fill in spaces in my Christmas list. They won't be the way I had planned on finishing them, but they will be fixed up nicely if I get to them.
I have more ornaments to finish or make. I plan to gift a bunch of them so I need a few more made.
Since I have more projects than time, I will do my work on what catches my attention at the moment.

I will see what I actually do tomorrow.

Year 11, Week 48, Day Two (week 622) (January 17, 2000 was my first carving day.) 12-10-11 Sunday

A cool 78 degrees in the morning, a scorching 80 degrees in the afternoon. A steady breeze with some gusts, clouds moved quickly. One sad cloud wept on me in the morning but it had stopped before I got all my equipment under cover. The rest of the day was patchy clouds of several levels and styles and lots of blue sky and some nice sunshine. the sun being to the south of us made it more difficult to give us long periods of sunshine because of the clouds in the way.
This weather report was brought to you by the City Of Pompano Beach Department of Tourism.

This morning started with finishing up some projects that had to be done now.
I brought all my collection of circus / parade / mini ornament sets and a bowl I had that really needed something. The first project was to mount a two by two into the lathe and make a tall Christmas tree. The corners were not going to let the wood fit where I wanted it to go, but I would round the corners of the base so it would fit. I really wanted a bigger piece of wood but decided to go what I grabbed first which was an over-long two by two.
I mounted the base end in the chuck of the lathe, and the point of the tail stock in the center of the other end. I then cut in creating a Christmas tree effect with the rows of bows getting bigger as they went down the tree.
When I had that, I sanded well and touched up some errors. Then I mounted the piece, with the point of the tree going inside the shaft of the head stock and gently clamped down the chuck onto it.
The way the chuck is designed, is that the jaws fit onto plates that slide in a slot when you rotate screw. The inside of the plates close down almost but not quite, completely. When you put the jaws of the chuck on, the design of the jaw prevents it from closing quite as far. When you slip something inside the tubular shaft of the lathe, the bottom of those plates will close down on smaller pieces.
I had the base sticking out and held firmly enough not to wobble but not enough to damage the wood, and I was cupping the bottom slightly to fit the suface it was to mate with. I then was trying to slope the top of the base so it would not stick up like a big block the way it did. I got a catch and almost the entire base blew off the trunk of the tree. I cleaned up the trunk and then hand sanded the marks of metal touching wood at the jaws. I touched up the bottom of the trunk so it sat flat which it now had to do, and then drilled a hole for a dowel.
I painted the tree a dark green. I then hit the bottom part of the bows with white to represent snow. Finally dabbed different color dots all over to represent lights and decorations. I had decided not to wait to add beads to the tree.
The bowl I brought with me today was a natural edged bowl that did not come out right. I turned it on the side and did not mount it quite center so where the interior cut through the bark, it came out wrong. the bowl was both nice looking and ugly. I fished it out of my junk bowl box twice, a box where junky pieces go to be finished or tossed later.
I drilled a hole in the center of the bowl and stuck a skewer through and glued the tree over the skewer with the top fo the tree sticking out the top of the bowl.
I had laid out my "little people" which are ornaments for tiny trees, decoration figurines and such, and after taking pictures, put all the big pieces away. I then added the tiny figures around the base of the tree, looking out and looking at the tree. Everyone in the family I showed it to said it really maid a big difference. I had thought of doing this many times over the years and never had the gumption enough to do it. This month, I had acquired several baggies of these figures and now was a good time to make use of them. It sure saves the bowl.

Bowl I saved by adding Christmas tree and figures

I touched up several ornament carvings so they are now ready to paint. I will paint them this week.

A friend sent me a plunger for a kitchen device and was asked me to copy it but in one piece of wood. I dug out the ones I made, two in Mahogany and one in Oak, and touched up some "boo-boos" they had. They are now ready to send back. When I made them earlier this year, the problems seemed too difficult to fix. today, fixing them seemed so easy. Sometimes when you are having a problem with something, give it a few weeks and it will suddenly be solvable.

My nephew came up and wanted to work on something, so I dug out my little lathe, helped him set it up as a milling machine, and then had him mill the bottom fairly flat, a whole lot flatter than it was anyway. It is good experience for him. He eventually wants to have a whole machine shop and now is a good time for him to learn how to do it. It helps me as I have not had time to get to that project because of the Christmas Rush.

My nephew Machined the bottom of the aluminum block that will be used for a tool I am making

I had a couple pieces that needed sanding. Usually, I will take my drill out, mount the sanding disks on that, and move the drill while holding the work in place.
I got an idea. I mounted my Jacobs chuck (drill chuck with a taper attached) into the lathe and put my flap sander on it. I then moved my piece around as the lathe did the sanding. I could adjust the speed of the lathe as needed, slow or fast. At fast, it was not too fast either.
I then put a two inch sanding disk and sanded other places on the pieces to clean them up. It actually made short work of bringing two pieces up to something of a standard.
I had thought of making a big sanding disk to fit on the lathe, but it was only today that I thought of using the drill chuck for this. It sure did a great job

Jacobs chuck mounted in lathe with sanding disk

I had a Norfolk Island Pine vase I made a while back that had chips on the mouth. I had planned on carving it so the knots would be the centers of flowers. I just had not come up with a design I really liked. One thought was to pierce it all the way through with the design. It is one of the few pieces I have made that was thin enough for that. carving or piercing would hide the missing chips in the edge.
Looking at it, I decided to take the easy way out. I mounted the piece in the lathe, with the sanding pad still in place and centered the piece the best I could, and then cut the rim off just below the lowest chip. I went about a third of the way through and the piece seemed to be wandering in my arrangement. I took it off and used my carving knife to deepen the groove I already made until I could pop the damaged part of the rim off. I then used the disk sander and some hand sanding to finish off the edge. I actually like this look a bit better than with the taller, wider, mouth it had before.
I Can still carve and pierce this piece, but except for a few more coats of varnish, it is done for now.

