Here There Be Hares

from Avalus,

more photos from my way to and from work, this time it is all about hares. They languish in the fields in the morning and the evening.  They are also clearly uncomfortable about people stopping to take pictures from 20 m away. With their brown fur, they are pretty hard to spot if they don’t move.

Hare 1 ©Avalus, all rights reserved

Hare 2 ©Avalus, all rights reserved

And for comparisons sake a rabbit. Note the much smaller ears.

Fun fact: In German the ears of hares and rabbits are called “Löffel” which means spoons.

Rabbit ©Avalus, all rights reserved

Where in the World are Voyager and Jack

Bubba takes a dip in the murky creek ©voyager, all rights reserved

Here we are, at home like most people during the pandemic, but it’s been a tough summer for Jack. He hasn’t coped well with the heat, and many days he was only up for short walks down the street very early in the morning or late at night. Usually, we spend the summer on the east coast where it is cooler and Jack can swim every day. These humid and hot Ontario summers don’t agree with him. Or me.

Also, the past few weeks have been very busy for me. I’ve been organizing my pantry (a cupboard in the basement) and my freezer (also in the basement – I’m up and down as often as a new bride’s nightie) in preparation for the second wave, which is already starting slowly. The Globe and Mail said this morning that our curve is no longer flattening and are blaming “pandemic fatigue.” Great, just as our public schools are due to open next week. They are combining on-line learning with in-class and are staggering school days. One half goes Monday, Tuesday and the other half Wednesday to Friday, then switch back and forth. Masks are mandatory at all times. It’s a plan, but none of the teachers I talk to are feeling confident, and neither is the public. So, I’m putting us in lock-down until the end of October and possibly longer than that. Mr. V has a bad heart, so we can’t afford to take chances. I have until the end of this week to double-check the plan and shop for any gaps. After that, I won’t be going out except to the mailbox and to walk Jack. Socially distant visits with friends will be outdoors only.

The good news is that it’s cooler and Jack can get out every day. Some days, he still wants only a short walk, and now that he’s 12, I don’t push him. On those days, we take 3 or 4 shorter walks just to the end of the street and back, and he seems content. Most days, though, Jack still likes a bit of adventure, and in the cooler weather, he can make it all the way around his favourite trail in the woods. That’s the Fairy Woods, which brings me to a piece of news. Jack’s Walk will now be only Jack’s Walk. Any fairy stories that find us will be posted under a new title – Tails in the Wee Woods. With that change, we’ve decided to go back to posting Monday to Friday. We’ve had a lovely break, but it’s time to get things back to normal.

This labour day, I’d like to send a good word out to Giliell, who is back to school in these uncertain times. Stay safe, my friend. That message goes out to the rest of you, too. Stay safely vigilant and don’t give in to “pandemic fatigue.” Here at Jack’s Walk, it will always be a safe place to come and take a deep breath.

Card Weaving

kestrel is graciously sharing her woven artwork with us, and she’s taken the time to teach us about how this type of weaving is done. I’m sure you’ll agree that it’s fascinating.

 

Card weaving (or tablet weaving as it’s also called) is a very ancient craft going back quite a ways. A very wonderful find was the Oseberg ship with two women buried in it. Among the many textiles found, there was also a loom with the warp still attached to the weaving cards. However historians believe card weaving is much older than this 9th century find. Card weaving was a technique people used to create very strong and sturdy as well as ornamental bands. Some of the very ornamental bands seen in religious textiles were created this way. 

 

Although I used to weave quite a lot, for whatever reason, I had never tried card weaving. I’d had to give up weaving (there was no room for my very large loom and I had to sell it) but recently I decided I wanted to weave again. My big loom was gone, but you don’t need much to do card weaving. 

©kestrel, all rights reserved

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Fly me to the Moon

And let me play among the stars. (Bart Howard, 1954) The moon fascinates all of us and Avalus is no exception. He’s taken some wonderful moon shots and is sharing them with us.

With these it is hard to not simply say: Look what my toy can do!

Because I kinda just pointed my camera at the moon and, very unexpectedly, got beautiful shots. The advance of photo-technology is pretty amazing, as I remember trying the same thing about a decade ago with my dad’s professional camera and failing to get any more than a washed out disk of light. And nothing for daylight-moon. These were taken by hand or the camera rested on my balcony railing.

 Now I need go and play some more Kerbal Space Program.

To the Mün!

©Avalus, all rights reserved

©Avalus, all rights reserved

©Avalus, all rights reserved

©Avalus, all rights reserved

Mowing Pictures – Part 1 – Butterflies

I made these last month and then I forgot to post them. Well, the pictures are not that good, they were made with my phone. But I still think they are worth posting.

