Outdoor Theatre Project, part 2 – Streets, Houses, Families

I really like the idea of outdoor theatre where the audience moves from scene to scene and becomes a part of the play itself. In part 2 of the series, Nightjar’s photos are done in black, white and sepia tones and have an antiquated feel to them in keeping with the play. I’ll let Nightjar explain the artistic choices behind each photo:

This is one of the most dynamic and beautiful scenes and took place in an old and narrow street filled with props, although the public can’t see everything right away because of all the hanged clothes blocking their vision.

White clothes and wooden clothespins gave the street a properly antique look. Plastic just wouldn’t have worked.

Not an actor and not part of the crew. Originally. I took this photo before one of the rehearsals, and I was convinced the public would scare the cats away. That was not the case. They even showed up in my recording of this scene, running along in front of the actress. Well, the scene is about houses and streets, I guess the cats concluded it could be about them as well.

Near the end of the street things get a bit more personal as you can see. Families are remembered and everyone gets a good laugh when we get to a list of family nicknames. Me, I am somehow still from the “pinenuts” family. I do not however belong to the “vinegars”, “onions” or “garlics”, definitely not to the “howevers”, “glories” or “fourteens”. I will admit to a bit of “turnip” blood and the “mouths” are still my distant cousins. I think for most of these silly nicknames no one has any idea how they came about, just that they have passed from generation to generation and when put together whole sentences can be made out of them.

Tree Tuesday

This week we have an autumn oak tree in its fieriest colours from Avalus. I love how bright the colours look against the grayish sky, almost as if the leaves are lit from within. The single oak leaf that follows, though, is seriously trippy. It’s instructions seem to read 1) lose all green colour 2) fall to the ground 3) get a fungal infection and 4) turn green again…in artistic little blobs. Thanks, Avalus, for this very interesting share.

Making Kitchen Knives – Part 7 – Assembly and Finishing

After leaving the handle scales in the ammonia overnight, I took them out the next day, washed them in running water and quickly dried them. First by letting them for an hour above the stove in my workshop and when they were nearly dry, heating them carefully in 10 sec intervals in the microwave until there was no steam coming out. I do not count this time into the manufacturing time, because I have been doing it this way only to be able to proceed quickly and get the knife done this weekend. Normally I would let it dry by itself.

When dried, the scales had to be fitted to the handle – that is done by carefully sanding the faces that are glued on the tang on a flat stone as long as it takes to get them nicely flat. Then I screwed the handle scales without the blade together again and sanded and polished the two forward facing facets, because once the scales are on the tang, nothing can be done about them.

As far as the metal goes, I cleaned most of the scale from the tang with 80 grit sandpaper and then I cut two pins from 6 mm brass rod, hammered them through the holes in the tang and tried whether the whole assembly fits together without unseemly gaps. I was prepared to eventually sand a bit here and there, but it was not necessary, it fitted nicely. So I slathered generous amount of quick drying epoxy cement on all adjoining surfaces and squeezed the whole assembly gently in the vice. I cleaned the epoxy that got squeezed out, first by scraping of the excess with a piece of wood and second by washing the blade with paper towel soaked in alcohol. A piece of epoxy on the back and belly of the handle are not a problem, since those areas will be sanded anyway, but a real care must be taken in cleaning the blade and the forward facing facets of the scales thoroughly, because again, any mistake there cannot be easily corrected.

The epoxy that I was using was hardening quicker than I was happy with, but our local Baumarkt has “optimized” its wares selection a few years ago and they are only selling quick-setting epoxies now and I will probably have to order some slowly setting epoxies over the internet. I got lucky and I managed to get everything important clean before the glue set, but it was a race with time. That means I could not make any pictures of that process, so what you see is status just before applying the glue.

After the epoxy has hardened – in this case about 15 minutes later – I have made final shaping and polishing of the handle. I did not go above 150 grit sandpaper though, because that would be a waste of time with this wood.

Because the used wood was extremely porous, I had to stabilize it. Marcus has already mentioned the recent fad in knifemaking that consists of infusing the wood with resin. That would be ideal here.

Well, I lack the equipment to do that. But I wanted at least somewhat stabilise the wood even so. And I wanted to use the same finish that I have used on my mother’s knife, because it has proven itself to be very resistant. So I took the boat varnish and diluted it with acetone at a ratio approximately 1:4. You can see on the picture that the undiluted varnish is a lot thicker than acetone and it has sunk to the bottom of the jam-jar. However after mixing it did not separate again for a few days by now.