I have a turning club meeting on Thursday. That was one reason I rushed to get some pieces done today. I like to have work to show off, and one of the pieces I worked on is a Bring Back Prize. I won the Prize last month, receiving a tool handle someone made. I need to have something to give out this month.
I will be running the video camera again this month. The guy who does it is not going to make the meeting. The video camera shows details of the demonstration that the audience cannot see from where they are seated. Of course I also take pictures for the club web site.
In the next couple days, I will paint the three ornaments I have done, and add them to my ornament display which I have set up in my office at work.
I will add more finish and touch-ups to the pieces for the club meeting. I always take them to work to show off before I take them to the meeting.
I MUST get started on my Christmas Cards. They are due weekend after next and I generally have to make up two dozen. These cards are hand painted and lettered on white card stock. I have a design in mind and the process thought out. It is just finding time to get started on it.
Next week, I will still have to make some more ornaments and have a couple pieces that I need to finish up that might be gifted. I have several things that need to be packed up and mailed out. I also need to start wrapping items. I may need more boxes.

I will see what I actually do next week.

Another New Pro Se Magazine!

2011-12-09T18:43:00.000-08:00

READ ABOUT IT!

And yeah, I have a story in this one too, as does our loyal blogger follower Kevin Rodgers, a writer of riveting horror; and two very talented gentlemen, Andrew Salmon and C. W. Russette. You don't want to miss this one! Available on both the Createspace site and Amazon.com

The holidays are coming, so why not give books, the gift that keeps on being opened over and over again.

~Nancy

December fifth 2011, Did You Write?

2011-12-05T15:27:00.000-08:00

December fifth 2011, Did You Write?

I bet some of you are just getting back into the swing of things after the Thanksgiving holiday, hoping to stay in it for just a couple weeks before Christmas and New year messes you up again.
This note is mainly for those who write maybe once every few months. This is an opportunity to shame yourself into writing By posting here whether you have written or not. After a few times of not writing, you will feel shame and start writing so you can feel good about accomplishing anything. For the rest of us, we can feel shame for not meeting some goal we aimed for, during the week.

How much to write is not important. It is more about first opening some work in progress or starting something new. The more you do the better but opening something is the most important part.
As to what is writing, It can be just about anything. New writing is of course writing. Editing, even if it is the work of others is also writing. Critiquing is a form of editing and therefore counts.
Poetry, technical writing, blogging, writing assignments, article writing, world and character creation, synopsis, outlining are all writing. Bulletin board writing and E-mails can be writing if they are wordy and pertain to writing or story.
Of course, many of these might not be looked at as writing. The rule is, though, if you have to ask if it is writing, the answer is yes.

As for me, Yes I have been writing. I got to THE END on my Spirit of Vengeance story on the clean up editing pass I did. I am now in the final stages of editing. I ran it through two grammar checks this weekend. I have two others, plus reading aloud.
With grammar checks, each author considers certain things a problem. They will flag those things as a problem. I used one ages ago that flagged FROM and asked if I really wanted FORM. It was something the author felt was important.
There are standard problems they flag that we all would agree with. Then they have flags that basically say "there is a problem with this sentence but I have no idea what it is."
Grammar checks are also not designed for fiction. Conversation throws them into a tizzy. "foreign" names also bother them a lot. The help files and instructions are written by people who know language in detail, for people who do not need a grammar check.
The key to using a grammar check is to learn what to ignore and what to pay attention to.
I used two of my programs and they did help. I did get a kick that they disagreed with the spelling of one word, though.

On the story idea front, I have 40 story ideas, including the one I am posting tonight, in my compost pile., It would have been a worse except that I came up with four new story ideas today. I was getting down to the top of the permanent compost pile. I cannot remember if I mentioned it and won't bother checking, but I did one story idea at the end of last month that was supposed to be two. It dawned on me that the first one was simply a description of a disaster. The second one was the aftermath. I combined the two. I have one other double story idea in the stack.
Last month, I posted 30 story ideas for a 30 day month and it ended up on Page 35 with 21229 words of pure drivel. One never knows when one might spark one's imagination I happened with my Spirit of Vengeance story. It was originally a story idea. It looks little like the original idea but that is not important. If twenty people wrote stories from that same story idea, we would have twenty different stories when they went to market. It is why I have no problems using ones I have already posted.
I started posting these story ideas in December 1997. I need to locate about two year's worth of files in my backup disks to be able to work out exactly how many stories I have posted. at an idea a day, It is a lot of ideas and I doubt I have repeated one.

