Some delicate mushrooms in bright shades of yellow and orange, courtesy of Avalus,
©Avalus,all rights reserved.
©Avalus, all rights reserved.
©Avalus, all rights reserved.
©Avalus, all rights reserved.
I have finished the two fullered blades that I intended to mirror-polish for research purposes. It went reasonably well, I must say. The new jig helped a lot to smooth out and polish the fullers and although I had to resort on occasion to my old method of wrapping the abrasive around a bottle cork or popsicle stick, my fingers were spared or the worst of the worst. They are not perfect, but they are good enough for it to take some time to spot the irregularities and imperfections.
I think that next time I will do even a bit better because I did not have the jigs from the start for these, I have developed and tinkered with them during this project. One such tinkering that I forgot to mention in my previous post was to coat the idler wheels on my belt grinder with PVC flooring offcuts. That has reduced the chatter when grinding and polishing the fullers on the belt grinder, so I could actually use the belt grinder for polishing, and the handmade jig was subsequently only used to remove the perpendicular scratches and replace them with longitudinal ones. And because next time I will have all this equipment and the knowledge already, the results should, at least in theory, be better and with less work.
So here are some pictures containing the main things that I am writing about – blades, flowers, and insects.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
The pumpkins are flowering nicely and there seem to be enough solitary bees around to pollinate them.
The blade on the left is the one that I have almost tossed. The fullers align well near the hand, but they diverge towards the tip quite noticeably, at least a few mm. Both fullers on both blades are a bit irregular.
I have a love-hate relationship with mirror-polished blades. They are very difficult to make, it is a lot of hard manual work that busts fingers and back so I hate doing it because I am tired and I do not recover as well as I should from physical exertion. But I also like doing it because it is very rewarding and satisfying to see the gradual change with each step as one progresses from 40 to 7000 grit and then to the buffing compound.
But they are never truly finished because the mirror polish exacerbates every minute irregularity to an absurdly high degree. A few microns deep divot will be seen at a certain angle. Also one thinks all scratches are removed and then, a few days later, you look at it at a very specific angle in a very specific light and suddenly you see that some gossamer-thin scratches are still there.
Then there is the practical side of course – although the steel is hardened, at mirror polish you can literally scratch it if you cut cardboard or office paper with it. They are very precious flowers indeed – basically, the wind blows a speck of dirt on the blade, you wipe it off and it leaves behind a scratch that will be visible in some light. That was one of the main reasons why I have decided to make a tumbled finish for my friends’ knife and why I am going to use it for most of my knives because that hides all but the most egregious scratches.
All in all, although these two blades are not perfect to a degree that I would be perfectly content with them, they are good enough that I shall go on and finish them with high-end fittings.
An amazing capture from Nightjar,
©Nightjar, all rights reserved.
©Nightjar, all rights reserved.
The kid’s birthday was already at the start of the month, but of course with my body being an asshole again I couldn’t make a cake for her actual party. Thank goodness teenagers mostly require insane amounts of food and not attention, so she could have her friends over for a small party.
Last weekend we celebrated with our friends and she got her cake for that day. She went for her favourite Eevilution, Leafeon.
©Giliell, all rights reserved The eyes are not my best work.
©Giliell, all rights reserved Yes, that’s a ton of individually cut and applied grass blades
The inside of the cake is a standard vanilla cake with a cream cheese and cream filling. The filling was really easy and tasty: I used a packet of lemon flavour jello to mix with the cheese and the whipped cream, added some lime zest and cut canned peaches. The only problem that I had was cooling it down quickly enough for the jello to work so it wouldn’t run all out on me. I then covered the whole thing in a thin layer of buttercream before adding the fondant.
Because a German buttercream (butter with custard) has too much liquid for fondant and an Italian meringue buttercream (my usual go to buttercream) was too much work for the state of my recovery, I made an American buttercream. I usually consider American buttercream the symbol of everything that is wrong with American cake making: It’s just butter and sugar, too heavy and too sweet. I love watching cake videos, but quite often the American ones leave me a bit puzzled: Yes, this looks amazing, but all you have in there is cake and buttercream. Where’s the flavour? Do Americans really spend 200 bucks on a cake that looks great but doesn’t taste of anything but butter and sugar? Please do tell me.
It did work well here, btw, because it was only a small layer to get the surfaces even and it contrasted nicely with the tart lemony filling.
