Cats and Wood

A little while ago, I started a woodworking apprenticeship. Meep thinks that's old news. It is, but I've been too busy to write about it.

Woodworking is something I've enjoyed for a while. My friend Dan and I plotted to make electric guitars way back when. He made his pretty quickly while I hemmed and hawed and realized I didn't really have the woodworking skills to get started. He ended up making an electric bass for me and I did the inlay and staining. Dan is now master luthier at Born Guitars and I'm still plotting to make guitars. I did learn how to do inlay pretty well doing that first bass. Since then I've taught myself a few more things. My first spinning wheel is functional.

 And so far, the recipe bookcase I built for the kitchen remodel is holding up well.

It's great to be able to design something and build it, but I've been wanting to take my woodworking to the next level. It was the perfect opportunity when a local Davis woodworker put out an ad for an apprentice. Even better, Joshua makes fine furniture and art mainly from salvaged urban wood.



Frank gets logs from local arborists, so the trees that he mills are not cut down just for their wood but are removed for other reasons. Normally they would be mulched or just used for firewood, but Frank mills them into boards.













Hank the dog is very helpful except when he is distracting.

After the logs are cut into boards, they're sprayed with boric acid to keep insects from eating them and stacked to dry with stickers (spacers) between them to allow air to circulate.














Some of the wood is spectacular. It's hard to look at it and know it will be a year or two before it will be dry and useable. Walnut is my favorite wood and Frank mills a lot.








It gives me wood envy, so to distract myself today, in between helping spray and stack wood, I took pictures of the very photogenic Nigel.









He was not at all helpful, as he likes to get in the middle of things.

He is disarmingly cute.












































And he likes to use wood as a scratching post.

But he is very very very handsome and cuddly.

Which is not to say the new Davis shop kitty is not equally affable. Joshua is moving shop from Frank's place in the country north of Woodland to Davis. Lester has made himself comfortable in the new shop.

And the shop is taking shape. Very exciting.

With moving the shop, we haven't been getting a ton of woodworking done, but I have been scavenging from some walnut burl we brought in and made this little necklace.















Here's some eye-candy...a corner of the burl that's waiting to be made into something magnificent.

And finally, a plug for my boss: Joshua just launched his new Kickstarter project today: the Urban Shelving Collection. Really beautiful pieces out of really beautiful and sustainable local woods. Woods include Claro Walnut, Valley Oak, Mulberry and Silver Maple and I can't wait to work with them. There's a bike shelf, a bookshelf, an entry shelf as well as smaller items. Check it out and spread the word!

Sewing Machine with Koi...it was meant to be

My fish spinning wheel is finally nearing completion and is actually functional for spinning off the spindle.
I'd neglected gravity a bit when I designed it so it wanted to lean backwards. I tried to compensate by adding extra wings on the base, but it still seemed flimsy. I finally gave in and designed a new base which is heavier and so makes it a little more heavy/complicated to pack up the wheel for travel, but it should still be able to be packed up for travel more easily than my saxony wheel. I have some more sanding/finishing to do as well as completing the flyers, but it is finally so close. I'm also thinking of inlaying the new base to match the treadles. Here's a close-up of the inlaid treadles:

At any rate, I've been wanting a treadle sewing machine for a while. I already have a very lovely 1947 Singer sewing machine that Aaron had refurbished for me, and I'm not that much of a seamstress, so I didn't really need another sewing machine, but I did really want one. What if there was an extended blackout?

So I might have been perusing Craigslist once in a while. And I might have happened across an ad for a machine right here in Davis. The couple selling it were very nice and when I went over to their house to check it out, they had a very friendly orange kitty who offered to assist, i.e. sit on my feet. The decals are pretty worn, but they're koi!--matches my koi spinning wheel. And the cabinet is in great shape and is oak which matches Steve's new cabinets, so he agreed the sewing machine can live in the living room. (My room is a little packed.)


Here she is closed:open:
And sewing the hems of some handwoven towels: (I took the towels off the loom ages ago and never finished the edges. It took buying a new sewing machine to finish them.)

Detail of the cabinet carving. Ok so it's a flowery flourish, but doesn't it look like koi?
And look--definitely koi!
The drawers are in good shape with pretty carvings.
And interesting innards:
There are quite a few attachments, and I've been trying to figure out what they are and how to use them. That's quite a step for me since I've never used any alternative feet even on modern machines. I've sewn all my zippers by hand in fear and ignorance of the zipper foot. Here's the box helpfully marked "Attachments"I bought a book on sewing machine attachments, so here's what I think I have:

Ruffler:Tucker:

Quilting guide:

If I'm wrong with any of my labeling, please let me know! And if you have a recommendation for learning how to use them, I'd appreciate references as well. The book I got was not as helpful as I'd like.