I brought my Christmas ornaments to work today. I have at least six of each kind of ornament. I really need twelve of each but I have enough to start.
I got an idea for a bowl that would be a turkey. I was going to have the tail integral to the bowl and add the carved head. While trying to work out the process, I decided I should try it small, a Christmas ornament, to see if my concepts would even work.
My first attempt showed me I did not fully given thought to the shape of the body. I had it backwards. After some thought, I decided to carve it by hand. When I was done, I showed the unpainted carving to my mom who tried to set it on the tail and have me add a tail to the belly. Oops. I did some touch-ups and then painted it. Once painted she saw what I was doing with it. Now I am considering making a bunch of them as Christmas ornaments using corrections I learned on the first one.

I heard on the radio that they are going to take some genetics found in a mastodon bone and clone it into an African elephant The host asked if we have not learned from Jurassic park yet.
Consider if we somehow got dinosaurs to come alive and start breeding them. Since one line of research says they are related to birds, and birds essentially taste like chicken, think of raising dinosaurs for food. Harvesting the eggs, The babies sold as big chickens. The adults processed for slabs of chicken or mass produced chicken products. think of how many chicken nuggets an adult dinosaur would provide.
My original thought was for something like Velociraptor or T-rex but herbivores would be better as what would you use to feed a predator? There are always dietary concerns when eating a predator.

As to the question of the week,
I can honestly say,

YES I DID WRITE!!!

DID YOU WRITE???

Week 621 Woodworking

2011-12-04T16:31:00.000-08:00

Year 11, Week 47, Day One (week 621) (January 17, 2000 was my first carving day.) 12-03-11 Saturday

75 degrees, strong almost constant breeze, fast moving clouds, a couple in the morning were sad enough to sob a little giving just a little mist before we ever got started. Because they were moving fast, it only lasted a minute. Some sun but most of the clouds blocked the sun. This weather report was brought to you by the City Of Pompano Beach Department Of Tourism.

DURING THE WEEK

I painted the ornaments I made last week, getting them ready to be finished. I mainly had to add beads to the palm trees and varnish all of them. The polar bears just needed one color of paint. the seals got two, where I painted the belly white and the body blue. The palm trees got several colors of green and some brown at the base.
The cornucopia required lots of different colors. I had all six in front of me and I added one color to all of them at the same time, cleaned the brush and then did the next color.
On the second session, I had to touch up some spots on all the ornaments and some of the Cornucopia fruit got a second color.

My newest Christmas ornaments are done.

SATURDAY

When I arrived, mom asked me if it was getting light yet when I said yes, she took me outside and asked me if I noticed anything. I had to look a bit before I realized that a palm tree was missing. the tree was in the neighbor's yard and he removed the tree I have needed to trim for over a month. I procrastinated long enough and did not have to do the project. That corner looks bare. The tree did a good job of filling in adding privacy.

We went yard sailing.
At one yard sail, I picked up a plastic drawer unit for small items and it turned out to have some beads in some drawers. that was a good find for the price. In moving it around many places, I lost a bunch of small beads such as when I put it into the car upside down and the drawers moved partially opened, and when it tipped when transporting it.
I also picked up some small plastic kitchen measuring stuff, and some good stoneware dish set, eight plates and six bowls all in a gym bag.

Stoneware plate and bowl set. kitchen gadget set.

beads and a partial view of the unit they came out of.

At another yard sale, I got some quilting magazines, mostly from around 2000. Someone is gong to be surprised when she finds it in her mailbox in a few weeks. There were also some cross stitch and knitting magazines along with a 100th anniversary issue of McCalls. I will hang onto those.

Knitting and 'other' magazines that I will keep. Quilting and sewing magazines that I mght send out later.

After loading the magazines into the car, I went back in and picked up a pair of drill bit / drywall assortment sets with one still in the shrink wrap.
I picked up a Harbor Freight style battery powered drill of a type I have several of and it works. The charger and battery works with all my other equipment.
There was also and a small battery powered motor tool kit that works good. The motor tool has no real guts, but is useable. I used it today when I needed to drill holes to start the eye hooks on my ornament and this tool was perfect for that.
This was a moving sale and they were unloading everything at a good price. A lot of people were there.

Drill bit sets, one still in shrink wrap. Small battery powered motor tool

Harbor Freight drill kit.

When we got back home, I fed and petted the beast of the backyard, and examined the stuff I purchased, taking pictures of each item. I sorted some of the beads I retrieved after they were dumped out. That took longer than I planned, but was fun.

While petting and feeding the beast of the back yard a second time, I added eye hooks to the new ornaments and a couple older ornaments that were missing hooks. I found that the hooks did not want to go in on their own, so I used the little motor tool and one pointed grinding bit to poke a hole so the screws would go in. That cut the time to do the remaining ornaments by three quarters of the time. There were other ways of making the small hole, but this worked out better and I did not have to bother the cat to use it.

I then dabbed white glue on the palm tree trunks, and dipped them in a bag of seed beads. The multi color beads resembles Christmas lights. I let them set for a while, then added glue to the fronds and dipped them again in the beads. I found that white glue works good for this. Most of the beads fall of but enough stay on to look good.
I let the palm trees dry for a while. I dipped all the other new ornaments in wipe-on varnish to protect them and set them on a rack to dry. When I decided the glue had dried enough, I sprayed them with spray varnish to set the glue and beads in place some, and when that dried, I dipped them in wipe-on varnish.
I like to soak my work in wipe-on varnish because it soaks in everywhere, into the nooks and crannies where a spray cannot go. It also gets into the fibers of the wood.
Wipe-on varnish is essentially a thinned varnish. when working on a larger piece of work, one would wet a cloth with the varnish and wipe the work all over. Then one rubs the work all over until the varnish is completely dry. There is no bubbles, no hair in it, no drips or drops. It really should be called a Rub-on varnish. Most people tend not to be that energetic though. I know I am not.

