Very busy at A&S this weekend. Finishing and starting projects. An outline of work first, then details below.
Saturday:
Finished one set of Puttees hooks to give to their Highnesses for largess.
Started forging period nails.
Forged a bad hoof pick
Forged another skewer
More on these below.
Sunday:
Started a leather bottle project for a friend.
Started an armguard for myself.
Started an armguard for a friend.
Started a pouch for a friend
Forged a very period ( ;-) ) paper towel holder.
Details of Saturday’s projects:
Puttees hooks. These are from the casting I did last week. The wax that I cast these from is beginning to show signs of age. Not sure how many more sets I will get out of them. The polishing went smoothly and I was able to work some detail in where the cast did not come out well.
Forging nails. I have begun a 1000 nail challenge. I am doing this for a few reasons. To start, I wanted some nails for finishing some medieval woodworking projects. Secondly, in forging 1000 nails I hope to improve my hammer and heat management skills, and third, I will always have something to work on in the forge( see notes below). I will be working on them in batches of at least 12 at a time. Of my first dozen, I think I have 7 working nails. Of these I am not sure I will even want to use 1/2 of them on a project I care about. As this was my first attempt, I feel like I at least have a grasp of the process. The next forging will show me how much of it stuck.
Bad hoof pick. Poorly done and will be thrown away. This is what happens when I want to do something , but I do not have a plan in place. When I came home Saturday night, I just wanted to forge, not make anything specific, just wanted time at the forge. Without a focus and a plan of action, I fumbled around trying to decide what to do and ended up half assing this piece. I need to go into the forge with a plan of action and not just wing it. I might hang this piece on the wall of my forge to remind me of this. It is bad work in so many ways.
Skewer: After botching the hoof pick I decided to get my sh*t together and work smart. This skewer is made from 1/4 in round stock and came out pretty well. I still need to do more research on skewers and their use in the medieval kitchen.
5. Paper towel holder. When my wife and I first moved into Grimmsfield, the lack of a paper towel rack in the kitchen. I quickly bought an inexpensive plastic holder and jammed it on the wall for the time being. That was years ago and I have hated that paper towel rack ever sense. I finally decided to do something about it. My wife and I looked through the Internet at how others had solved the paper towel rack conundrum. After deciding on a style, I set to work. It was not to be a copy of a piece, but an amalgamation of several we had found. This presented several more problems then I anticipated and the final results were less the satisfactory to me, My wife likes it and therefore it was installed. But I hope to redo this with a better design in mind. I am not happy with the proportions and flow of lines and the general look of the piece. I feel better pre-planning could have improved the looks greatly.