Shiny Fancies: Glass and wood and silk and metal

Originally I'd planned a few series for this show...a series of pots, a series of lamps, a series of shawls and a series of mobiles. The pots and shawls happened, the mobiles never got made and I stopped after two lamps which don't really go together anyways.

This lamp was the first in my projected series of lamps using wood, fiber and glass. The wood is scavenged camphor from the wood bin at the Craft Center. I found the thin pieces with natural edges and saved them not knowing what I'd do with them, but the wood smelled too delicious to resist. I've never worked with or even seen camphor before, but later found out that this was from a bookcase my friend Dylan was commissioned to build. The photos of the full boards are breathtaking and I can't even imagine how wonderful it must have smelled while he was working on the case. I added in some found maple for the edges of the base, then foolishly tried handcut dovetails to attach a little block of oak to the maple for the lamp base. I like the idea of hand tools, but really really really need a class to learn how to use them well. The dovetails took forever and don't show unless you look at the lamp from the bottom and the whole thing is very probably overengineered, but hey, it works. The silk is from the silkworms I raised last year. I let the moths emerge, then degummed the cocoons and stretched them out over a frame to form the panels. The panels were then stiffened with paverpol, a fabric hardener.

The other lamp is a redo from a series of lamps I made for Tom Wickersham's Ides of March way back in 2005. Maurice Ravel's Piano Sonatine is a piece I first played in junior high, studied again with Susan Aceto at Williams, then used as an audition piece to get into private lessons with Lois Brandwynne at Davis. I've played piano since I was tiny, but had never been good about practicing until I got to Williams and decided I needed to learn a piano concerto and tried to learn Chopin's Piano Concerto No 1 on my own. I soon realized I needed a teacher and found Susan Aceto. She was wonderful for me, helping me improve my playing and technique while finding pieces that I really liked to keep it all fun. I've never worked so hard at classical piano as I did in college.

Ravel is an impressionist composer and Susan used the idea of colors and images to help me improve my playing of the piece, especially the third movement (which was the first movement of the piece I'd learned as a kid and is the most difficult). I played the entire piece as part of my college senior recital, but my most memorable performance of this piece was in the impressionist gallery at the Clark Art Institute on a beautiful old piano surrounded by Degas, Monet, Renoir and more.

I created images in my head for the different parts of the third movement and still have those images in my head, though I can't play the piece nearly as well now as I did then. I thought about doing a series of lithographs of the images, but never got the print time. When the theme for the 2005 Ides of March house art show was "Found in Translation" it seemed the appropriate time to translate the images from my favorite piano piece into a different medium.

There's an old weaving magazine called "Loom Music" and weaving patterns or drafts do look a little like sheet music. There are many possible ways to translate music into weaving. Since I wanted to do a series of fabrics from different parts of the music, I decided to translate bits of melody into the treadling (which determines the order in which sets of threads are lifted). The loom I used was an eight harness, 10 treadle loom, so I didn't quite have enough "notes" for an entire scale. Taking out the sharps and flats gave me 8 notes so I threaded a point twill and set two treadles to tabby and used the other 8 for my melodies. The fabric was made of 60/2 silk at 48 ends per inch (i.e. really thin yarn fairly densely set which means it took a really long time to set up the loom). I'd painted both my warp and weft threads in sections according to the colors for different parts of the song, so I ended up with a series of very different pieces of fabric, all on the same warp. Cutting the silk fabric fabric was the most painful part and I was tempted to just display the cloth, but I wanted to make a series of lamps since light was so important to the impressionists. I was rushed for time at the end and was never a good seamstress in the best of times, so I never felt I did the fabric and concept justice in the actual lamps.

A very long story to get to the point. This lamp is my redo. I took my precious fabric off the clumsy wire frame and designed wooden triangles to hold it instead. The wood is from some beautiful dense aromatic hardwood I got a while back in trade for a bunch of fleece. It's a wonderfully thick piece, so it felt a little wasteful to rip it into thin strips, but it was the perfect wood for this project. I was thrilled that my miters worked and the triangles glued up well. I made a series of glass rings to hold them together and very gingerly fused the glass rings together with a tiny jewelry torch. Happily I didn't scorch any of the wood. I may refine it further, but I'm much happier with this version than the original.
Few more pieces to round out the show:

November Rain. One of the only two welding projects I completed before I apparently forgot how to TIG weld. Steel, human hair (from back when I had very long hair) and glass. I made the two figures while I was depressed after a breakup. Apparently I was enjoying wallowing in grief :)

Moving Forwards. Glass, walnut. Walnut is my favorite wood and I like working with it even just to sand it down really fine and finish it with a nice oil. The glass figures are part of a study I was doing on movement.