After the ornaments dried enough, I packed up to leave. This was around noon since I had some places to go.

I have some of my wood turning work on display down at the Candlelight Antique shop down in Dania Beach. It is on the west side of US-1 right at the Dania Beach Blvd.
I have had my work in there for about three years now. I have not sold much, but my chances of selling something is better there than being kept in my closet.
I re-arranged my display a little, giving it a slightly different look. It might make someone think that there is new stuff in there. I have not had time to do anything new so far.
I gifted a carved Christmas tree and one of my palm trees to the owner of the place. He is a good friend and he has several of my ornaments.

My display at the antique shop. my stuff has been there for three years now.

I stopped and gifted another Christmas tree at a thrift shop I frequent. I was able to walk out without anything though I saw several items I could use, or think I could use.

During the week, I came up with an idea for a project. I have seen a sort of sunray/fan kind of thing in furniture carving. It dawned on me I could turn a disk as a start to make one. It then dawned on me that it looked like the tail of a turkey.
One popular way to make natural edged bowls is to turn the wood side grained, so the curve of the log is the top edge of the bowl. If one goes wide, one gets what is referred to as a BANANA BOWL which is long lightly curved, sort of like a banana. If one goes close to the center, once can get the sides to really dip low. I used a couple of mine as napkin holders.
My idea for a project is to turn a piece in two directions. Thinking about it, I would first turn it length ways but off center. I would turn a disk that would become the tail.
I would then mount it sideways. I would hollow inside, and form a disk on the bottom which will become the feet of the bird. While the front might be a bit thick, the tail would already be formed and not have to be added. I just have to make sure I don't cut into the tail part when hollowing it.
The disk on the bottom, sort of a saucer, becomes the feet, I cut away the back side of the saucer, blending it into the rest of the work. I call it a saucer as I made one where the disk was whole and that is what it looked like.
I will have to see how easy it is to do, and how it turns out. It will be another project to work on when I finish with my ornaments.

For tomorrow, I will make some more ornaments. I need a bunch more polar bears. I need six more each of seals and Cornucopia. I started on my BRING BACK prize but have more finishing to do on it. I have to sand out some tool marks created by removing some flaws I had.
I have several projects to finish up also. I want to make some more rods for crochet hooks too.
My project right after the Christmas rush is to prepare for the art show I do every year. It was moved up to March so I have less time to prepare. I have two main projects to do. One is a dragon I started carving, and the other is a face vase with five faces on it. I won't be working on them tomorrow unless it is to cut the wood for the dragon wings. They will start out roughly as rectangular blocks and will be shaped later. the wood is out in the weather and needs to be put under cover so they don't weather any more. If I cut them, I will also cut the turkey wood out of the same block.
My ornaments still have priority. I have to make the blanks, and carve as many of them as I can so I can finish them up this week. I am taking my ornaments to work for display Monday and will add the others as they get done. Many will end up being gifted, but some might be sold.

I will see what I actually do tomorrow.

Year 11, Week 47, Day One (week 621) (January 17, 2000 was my first carving day.) 12-03-11 Saturday

80 degree, really strong wind in the morning weakened some in the afternoon. I was setting up some ornaments and they kept being blown over in the strong morning wind. Later I was carving and the chips which go in all directions, kept being blown back at me. The morning had lots of thick clouds, almost complete at one point, then the sky became mostly blue as the clouds raced away from us. It became mixed again later. This weather report is brought to you by the City of Pompano Beach Department of Tourism.

I left my camera at home so that changed a few plans.
I dug out all my ornaments and cataloged what I am starting with this year. Some ornaments are from the year I first came up with them and others were made again to keep the number up as they were popular.
I have some bells I made in my very first batch in 2003, for example, and I have made Snow Men and Christmas Trees every year since then. Other ornaments have had extra made but mainly I have whatever remains of what I made the first time. AS it is, my total count right now as I type is 108 ornaments to display.

I had an idea of making a turkey bowl made on multiple centers. I realized that a bowl like that would be a bit tough from the start, so I decided to make an ornament to see if some of those ideas would work. I mounted a piece of white pine I am using as my ornament wood into the lathe.
I set the wood off center close to one of the corners and started it spinning. I worked the tail first. I cut in slightly on the end of the wood so the "underside" of the tail would be cupped and curved. I then worked the front of the tail to match the rear, though I had it thicker than it would be in the end. I then shaped the body in a graceful curve.
I stopped to look at it and realized it did not have the shape of a turkey body.
Later, I decided to try again but this time just carving. The other day, I had cut up an eight foot long two by two into twelve inch long pieces. I took one and somehow measured wrong so instead of getting three pieces the same length, I got three different lengths pieces.
I grabbed the shortest one and knocked off one corner as the base so the other corners would give me the most height and width. I then started carving the tail.
The knife does not like end grain all that much so I did not do well on dishing out the end of the wood so the tail would angle in. The front of the tail was easier as I was attacking it from the side and at multiple angles. I got a good angle on that side, but it was thicker where I stopped at the body.
I then shaped the body. I left room for the head at the front which would stick up to the height of the wood. I had a knot at the shoulder and used the bandsaw to cut so the head would stick out in front. I angled the shoulders ack. I also did a couple cuts below the head and angled the chest back a little. I carved the rest of the body to shape and formed the wings against the body. I then shaped the head.
I thought I had something pretty good and showed it to my mom. She wanted to set it on the tail and have me add a tail to the bottom. I had to explain how I had it carved. She explained what I did wrong, showing me an example too.
I did some touch-up carving and then painted it. Once painted, there was no question on how it was supposed to be positioned. It does look like a turkey now, just not a great one.
I can see how to make it better if I choose to make more. I have not decided yet I will see if anybody wants it this week when I put it on display. If it sells, I make a bunch more of them.