For the first dip I have put the handle in the heavily diluted varnish and I waited approximately 20 minutes until no visible bubbles were rising. Ideally It would be better to do this in a vaccuum-chamber, but acetone is very good wetting agent and this should be enough for at least a few mm penetration. After that I took the handle out and cleaned any varnish from the blade immediately with acetone. Then I have let it dry in a dust-free and well heated room. All that is left now is this week each evening after returning from work giving the handle a slight polishing with 150 or 180 grit sandpaper, dipping, cleaning, leaving it dry again until I am satisfied with the surface. I am not going to measure this time exactly because it is scattered a few minutes each evening over a few days. Lets say it is 30 minutes overall, including final signing of the blade.

That makes it 1:30 or 90 minutes for all of the work described here. That also makes the knife done for the purpose of measuring the time of my actual manufacturing process, so next time we can look at the data and look what (if) can be done there to make it more efficient.

Macedonia 4 – Terrible Butterflies

Terrible picture butterflies, that is – the butterflies themselves were amazing, and everywhere! Very few of them were ready to co-operate and pose for me, so I was lucky to get these three at all – and from a distance, playing around with the zoom. There were at least two more varieties that I didn’t even try for, else I would get stuck in the burrs.

Blue butterfly
©rq, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Orange butterfly
©rq, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Yellow butterfly
©rq, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Inevitable

A fixture of my childhood has passed away suddenly. The sister of my godfather, actually. I went to Latvian school with her children, and she was certainly an unstoppable force – abrasive yet good-natured, she didn’t stand much for politeness where undeserved, or properness where a bit of liveliness would do; she had opinions and wasn’t afraid to let them out. She laughed loudly, sang loudly in church, and wore flamboyant hats in loud colours.

We weren’t close, but I’m going to miss her.

Jack’s Wallk

The sunshine has returned and it’s a lovely autumn day. Jack and I decided that it was a perfect kind of day to go for a walk in the woods and instead of our usual little forest path, Trillium Woods, we went to a place called Vansittart Woods. It’s just out of town to the west and it belongs to our local school board who use it to educate kids about nature and camping. There’s an easy trail that winds through mixed hardwood and fir trees and eventually it connects to another trail that goes through open meadowland. Doing both trails is a bit much for Bubba (Jack’s nickname) and me so we stick to the short manageable forest path. Today the ground was covered with a blanket of newly fallen leaves and I found myself swishing my feet and kicking them up to make the leaves dance and to hear that wonderful crinkling, crackling, whooshing sound.

Monday Mercurial: Patagonian Sealions

Sealions, much like penguins, look comical and clumsy while on land, but in water, they’re nothing but sleek grace.

© Giliell, all rights reserved Sealion, jumping

An Invitation to Walk and Dance

Nightjar was recently responsible for taking the photographs of a play put on by a local theatre group. The pictures are a departure from Nightjar’s usual style of photography and I think they’re fabulous. They’re storytelling photos that give a real sense of the mood and setting for the play. We’ll be sharing them over the next 3 days and I know you’ll enjoy them, too. I’ll let Nightjar take it from here:

As you may know I was recently responsible for the photography of a theatre play created by the local amateur theatre group. I will not be sharing photos of the actors, but I’ve selected 12 other photos to give you all a taste of what it was like! I divided them in three parts and added some context. I hope you enjoy!

Part 1 – An Invite to Walk and to Dance

The play starts in the village’s fountain with a short scene where the public is invited to walk along streets they walk along everyday. The actress is barefoot through most of the scene and walks the shoes you see here with her hands. She introduces five guides and tells the audience which one to follow. Each group will walk down a different path, but they will all see the same scenes (just in a different order). Before leaving the public is left with a question… can this familiar place still surprise or move us?

[Read more…]

Macedonia 3 – Husks

Macedonia is also heading towards autumn, and while it was ~~warm~~ hot while I was there (I mean mid-20s in October? Sheesh!), getting out of the city proved that summer was, indeed, coming to an end. Previously, we have already met a spider and two lizards from the local famous mountain. In this chapter, I present to you the golden glory of dried out plants, all sharp edges and pointy ends – except, of course, the ones with fluff. Most photos below the fold, because uncontrollable camera finger.

Dry grasses
©rq, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Pointy dry grass
©rq, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

[Read more…]

Making Kitchen Knives – Part 6 – Basic Shaping of the Handle

I have decided to make the handle on this knife from an old piece of wood I have cut from a palette that stood outside for quite a while. I do not know what wood it is, I suspect birch. It is extremely weathered and looks kinda crap. But there is a trick to make such old wood look very fancy.