Women Charge. Glass, silk, paverpol. More glass women. I can't remember when I started this piece. I wanted to make a bunch of glass women marching with fists in the air, but once I'd made a few I wasn't sure what to do with them. I tried welding together the steel framework for a glass bridge but found my welding ability had evaporated. I didn't really know what I wanted with a bridge anyways. Paverpol is a fabric hardener for sculpture that I'm just learning about. For this piece, I thought maybe I could make a silk "rock" out of silk roving and paverpol. It looks, well, interesting, but isn't as solid as I'd imagined, hence the women appear to be charging a little overzealously rather than marching. Hmm...

This is a long post already, so I'll end here. One last piece in the show...

Recent adventures

Despite my utter inability to keep up with blogging, interesting things have been happening the past few months. August 1st, two historic houses were moved across downtown Davis to a new site to be made into new co-ops.
The Solar Community Housing Association runs several co-ops and has been working on establishing a new one. Two houses across the street from Davis' Central Park were donated and there was a big turnout to watch them be moved. It was a huge cooperative project, with tree trimmers, PG&E, the railroad and the city all having folks there to facilitate the 7 block journey through the heart of downtown Davis. Mark Chang brought his piano car and played "Our house, in the middle of the street, our house..." as part of a procession of bikes following the house.
The houses will be retrofitted for LEED certification and will rely on a large number of volunteers. Anyone in the area is welcome to come help out, no experience necessary. A bunch of my friends and I helped out at their big September work day. See their website for more details.

Also in August, I finally made it to the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. There was so much more than I expected, everything from tiny frogs:

to little brown birds:to catfish:I really liked the giant catfish.The living roof was beautiful, especially at dusk:

The next adventure was camping at Arroyo Seco. We hiked in and set up camp, then went for a swim before settling down for the night. The next day we decided to do a nice little day hike out to Tassajara Hot Springs. It didn't look far on the map. There were beautiful flowers along the trail.

and manzanita

and butterflies

and cool creeksWe went along the Horse Pasture Trail from Marble Peak Trail then took the Tassajara Cutoff Trail. There was evidence of the recent fires.and there were beautiful views

but Horse Pasture and Tassajara Cutoff trails were so overgrown that it was slow going slogging through them. It took us so much longer that we didn't have time to soak at Tassajara before turning around and taking the Tony Trail back. Tony Trail went up up up before going down and was washed out in places on top of having plenty of overgrowth. The burrs loved Aaron's socks.
Since I hadn't checked trail reports before going on this trip, I was completely unprepared in shorts and between brush and burrs and ivy and what not, my legs were in rough shape by the end.

We were very happy to make it out of Ventana Wilderness.
In September we went to the Monterey County Fair:and I was excited to see the Monterey Wool Auction
I was good and didn't bid on anything since I met Sue Reuser and picked up the three cormo/cormo x fleeces I'd bought from her in June. Her fleeces are pricey but well worth it...so gorgeous. Her fleeces took a bunch of top honors in the wool show and if I didn't have my lovelies filling the trunk, I would have been tempted to bid on more.

Doxie:hogget 910:hogget 925:

I also had some time to saw seashells by the sea shore (to inlay the treadles of my spinning wheel):while Aaron had his African drumming practice:

Culinary adventures included a mild fixation on pluots after reading Chip Brantley's book "The Perfect Fruit"

and a new obsession with making risotto:
Shrimp and fresh veggie risotto

Heat up 1/4 cup olive oil in a stock pot.
Add 2/3 c minced onion and 4-5 large cloves minced garlic and cook until aromatic.
Add ~1 cup chopped sundried tomatoes, ~1-2 tb finely chopped rosemary and 1tb finely chopped sage and cook for a few minutes.
Add 1 cup risotto rice and mix with oils, herbs, etc.
Add preheated chicken/veggie stock +/- water in 1/2 cup aliquots, stirring and waiting for liquid to be absorbed completely before adding more. Continue adding liquid until rice is done, still slightly firm in the center.
Add in fresh peas and corn. Cook for a just little bit, then remove from heat and add in 1 cup grated parmesan cheese. Stir to combine. Salt and pepper to taste. Add pre-cooked shrimp and stir until warmed through, then serve. Top with a squirt of lemon juice if desired.