Two views of my turkey ornament.

I mounted some sticks of wood in the lathe and roughed out some polar bears. I had one blank to carve so I made two more real quick. I then sat down and shaped and carved them. These are the easiest ornaments to make. The lathe does the worst of the work. I just touch up all the surfaces, and then shape the rear legs and the head.

I had a number of things I wanted to take pictures of, but because I left the camera at home, I never got those pictures
A friend of mine died early this year and They are starting to refurbish his home. He had an art piece mantle and I have a chance to retrieve it for another friend of mine. I loaded the tools to do that into the truck.

My plan for next weekend is to do a few more Christmas ornaments, but now I am thinking of making some presents for Christmas.

I will see what I really do next week.

Did You Write? Nov. 28, 2011

2011-11-28T16:29:00.000-08:00

Did You Write? Nov. 28, 2011

It is that time of the week. What has been going on in your life? what about your writing?
We just passed through The Thanksgiving Holidays here in the States. For some people, holidays mean staying home and writing. For others it means more tasks on the plate and less writing. Which is it for you? The answer will also tell you how you are likely to bo doing over the Christmas Holidays coming up.
Oh, that reminds me. the end of the year is but a month away. Think about how you have done this year in your writing. Have you met or exceeded your goals or are you way behind and writing heavy the rest of the year is not going to help?
The hope of posting here whether you write or not, is to use implied pier pressure, or shame, to get yourself to write regularly, to develop it into a habit and get some real work done. This is especially important to those of us who will somehow go months without writing a word.

AS to what is writing, If you have to ask, the answer is yes, it is writing. New writing, editing even if it is the work of others, critiquing, poetry, blogging, article writing, technical writing, writing assignments, synopsis and query letters, world and character development, all are writing. E-mails and board posts might also be writing if they are wordy and pertain to writing or story.

As for me, Yes I have been writing. Not as much as I wanted. For me, the Holidays and subsequent recovery cut down my writing time. Also, things have gotten busy at work and I am getting full weeks for once. The pay looks great but the hours are cramped for writing. There is a limit that things can be squeezed in. In the next few weeks, I have to squeeze in even more into the ever shrinking hours I have.
I am editing my Sprit of Vengeance story. The previous editing pass was a section by section re-write, where I corrected and changed entire sections and added more. Now I am doing a heavy edits, cleaning up sentences and fixing loose or incomplete passages. If I can get some spare time, I might be able to finish this soon. 'As it is, I have added 650 words this week and a whole page. The next paragraph I add will kick it to the next page.

On the home front, I am working on my Christmas ornaments. The last two weeks, I came up with my four designs. I need twelve of each. that is 48 total pieces. I have ten of one design. I have six of a couple other designs, and I only have three of a fourth design. I have this next weekend to get them done.
I am starting to plan the Christmas cards I need to paint. I would like to get them started early so I can get them done with plenty of time to think about other things. The past couple years, I was painting them on Christmas Eve, to be given out that night. I want to avoid that pressure. I usually need to paint twenty four of them in total, usually two different designs as I really can only paint twelve at a time and the second time I figure out how to do it better.
when I first starting making my cards, I was going to use stamps, and then realized it would be easier to paint them. I get more pleasure and compliments over making my cards than anything I could pick out and buy. Many people keep them as art pieces. It is work but I do like the results when done.
I learned something new about machining this weekend. I made another step to being closer to make a tool I need for my metal working lathe. I also tested a tool I made and had a partial failure. Luckily, I can easily fix the problem and continue to use my creation.

As to the question of the week, I can honestly say

YES I DID WRITE!!!

DID YOU WRITE?

LOST CHILDREN ANTHOLOGY now in Paperback too!

2011-11-28T05:54:00.000-08:00

Right now, with the holidays upon us, most of us are thinking of gift giving and how to help our fellow human beings here on Starship Earth. Well, here's one way you can do both, and feel very good about it too. The Lost Children Anthology—of which I am proud to be a part of—is now available both in printed format as well as E-book. So now folks, you have even more choices. Won't you do something that makes us all feel good, and buy a copy or copies for yourself and/or as a gift, and give a present that can be opened again and again? Remember, all profits from this one go to the charities mentioned. Come take a look, and do something good for the world this holiday season.
http://the-lost-children.blogspot.com/2011/11/now-available-in-trade-paperback.html

~Nancy

Week 620 Woodworking

2011-11-27T15:22:00.001-08:00

Year 11, Week 46, Day One (of four) (week 620) (January 17, 2000 was my first carving day.) 11-24-11 Thursday

I have no idea what the temperature was, but know it was in the high 70s. Even amounts of blue sky and brisk moving puffs, some thickening in the later afternoon, nice light breeze where we were, quite comfortable. This weather report is brought to you by the City Of Fort Lauderdale Department of Tourism.

