Don’t blame me for the used neologism, it is courtesy of Eric D Red.
But I like it.
I also like what can be done with epoxy resin. I am in no hurry to jump on this bandwagon, but I do have it somewhere on the back of my mind.
I tend to go through crafting cycles. Right now I have little motivation to mix resin or, lets face it, sand it (sorry, voyager. I promise you will receive your stuff). Right now it’s back to the sewing and embroidery machine. I also found the cutest Pokemon designs on Etsy (apparently they don’t try to beat their fandom into dust by wielding the copyright maze heavyhandedly)
The technique used here is called “in the hoop” embroidery, which means you’re not just embroidering some designs onto fabric, but assemble the whole project more or less with the embroidery machine while your fabric remains in the embroidery hoop.
These neat pouches are a combination of an in the hoop design from Urban Threads a long time ago and the Pokemon applique I already used on the mask.
©Giliell, all rights reserved
©Giliell, all rights reserved
©Giliell, all rights reserved
They are also neat ways to use scraps because you only need a bit more than a letter size piece of fabric.
Next one was created by sewing the individual pieces in the hoop and the assembling them by hand. It’s not a toy I’d hand to a baby (but I got lots of baby suitable plushie designs anyway), but aren’t they cute?
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The little one( meaning my kid) “borrowed” the larger one (meaning the Eevee) and the told me the next day that Eevee had called her mummy and she couldn’t return it now because you mustn’t separate babies from their mums. Yes, I got a smart kid. It’s not the first plushie that she adopted by emotionally blackmailing the original owner. Not that I wouldn’t have simply given it to her anyway…
Now for the cost of those: this is not a way to save money. I had the fabric for the larger one lying around, but of course I needed (cough) some better fabric for the small one, so between the design and the fabric (though there’s still quite some left for more of them) I’m down 50 bucks and of course I could simply have bought two Eevee plushies for that money…
Just as with carpenters, there will be more of these in due course. Is there a terminus technicus for people who craft things from resin? Probably not, we will have to do without.
Today I want to share two videos actually because there is a follow-up to the first one, where she learns from her mistakes and improves her art.
I did not include this step in the time measurement last time, and neither will I do so this time. It is about 10-15 minutes per blade and the only way to reduce that time would be to forgo it completely. If I only signed the blades with my logo, I would have made a significant improvement actually, but since I have decided to number them too, I am back to square one time-vise.
I wrote about my logo design in the Rondel Dagger series. At that time it was meant to be maybe only a one-time action, but the design has grown on me and I have decided to adopt it as my new maker’s mark for all my wood and metal projects. When working on my first commission, I have built myself a specialized etching electrode that allows me to etch the logo without having to mask the whole blade, prepare big solution baths or construct complicated barriers holding the etching solution in place.
This time around I have further improved on this and for the logo etching itself I have built myself a new stencil, since cutting the logo in adhesive tape each and every time leads to inconsistent results and is time-consuming. I tried to get my hands on photosensitive foil to make a stencil, but I was unable to find any seller in CZ offering one that is not for copper. And then I realized that my mother has an old silicone kitchen pad that she never uses, so I asked if I can destroy it in the name of science. She said yes, so I took it and I cut my logo in a strip cut out of it with a scalpel. It is water repellent, so the etching solution did not want to get in there, but a drop of dish detergent in the etching solution has solved (ahem) that problem.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
However, another problem persisted. Etching stainless steel works differently than etching carbon steel. When etching carbon steel with FeCl3 solution, all you need to do after the etch is to let the solution sit for a few seconds and it turns the inside of the etch black with oxides. For stainless steel this does not happen. You need to change the polarity of the electrodes to deposit a layer of black oxide on stainless steel. In order to do so I had to remove the crocodile clips and switch them between the blade and the electrode several times, which was onerous and annoying.
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I have performed tests on the piece of blade that I nearly ground through, and here you can see the results of various etching parameters. On the left, the two etchings are with five minutes of etching time, which was needlessly long and has led to etching the surrounding area under the stencil too. I found out that one minute is more than enough for this logo and those are the two upper logos in the middle. And as you can see, they are grey, not black, because I did not change the polarity. All the other etches are various iterations of me playing with the polarity and whatnot.
After this experiment I have spent a fruitful afternoon cursing in the workshop building this highly sophistimacated tool from a scrap of plywood, brass sheet metal, copper wire, and some left-overs of speaker cables.