When my neighbor has finally mown the meadows surrounding my house, he left a bit unmown just in front of the gate into my garden. He always does. I do not know why maybe he is afraid that he will damage the geodesic leveling pole that is positioned there. Regardless of his reasons, I have to mow that piece with a scythe, and this year I have made a few pictures of the various critters and flowers that live there whilst doing so.

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

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

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

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

Hello, Hairy

Kestrel has had another close-up encounter of the bird kind, and this guy cracks me up.

 

So there I was, minding my own business, when I heard this odd noise, a sort of squeak or chirp. I looked at the window and what did I see:

©kestrel, all rights reserved

Something looking back at me! 

©kestrel, all rights reserved

He was pretty interested in what I was doing. Maybe he wants to learn how to weave! 

©kestrel, all rights reserved

Or maybe he was just hunting for bugs. This is a Hairy Woodpecker and they are fairly common here. There is another type called a Downy Woodpecker that is virtually identical but much smaller than this guy. He could not see me through the window; he never would have tolerated me holding my phone up to him to take his picture if he had seen me. 

Swan Swam Over the Lake

The pond we often visit for walks/Pokémon hunting used to have a swan couple. they were kind of the mascots of the village, featuring on signs, they were looked after and taken in during winter, but last year the unthinkable happened: a swan divorce! One of them left and the other one soon vanished (died?), so for the last year there were no swans. Now they got a new swan family, complete with cygnets.

©Giliell, all rights reserved

©Giliell, all rights reserved

BTW, shortly before I took these from a safe distance, a lady let her baby(!) up to one metre to the swans. But guess whom she would have blamed if the baby had gotten eaten…

Ring Ring! Resin and Opal

After lots of frustration and some success, the right blanks finally arrived. That vendor will sure see some more business from me. So, while still not being able to use my lathe, I started to work on my first resin and opal inlay ring. What can I say, after all the building up to this moment, the process was so damn quick and easy that it was almost and anticlimactic letdown. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love, love, love the result and will sure make more of them, but it somehow feels a bit like cheating, like ordering one of those teddy bear kits where you just stuff the already sewed animal and then close the opening.

I was actually pretty anxious about this beforehand as the materials don’t come exactly cheap. While you don’t need much opal for a ring (I suspect I used about 0.3 grams for the ring), a gram is 10-15 bucks plus shipping and it looks like nobody in Germany has yet thought of selling it so I had to order from the UK and the US*. I’m thankfully not anywhere near poor, but the thought of possibly having a starting cost of 100 bucks without any results was not appealing.

Anyway, here’s some pics from the making of and the final result.

When watching videos on youtube, the people making these rings usually use either UV resin or CA glue, so naturally I decided to do both. I was worried that the opal would vanish under the midnight blue resin, so I first put on a thin layer of coloured resin and then tried to glue on the opal splinters. Only that apparently the resin prevents the CA from curing. Don’t ask me. It stayed completely fluid even after about an hour while on the ring, but occasionally it would drip down, taking my carefully set opal splinters with it and then instantly harden on my workbench. In the end I just slathered everything with a generous serving of UV resin. Because the pigment is quite dark, curing it took some time. Another bonus of finally having a workbench in the cellar is that I could just go and fold the laundry while turning the ring and restating the UV lamp every other minute. After that I put the mandrel into the drill and started to sand down the excess.

©Giliell, all rights reserved

Yes, you can see me “how to attach the mandrel to the drill” contraption here, which would make my miner grandfather proud and give my machinist dad hives.

©Giliell, all rights reserved

At 100 grit that is maybe 10 minutes of time, with breaks to let the abrasive paper cool down. At this point I filled in all gaps in the resin, cured it again and then sanded some more until moving to the polishing going 240/400/600/800/1200/1500/2000/2500/3000, which would be pure horror by hand. Here it’s just “hold the wet paper to the ring and make sure you don’t burn your hand. For the final polish I usually use a “scratch ex” kit for cars. Dunno if they are available where you are, here Aldi usually has them twice a year or so. They contain a mildly abrasive paste meant to smooth out small scratches from your car paint and polishing paste and they work a treat**.

Now I hope I built up some tension for the end result. Sadly no sunshine, but with a heat wave and a drought I’m really happy about the rain this morning.

©Giliell, all rights reserved

Yes, that ring goes on my “stinky finger”.

©Giliell, all rights reserved

I photographed a bad position on the ring, but I only saw that afterwards.

©Giliell, all rights reserved

Today I was assisted by a friendly gecko.

 

*Apparently by now international mail from the USA is faster than national mail within the USA.

**Do you also have those expressions that you find yourself using in excess for a while? Seems like “works a treat” is currently my favourite expression…