It was thanksgiving day and I have a four day weekend off from work. We gathered at my brother's house for the holiday dinner and that was where my projects were done.

I arrived early, unloaded food and drink I had, then unloaded my carving stuff and dragged them to the back yard. After getting set up and comfortable, I got to work.

My project was to carve on as many ornament blanks as I could do comfortably in the day. I finished up a cornucopia I had half done last weekend. I mainly had to finish carving the fruit on it. I touched up a couple other pieces. I then carved a couple more cornucopia. I do love the way they are coming out.
I carved a polar bear and a couple seals also. It was pretty good production.

Dinner was excellent. My mom usually does the turkey but she was out for several weeks and came home early this week and did not have time to even think about cooking a turkey. My sister in law did an excellent job. while I did not over eat, I did eat far more than I should have. I also, like a little kid, knocked two drinks over, one into my plate, while passing food around. Other than that, this was an excellent holiday dinner.

My brother was doing metalworking. Several years ago, he built a power hacksaw. It uses belts and pulleys to slow down the action, and the saw is moved by an arm just like a steam engine.
He had disassembled it and replaced the bearings and a few shafts shown heavy wear and he swapped them around. After he had it operating again, he saw there was some flexing and decided to fix that. I helped him bend some thick plate on a hydraulic press he had built from plans and he then welded the piece in place. that made a big difference in the straight, clean, precise cutting one can get. Before the repair, he had to hold the blade guide in place as it could wander half an inch in either way. By his corrections and replacements, he could almost just set the blade down without guidance.
His power hacksaw uses regular hacksaw blades and the blades will last for thousands of strokes. The main reason most hacksaws are replaced when cutting by hand is that they get twisted. With this power hacksaw, the strokes are exactly straight and true and the blades have to replaced because the teeth get dull.
A great thing about this hacksaw is that you turn it on and get it cutting, and one can walk away and let it cut. It is nearly silent. It might take a couple hours but it will calmly cut through three inch stainless steel rod with no problems. A cut off saw or Saws-all require you to hang onto the machine and it takes a long time and makes a whole lot of nose that can irritate neighbors.

Power hacksaw, the actual hacksaw is on the arm on the left. It works sort of like a steam engine where a lever moves the arm back and forth

My brother then needed to make a lathe dog. I did not fully understand how one is used so the process of making it was interesting.
He used two lengths of square stock and cut them at different lengths using the power hacksaw. He then drilled two holes in the short bar, and two holes in the long bar to match those of the short bar. He then drilled a third hole in the long bar at ninety degrees to the other holes. He then cut lengths of threaded rod to span the shaft he needed to turn. He then cut a shorter length of threaded rod. He needed several nuts for the rods.
He found the approximate center of the big rod he needed to turn and mounted it between points in the head of the lathe and in the tail stock. He had mounted a face plate that had slots and holes, and the center was open so you could run a piece straight through the head. We found a wobble in point in the center of the face plate and my brother found there was gunk in there and had to clean it out. The point then went in deeper so he had to re-setup everything.
The lone hole had a rod in it that fit into one of the slots in the face plate. With the bars really tight on the rod, and the threaded stuck into the slot, the rod was held on center and turned nicely for machining.
We made just a few passes on the rod when we ran out of time. I would never fully understood how that lathe dog worked until I had seen it in use. I have something like that for my little lathe and now see possible uses for it.

the lathe dog my brother made. the work held between two points, and the lathe dog that is clamped to the work uses the post to actually turn the work around the two centers.

I had some fun watching and helping with metal working, and I made some Christmas ornaments from blanks I made last week. My main project for tomorrow is Christmas ornaments. I need to spend time and carve a bunch more of them.

I will see what I do tomorrow.

Year 11, Week 46, Day Two (of four) (week 620) (January 17, 2000 was my first carving day.) 11-25-11 Friday

72 degrees in the morning, 79 late in the afternoon. good moving clouds filled the sky, with a quarter of the sky made up of blue sky. The sun did not show all that much during the day. A nice breeze kept things cool. This weather report is brought to you by the City of Pompano Beach and the City of Lake Worth Departments of Tourism.

I set up in the morning. The beast of the backyard was nowhere to be seen Scarface was around and he got some petting but was gone before I was ready to feed him. The beast showed up in the afternoon and got a lot of attention, but not as much as he wanted.

I settled down and finished a seal carving I started yesterday and then carved a couple more ornaments.
My main project was to figure out how to do palm trees. My method of using the lathe to rough out the blank was not working. The force of the tail stock ramming into the wood to keep it in place, was causing the wood to break when it got thin. Whitewood is not a strong wood when not worked straight.
I turned to the bandsaw. My idea was to cut the curves of the trunk with the bandsaw. that was not a problem. For the fronds, I cut angles slits into the top of the tree. I would then carve the different layers differently so the fronds would hang in different places.
while Whitewood is a good carving wood, it does break easily compared to basswood. As I was carving, separating the fronds, the wood would break, changing my design with each cut.
One thing I wanted to do was to cut slits to separate the fronds top to bottom. I realized I would have to stand the piece up at the bandsaw blade and that was not going to work as I would have to cut the base too. I realize I could hook blade so it is next to the trunk and cut up to catch the bottom of the bottom fronds. I might try that later.
The layered fronds, even with the breakage I had, makes the carving look more like palm trees. Paint will help too. I should rib the trunks. Not heavily but it will look like some varieties of palm trees.