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I can plug my 12 V DC source in the input (on the right) and my crocodile clamps on the output. When the switch is held to the left, the red wire/clamp is the anode and it etches. When the switch is held to the right, the red wire is the cathode and it deposits metal ions (which quickly turn into oxides). And I can flip the polarity fairly quickly, and I can either make the logo entirely black or just the outline, depending on how quickly and how many times I switch the polarity. It was quite fun, although there is still some factor of unpredictability in the outcome that I was not able to figure out.
So I could go etching the blades that were ready and as a bonus I got good use out of the rest of the silicone pad too.
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And it worked really well. The best results I got with 1-minute held at etching current, then 10 seconds depositing current and then 1 minute quickly switching the polarity back and forth. After that I neutralized the remaining acid on the blade with washing soda solution, rinsed it off thoroughly and that was it. I got some teething trouble, etchings on some blades are not perfect, but they are not terrible either, they are all identical in shape and size and after I found the correct way, it took me less than 5 minutes per blade.
Etching the numbers was a different kettle of fish after that, for the numbers are tiny, Glagolitic numbers can be quite funny-looking sometimes and I do not think I can cut stencils for them from 1 mm thick silicone sheet. I might try, but for now I reverted to my old method – scalpel and plastic adhesive tape.
Next time I will show you the actual knives that came out of this. I have to decide whether to make one post presenting them all, or scatter them over several days. I think I will do the latter. Either way, taking pictures will take some time too.
As I wrote at the beginning of my making kitchen knives project (oh my, is it over a year already?), the steel bars often need straightening before a knife can be made out of them. The method I used then was not particularly time-consuming, but it was very annoying, with the screws constantly falling off to the ground and me cursing all the time. So I have decided to build a jig to help with the job. And here it is.
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This simple thingie took me a ridiculous amount of time to make. Like, three or four times more than it probably should. It might even have cost me more time to build it than I will ever save by using it, depending on how many knives I will make in the future.
The principle is simple, there are three rollers made from old piping and some ball bearings. Two are fixed to the base plate and one is on a plate sliding on two columns opposite them and center between them. A screw in the center can push the upper roller down between the two stationary ones and thus it can bend steel.
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The use is easy. Put the end of a flat bar between the rollers with the concave side down, tighten the central screw a bit and pull the steel back and forth end-to-end through the rollers (but careful not to pull it out completely, because that would mean starting over). Then check for straightness, eventually tighten the screw a fraction, pull, check again, rinse and repeat until the bar is straight.
It works actually very well. I have straightened all my bar stock in minutes and to a better degree than I was able to achieve previously. But still…
Well, hopefully, the finishing works on the forge will go a bit faster, because without the forge I can’t do squat.
…they just make smaller, thinner knives
When polishing the blades, I run with one of them accidentally across the edge of the platen. Literally, in a blink of an eye, I ground it paper-thin in a spot, almost through, and I overheated that tiny spot too.
Instead of simply tossing it, I have decided to re-grind it into a prototype of a small knife for peeling veggies and fruits, like garlic, onions, oranges and similar, and also for cutting small things like radishes. For these tasks, the universal kitchen knife that I was aiming for can be a bit unwieldy and I need to test various knife shapes and sizes anyways, so why waste a perfectly good hardened steel, amirite?
This is the resulting knife. The handle is from black elder (Sambucus nigra), artificially infused with silica. That makes the wood a bit harder and it also changes the color a bit in places, making the grain stand out a little more and with a greenish tint. It looks and works actually a bit like an untreated black locust – go figure.
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It is a nifty little blade that goes well in pair with the one I gave my mother two years ago. ~19 cm overall length, 9 cm blade. So far it works well for intended purposes, we will see if my main tester (my dad) is going to have some remarks or complaints. I think that with a sheath it would be a good pocket knife for mushroom hunting too.
If you have ever wondered why are carpenter’s pencils flat, then here it is explained in detail.
This step was a real bugger this time. Forming the handle before it is assembled onto the tang has its downsides, but it also has its upsides. And they seem to prevail, in comparison to the approach I took this time. It took me a lot of time to get all the handles into shape. Part of the problem was also that I have used woods of different properties and thus I had to adjust my approach several times – something that entirely defeated the purpose of saving time by working in bulk. But I got eventually to the stage when I could impregnate the handles with boat lacquer.
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For some of the woods on display here infusing them with drying oil or buffing with beeswax would be entirely sufficient. For some, it would be much, much better to stabilize them with resin beforehand. But the boat lacquer is the most durable and universally applicable finish I have right now, so I have used that. And to make the work more convenient, I have built myself a little stand to put the blades in to dry.