This year I planted some cornflowers that grew in front of the window. They were planned as degu treats, but with one thing and another, I didn’t get around to harvesting and drying them. They do look pretty sad to human eyes now, but they look damn delicious to the goldfinches. I rarely get to see them, so I was all the more surprised to find them within 30 cm of my nose, happily munching the seeds.
©Giliell, all rights reserved
©Giliell, all rights reserved
©Giliell, all rights reserved This one’s grainy because I took it with my phone
I heard this orb weaver spider catch the fly when I was watering the cactuses in my greenhouse. Before I managed to fetch my camera and macro lens, it tucked itself away with the fly in a crevice and began to snack on it. I almost did not find it.
Pictures below the fold. [Read more…]
Surprise! It’s another unfinished painting by Caine, sent in by her husband, Dakota Grease Monkey
untitled portrait, ©Caine, all rights reserved.
A delightful photo from Some Old Programmer,
Our library has a culvert at the side entrance, where a family of raccoons were trying to beat the heat. Eastern Massachusetts, US.
Library Raccoons, ©Some Old Programmer, all rights reserved.
In case you don’t already know, “Find that lizard” is a fun game Dr. Earyn McGee is hosting on Twitter, where you get a photo of a yard or something with a lizard hidden somewhere, often showing how well these creatures blend with their environment. Well, my own lizards are lazy, which is why I got to take this shot:
©Giliell, all rights reserved
As you can see, the little fellow lost its tail and is currently regrowing it. You sure deserve a break, buddy!
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
Last week this magnificent bird sat on a dead branch of a nearby ash tree. It is their favorite spot and I have gotten some pictures of kites sitting there already, but this time It was later in the day, so the sun was at a much better angle. And the bird obliged staying in one place long enough for me to actually run with the camera outside.
It is a bit of pity that there seems to be some dirt stuck to the corner of its beak. Really, no sense of style whatsoever. One would expect a model to show to a photoshoot well groomed and clean and not with bits of food stuck to the corner of their mouths.
Still, what a magnificent bird. I shall definitively make a kite-themed knife. Soon.
While we took a look at the cultivated garden yesterday, today it’s time to look at the wilder side with some flowers.
©Giliell, all rights reserved
©Giliell, all rights reserved
These poppies are just amazing. Too bad the rain ruined them all.
©Giliell, all rights reserved
Here’s some simpler ones.
©Giliell, all rights reserved
Last year I threw some cheap flower seeds on one area. They turned put top be white mustard, which bloomed last year, and alfalfa, which is growing like mad this year. The bees love it, the degus love it, I’ll let it flower so it can seed next year’s crop as well.
©Giliell, all rights reserved
©Giliell, all rights reserved
And a colourful beetle. It was somewhat shy and I only had the mobile, so the pic isn’t great.
There is a pair of kites flying around every day and I hear their typical cries from morning until evening, so they are probably nesting somewhere close-ish. I hope they do and I also hope they will help with local water vole population, i.e. massacre it.
Unfortunately, I did not manage to get both into good focus, so a blurry picture must do.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
I did manage to get a few decent pictures of one of them though, from different angles.
© 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.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
The pictures are of suboptimal quality because they fly very, very high. Even finding them through the camera lens is a challenge, and to take focus and press the trigger button on a moving target that high is a bugger, that much I can tell ya.
But no matter how high a kite flies, there was something even higher that day around her. I could not find it in my bird atlas so the species is not determined. If you know it, let me know in the comments.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
When waiting for my father to come back from a doctor’s appointment, I wandered around a bit and went into an underground garage. I was around and about there several times, but I do not ever remember wandering inside. But the weather was extremely hot and I needed some shade and cold. So I went down the stairs…
…and there I saw beautiful graffiti that immediately caught my eye.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
I had to take two photographs and make a composite, this thing is huge, ca 4 m tall and 10 m in length. Graffiti is usually just pieces of vandalism around here, just initials or a highly stylized signature lazily sprayed over some newly painted facade. Those deserve a ding around the ear and a duty to pay for the cleaning/repainting. But this is a work of art and it was probably done with the approval of the garage owner. This must have taken several days of work at least. And that was just the start.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
There were some small insect pictures on some of the support columns, and that still was not all. The whole huge second wall was covered with art too. Possibly done by several different artists because it had several distinct styles.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
The last two panels of the walls did contain beautiful pictures too, but also bear witness that the graffiti vandals seem incapable of not being vandals for a bit, even when the thing they are vandalizing is someone else’s graffiti.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.