My dad died five years ago this week. It both seems like not long ago, and also a very long time ago. It is also the anniversary of when my mom met my dad. Her family pulled their trailer into a trailer park and my dad helped them back up. I think that was like 61 years ago. I learned that my grandfather, my dad's father, also died on thanksgiving weekend.
Mom and I decided to go to the national cemetery in Lake Worth where he was buried. It is kind of a long drive and we wondered if the cemetery was open because of the holiday. We started to go to the wrong gate and it was closed, then saw a car coming out the other gate so we knew it was open.
We located the grave immediately now that we know the number and about where it is. They have just about doubled the number of graves in the site since we were last there.
For those who do not know, this is a national cemetery on the level of Arlington Cemetery. There are a couple hundred of these around the country and this is the newest national cemetery site.
We visit dad's grave three or four times a year. Mom was thinking of going and I decided to ask her if she wanted to go since other days would not be as good.

Me standing at my dad's grave stone. I have lost visible weight!
Mom kneeling behind the grave stone. time is bringing out the color of the marble. when it was first put in, it was white.

When we got back, I returned to carving on my trees. At one point today, I tossed the three trees I had in process in the garbage and cut up another eight foot stick of two by two into twelve inch lengths to make more blanks, but then retrieved them and worked on them more.

Friday's production

For tomorrow, I will do some yard sailing if they are available, and then will work on more ornaments. I want as many as I can ready to be painted at one time. I will paint them in batches so I don't have to change colors as often. My cornucopia uses a large number of colors and it is a pain to clean the brush after dabbing a splotch on and then change colors. Doing several at the same time will save time and paint.
Since I won the bring back prize last week at the turning club meeting, I need to make something to give to the next winner. I have a piece of wood in mind and a design in mind.
I will see what I actually do tomorrow.

Year 11, Week 46, Day Three (of four) (week 620) (January 17, 2000 was my first carving day.) 11-26-11 Saturday
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74 degrees early morning, 80 in the afternoon. In the early morning, the clouds were really sad and a few cried over us. By the time I got outside, the sad clouds had just about left and happy clouds came running in and continued to race by in silent thundering herd. There was sun quite a bit of the day. This weather report is brought to you by the city of Pompano Beach Department of Tourism.

A little bit of early wetness, Mom needing rest from her trip, and I needing to get to work prevented us from yard sailing.

After petting and feeding the beast of the back yard, I got my stuff out. I was not planning on working with the little lathe, but I had gone to Harbor Freight last night and picked up a belt and a cutting bit. I wanted to see if the belt fit or was a waste of money.
The lathe has a pulley on the motor with several steps, then there is an idler pulley with several steps, and then there is the drive pulley with several steps. The drive pulley is the largest while the idler pulley is the smallest. One can run the belt directly from the motor to the drive pulley, or can run a separate belt to the idler pulley from the motor and the drive pulley. One can get a wide range of speeds with the different combinations.
The new belt does well running on the drive pulley to either of the two pulleys. It is too long to go from the motor to the idler. It does fit nicely though.
I forgot to check to see if the belt fits to the screw drive. The screw drive moves the cutting tool down the bed so you don't have to sit and twist a crank.

New belt and cutting bits. The things with the orange are wrenches to change the bits around.

I decided to test out the lathe dog on my little lathe. Working with my brother on Thanksgiving showed me how it was used. I mounted a piece of Black Walnut in the lathe, held between points with the lathe dog holding it. I machined it at one end, then flipped it around and machined it then, and flipped it a third time to finish it up. On the third time, I kept hearing a ticking sound. Then the wood broke and the lathe dog hit my glasses. It was not hard enough to do any damage to the glasses. I checked the diameter with my knitting needle / crochet hook guide and saw that the center part was a bit thick. A bit of hand sanding brought it to where it would pass through the measuring hole nicely.

Lathe dog and face plate, then installed with a piece of wood to be rounded. the tang of the lathe dog fits into the slot of the face plate to actually turn the piece. The piece itself is really only held between two points- centers. This is a highly accurate way to work with something centered.

The results of turning on center. the upper piece is stock I started with and the lower one is the result. when I make that into a crochet hook, it will be a D hook, which is very small.

I dug out my big lathe. I have to make a BRING BACK prize for the next turning club meeting. I decided to turn an artistic piece. I decided to try a piece that I saw demonstrated which was conical in design, but had scalloped edges. I started making mine and made several mistakes. One was that it was not conical. Another was that I had the piece way too long. Then I had a catch and it came off the lathe. I could have finished it but decided to try it again with a bigger piece of wood.
I cut off a section of a piece I had turned round and decided to use the drive I had made a few weeks ago out of aluminum. I mounted them in the lathe and started turning. At one point, I got a catch and the piece came off the lathe When I was about to put the wood back in place, I saw that the ends of the screws were bent over. I then found that the head of one screw was also bent over. That had caught on the chuck itself. That was a lot of force.
I went to using the drive spur to finish adding the tenon to the wood, then turned it around. I was working nicely then suddenly a piece of the wood came off. I stopped, found the piece of wood. Luckily, it fell down onto the lathe bed instead of going flying across the yard. I clamped the wood in the vice and glued it. I do not know if it is save-able. I might end up cutting the top off the piece . I will see.