I have done most of the work per hand, first splitting the piece of wood along the visible crack, then cutting it with small hand-held saw to very roughly the final shape and drilling the holes for pins. So far this work was pretty uneventful and straightforward.

As you can see on the picture on the right, I have fixed the two halves with screws to make the final shaping. This is where things stopped being uneventful. The wood was not overly hard, but it was very tough and I could not shape it on the big belt sander because that is running too fast and the wood tended to gum up the belt and burn. So I have been stuck with using handheld tools. I thought that it is not a problem because I expected to do it quickly even so.

I was wrong. It took me 1:50, or 110 minutes, to get the handle scales into a nearly finished shape. I should have used my small belt sander, it has slower running belt and is better suited for wood.

Of course it would not be nearly as long work if I have made ordinary rectangular handle and not this ergonomically shaped one. However I consider the handle shape to be an important, even defining, component of this design. Simplifying the handle shape in the name of saving time would in my opinion strip the product of its uniqueness and I see no point in hand-made completely generic knives.

I think that I could reduce this work significantly by working on multiple knives at once, cutting the outlines with band saw and rough shaping with the small belt sander. Due to confined space in my workshop I need some time for setting those two devices up so it is not always worth for a one-off action. But should I prepare say 20 handle scales in one go, It would certainly be worth it.

Before proceeding to finishing the handle I had to use my magic trick to improve the looks of the wood. That trick is called “ammonia fuming” and consists of putting the scales into a big jam-jar with a bit of ammonia solution and leave them in it overnight of for a few days, depending on what your goal is – the longer the wood is in the ammonia, the darker it will become.

In this specific instance I have left the wood sit directly in the ammonia solution, letting it to soak it up. It is also possible for example to only let the wood above the solution in the fumes (hence the name).

I have experimented in the past with multiple solution treatments and I have at my disposal a few such processes to alter the wood to warying degrees – from mild color change to actually making the wood compacted and a lot harder. The advantage of these methods over staining the wood with a dye is that the color change goes deep into the wood so it does not get scratched off. It also looks a lot more natural in my opinion.

However, to wrap up, this step took more time than I expected it to, but I think I can put it in “low hanging fruit” basket, because I expect working in bulk should reduce time here significantly and I already have the machinery necessary for that.

Slavic Saturday

I was actually thinking whether this would be better suited here or in the “Behind the Iron Curtain” series and I decided for putting it here.

Former Czechoslovak Socialist Republic has had a great tradition of stop-motion capture movies and one of its pinnacles was a series of short stories for children that was so succesful that it runs until today. The series started the same year I was born, and one of my favourite episodes “Tapety” (Wallpapers) is just three years younger. The series was originally named “A je to!” (It’s done!) and was aired in the evenings as a bed-time story for children.

You can enjoy this series no matter your native language since there are exactly zero words spoken. If you spend bing watching multiple episodes, feel free to blame me.

You live, you learn…

Well, my latest resin project didn’t go that well. I wanted to created little snowglobes using wooden deco elements. The idea was to pour the lower half of the moulds, wait some time until the pot time is over, push the elements into the resin, let cure, add the top half, add a wooden base, be happy.

As you can imagine, reality had other plans. First of all the resin was still too soft to hold up the deco elements. The right moment would probably have been 5 minutes in the middle of the night.

I tried to stabilize them with bamboo skewers, but it was less than optimal.

The next day I added the top half. The hole is pretty small so I needed a syringe to put in the resin. Usually the two half separated a few times during the process and were a pain to put together again.

First of all, that introduced way too much air, second of all, I added too much glitter.

The results are sad. Very sad.

But I’m not giving up just yet. For the next trial I’ll do the following: I’ll cut off part of the top half so I get a bigger opening. I will then glue the halves together so they won’t separate. And I already glued the deco to the wooden platforms. I’ll pour the globes in one go (with less glitter) and then push in the elements and just let the base close the mould.

But in the meantime I had fun with the kids and my friends and we made many nice things.

My favourite one is the under water scenery, which I promptly turned into a necklace:

The plants are some fern which I collected and dried last week.

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Outdoor Theatre Project, part 2 – Streets, Houses, Families

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Tree Tuesday

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Making Kitchen Knives – Part 7 – Assembly and Finishing

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Macedonia 4 – Terrible Butterflies

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Inevitable

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Jack’s Wallk

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Monday Mercurial: Patagonian Sealions

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An Invitation to Walk and Dance

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Macedonia 3 – Husks

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Making Kitchen Knives – Part 6 – Basic Shaping of the Handle

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Slavic Saturday

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You live, you learn…

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