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Unfortunately, I am not done yet so I do not know how much time I have lost in this step. I only have enough data right now to know for sure that I have lost a lot, maybe even an hour per blade. The reasons for this are several.
First, this step was evaluated as “high hanging fruit” because I knew upfront that saving time here will be difficult. Lacquering is the most labor-intensive wood finish imaginable in this context.
Second, some of the savings in my previous step were not really time savings, it was merely that I have changed the order of operations this time and that moved some of the work time from that step into this one.
Third, I messed up, bigly, several times. I repeated steps tat needed not repeating and in the end, I had to redo the coating for four blades. This is why I do not have full data yet – right now, only 8 knives out of 12 are truly finished. But the purpose of learning was achieved, and I have definitively saved some overall time.
Making all those masks required that I somewhat clean up my sewing area and it reminded me of how much I love sewing and embroidery,and also Lidl had plain clothing on sale. So here’s a few nice things that I now own.
©Giliell, all rights reserved
More masks. I wanted some that match my clothing. I also changes the pattern a bit. The original pattern was made by an Asian woman and while differences on average are small, nobody ever accused my nose of being average. It’s more like something you’d find on a Greek statue if such prominent features didn’t have the tendency to break off. It’s also bigger, which makes it a lot more comfortable to wear, as there’s more room in front of nose and mouth.
Cute T-shirts:
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As you can see, my dear Marie Antoinette goes back to a time when there was a lot less fabric needed to cover my ass. Bright flowers on dark fabrics are just my thing.
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As are unicorns. The pattern sits a bit low, but not quite as low as on Marie Antoinette, as my tits fill up some space.
And a dress. With pockets!
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Please excuse the chaos in the background. I did not clean all of it… The next pic will show the difference between a dress sitting on a mannequin and a dress sitting on a fat lady. I tried to take a selfie, which is not that easy if you want to show your dress. You can also see one of my masks. It says “Wash your hands, no seriously”.
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Oh, and I made another pest doctor mask:
©Giliell, all rights reserved
This time a bit more sinister. I think it’s something I could wear to a ren fair, should we ever get one again.
And just for the fun of it: TARDIS keyrings
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The Covid-19 pandemic has prevented me from giving my brother the knife I made for his birthday, so I have used the time and I also made a simple stand for it. I have used black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia) wood from my firewood treasure trove. The wood is poisonous to ingest, but it won’t rub off on the stainless blade enough to be a problem.
It took me a bit longer time than it would had I been working with good planks because the cuttings were not perfectly square or flat and I had to do some fitting and gluing up in order to get big enough chunk for the base.
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After the glue-up when I started to square and polish the base I have realized that, quite coincidentally, I have glued it from two pieces that came from the same original plank, and that I have aligned the grain so that it makes a nice V-shape at the face.
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I have also found out that I will have to use another glue next time, since the one I am currently using turns black when gluing woods with high tannin-content, a problem that I noticed also when gluing leather with it. Which is a bummer, because it is very good, strong, and water-resistant glue that is really easy to work with. But the thin black line looks much worse on the picture than in reality.
The stand is covered with the same boat lacquer as the knife handle, but it is deliberately not polished and it has fewer layers since it should not get exposed to nearly as much water as the handle.
I will probably make some more knife stands/racks in the future
3x3Custom – Tamar is a Youtube channel that I have found interesting enough to actually subscribe to. She is one of those people who likes to experiment and invent things, which is exactly what I like too. I have learned a lot from her and I cannot wait to put some of those things to use, even though my equipment is not as fancy and I will inevitably be forced to improvise a lot.
The video for today is one where she makes very cool patterned boxes for sick kids – out of scrap wood.
While the knife handles were being covered in varnish, which is a few hours work a day followed by a whole day of waiting, I have designed and made another bobbin lace picture. This time a rose. It was a lot easier than the two previous designs because the blossom is de-facto just a spiral. And whilst the leaves are more complicated, they were just ten bobbins and could be made almost in one go.
We tried several backgrounds and the grey one worked best again. On a dark background, the thorns on the stem were not visible at all and on a light one, the blossom was poorly defined.
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To show you the difference in style between me and my mother, here is one of her roses, several decades old by now.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
It was not a major revelation, but I did realize that all craft videos that I posted so far were about men. So for several weeks, I shall post videos of woman artisans who create just as beautiful things as the men do. Today a presentation that yes, a woman can swing a hammer and forge a sword.