In back is the stock material the work in front of it came from. To the right is the broken chunk and a piece I tried first and realized it was not working. Bad design.

This shows some of the damage to the drive spur I made. The screw head was bent by the chuck when it started coming out. The tips of the outer screws were bent over from the force. I ended up cutting the screw points off and then backing the screws out with a pair of pliers. I have to point some new screws for this.

I have a lot of wood in the lathe cart. They add weight to the lathe so it does not bounce as much when out of balance. I found a piece of Sea Grape and decided to turn it. I cut a piece off right at the center shrinkage cracks. It was not anything close to being square.
One surface was cut with a chain saw and was rough. I decided to save that surface. I marked the centers, making adjustments to the shape of the wood and mounted it with the rough side to the drive head. The other side was flatter and I worked that side creating a raised rim for it to set on so the rest of the piece is off the table.
I turned the piece around using the same holes and started hollowing it. The top was at a strong angle so I had to cut down carefully before I got even close to be below the low rim.
The post that my tail stock was holding the piece with broke a couple times. I flattened it, made sure I had the center and then continued to hollow.
I got it down to where I wanted it. The post broke again. Old sea grape tends to be brittle. I was deep enough to call it done.
I used a strip sander attachment on an angle grinder to clean up the posts and remove some tool marks. I still have some sanding to do to remove the marks from the strip sander, but I decided it is close to being finished.

Sea Grape rustic bowl. Needs some more sanding but is basically done. If I made it again, I would do the top flat and make legs for the underside.

After lunch, I carved on a couple ornaments to finish up a day. I laid out the ornaments I have worked on and found several that needed to be finished. they were stopped and set aside, forgetting to complete them.

Saturday's production. I glued the missing piece of wood back onto the piece to the left. The piece to the right was my first attempt. I have a seal, a cornucopia and a polar bear. In back is the sea grape rustic bowl

Tomorrow, My main project is to work on ornaments. I need to finish several that were not completed, and then carve some other blanks I have. I also need to make more palm trees and see if I have them figured out now.
I will bring out the little lathe, not so much for me to work on it, but more to show my brother some things I did.

I will see what I actually do tomorrow.

Year 11, Week 46, Day Four (of four) (week 620) (January 17, 2000 was my first carving day.) 11-27-11 Sunday
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82 degrees, nice breeze, high and low puffs, mostly sunny. Excellent day to work or do nothing. This weather report is brought to you by the City of Pompano Beach Department of Tourism.

The beast of the back yard wanted attention and company. Since I was mostly carving, he was able to lay against my feet for long periods of time.

I carved first on some pieces that needed touching up or were not finished. A couple seals, but mostly palm trees. About late morning, I dragged out the dremmel and used that to help with the palm tree fronds. They kept breaking when carved with a knife. The knife did set the pattern on how they were going to be shaped, and then the grinding wheel on the dremmel removed the wood with less breakage than the knife was doing. I also used the dremmel on the surface of the base around the trunk as there were band saw cuts showing. I used the sanding disk to fix the bottom and sides of the base.
I have some snowmen that I accidentally turned round. I wanted to make them with the feet sticking out. I carved one of them with arms and a face. With these, I decided to leave them as they are so I cleaned up the top of the hat and the base and will paint them as they are.

Total ornament production this year. There are ten palm trees. Two more and that series is done. I only have four bears so I have a whole lot more of them to do. the others are doing well.

After talking with my brother, I took out that piece of aluminum that I want to make into a cross slide for my machine lathe. I took the bandsaw to it, roughly squaring up the sides. they will have to be machined more. My brother read that time with the saw saves a lot more time on the machining.
My brother measured the piece and says that if I am careful, I have enough metal in thickness for the part I am making. Only the tool holder part really needs to be that big. The rest of it can be smaller for the most part.
What I might do is make a piece of wood the size of my block and make the part I am after as practice so I have exactly what I am after. A time ago, I made a version of what I wanted to make, machining it out of wood. Wood does have problems when machining, but it is a quick and easy way to test out designs. Also, if I make my piece out of wood, my brother could sand-cast the parts so the machining would be limited. It is also excellent way to practice for the real project.

I cut aluminum block, my brother and nephew smelted for me earlier, on the band saw to get it closer to being square. I can think more about design now.

My brother was making a new tool for his lathe. it was a boring bar It is to smooth out the inside of pieces, getting them to the final dimension. The design is something I could use on my lathe. He did run into a problem. He has some cutting bits with interchangeable cutting tips. He also has extra screws. He thought he got the right tap for the screws but he found it to be wrong. He will come up with something else. His boring bar was simply a rod with a machined end that holds the bits at the right angle. I can easily make that for my lathe. The fact that I can make my own cutting bits helps.

For next weekend. I need to stop by the antique shop. Unless something happens so I can leave early from work, It looks like I will have to go Saturday. That will cut down on my woodworking. Again, my main project is to work on ornaments. I don't have near enough polar bears. Had I noticed that, and had I noticed I have ten palm trees, I would have at least carved the last two polar bear blanks I have made.
Between now and next weekend, I have to paint, sign, and varnish the ornaments I already have done. The palm trees will then get beads for ornaments and another coat of varnish to protect the glue holding the beads in place.

I will see what I actually do next weekend.