How to …

Posted on 26. September 2016 by fuzzy

… waste a perfectly good piece of wood. Or maybe how to waste a perfectly good Sunday. Well, in fact neither, but it got pretty close.

Carving designLast Saturday night, while watching a late romcom on TV, I started doodling around in my scratchbook, and when the movie was finished (and I was ready to go to bed) I had something approximating the drawing in the top half of this image.

Obviously this is only one half, but I often end up with half a design, since my drawing skills seem to work better on one side than the other, and rather than faff around with the other half, I just figure out a way of mirroring it from the first half.

So on Sunday, after a late get up, some breakfast and some more faffing  around the house, I finally went through the collection of half finished bowls (which I keep for precisely this purpose), and picked a cedar bowl, which only had the backside finished, and the top covered in blue spray paint, with two shallow grooves marking the space where I wanted to do some decorating.

Now the first challenge was tha5t the original design didn’t want to fit between the two grooves, hence the bottom drawing, where I marked the grooves first with a compass and then redrew the whole thing. I then copied it onto some grease proof paper, turned the paper over to copy the other half, and taped the whole lot onto my cedar bowl. The lines were then transferred with a ballpoint pen, leaving faint indentations on the blue surface. And then I spent most of Sunday carving the design into the bowl. And after several hours of work I ended up with this:

Blue Cedar carved bowl

Now you might say, not so bad. But the reality is that in terms of quality this is so far away from I am wanting to achieve, it almost made me cry. There are so many problems here, it’s unbelievable. Firstly, the paint comes loose when you put pressure on, it flakes off in small little pieces, making all the edges look untidy. Secondly, achieving a smooth curved line across figured grain is unbelievably difficult (for a beginner). Thirdly, the resulting surface is in places OK, but in other places the fibres just rip out and it looks like I hit it with a hammer. Uuuurrrrggghhh. Indeed.

In addition, with all the cleaning up of lines, the design now looks a little lost on the surface. That’s down to the fact that all the blue areas are now substantially smaller than they were designed to be.

Helen suggested I should get myself a CNC router. That would fix the problem with the untidy lines, but it would stop the paint issues. And it’s  not hand made (although Helen rightly pointed out that the design would still be mine). Plus: right now I don’t have the space or the money to afford a CNC router. Not even a tiny one.

Maybe I need to take some tuition on carving. At least now I understand why some woods are good for carving and others are tricky. Cedar (at least the piece I have here) belongs in the latter category. Probably not the worst, but definitely not the best either.

Or maybe I just need to stop fooling myself. You can’t be good at everything, and maybe carving is on of this things I am not meant to be good at. I’ll have to think about that for a while.

MInd you, I still just the whole lot off and do something else with it. Which may just include trying it all again.

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One final push

Posted on 30. August 2016 by fuzzy

OK, here’s the last ditch effort for this year, as far as shows are concerned. On Thursday we are setting off to the Chatsworth Autumn Country Show. From what I can see so far, this is very much the same as The Game Fair, i.e. lots of shooting, dogs, fishing, etc. If the game fair was anything to judge these shows by, it’ll be a total and unmitigated disaster in terms of sales.

On the other hand, it’s a few days out with my wife, and generally having a good time. Hopefully the weather will play along. The forecast is not great, but then, who believes those anyway.

I have made a few new pieces, and I am on the finishing straight with a nice commission, a clock in art deco style as a wedding present for some New Yorkers. I’ll post some pictures when it’s done, but here’s a preview of the assembly so far:

Clock-phase 2

The main body is a piece of wild cherry, the foot is ebonized ash, the clock face is snakebark maple (thanks to Steve Earis) and the dots are ebony. The sides of the main body will be adorned with 2 pieces of wenge, slightly protruding on three sides and rounded off on then top.

I’ve got some very simple black hands, should go nicely with the rest.

The design was developed together with the customer, so there’s no danger of him not liking it.

 

We’ll see how the show goes, and I’ll post an update here.

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Battered and bruised

Posted on 8. August 2016 by fuzzy

Last night Helen and I returned home from the BBC Countryfile Live, a 4 day event held at Blenheim Palace. The weekend before we were at The Game Fair, a 3 day event held at Ragley Hall.  The breakdown at Blenheim took a long time, mostly due to Helen needing more than an hour to get the van close to the tent for loading (not her fault, but the organisers’), and then it was 90 minutes back home. We arrived just after 22:00, and we were both knackered, physically as well as emotionally.

Both events were well attended by the public. On both occasions we got loads of oohs and aahs and “this beautiful” and so on and on. But also, on both events people had their hands firmly embedded in their pockets.

For those of you who have never had a trade stall, let me describe the whole thing to you. On the build day you get up normal in the morning, attend to your normal business of collecting all the last bits and pieces, getting some shopping done, etc. Then you load up your van and it’s off to the site. Depending on where that is, this could be a trip of anything between 30 minutes to several hours. Usually on build day, the queues to get into site are not all that bad.

When you arrive on site, you get shown top your pitch, and then you spend the next few hours erecting your stall, making last minute repairs, finding a power outlet, populating the shelves and making sure all your pricing is correct. In weather like we had over the last 23 weeks this is a sweaty affair (loading and building), so by around 17:00 to 19:00 hours, when your stall is complete, you are soaked in sweat and you smell like a pig.

Then it’s off to the camping site, reconfigure the van for the night ahead and locate the showers and other facilities. The evenings are usually spent talking with other traders, having a barbecue and sharing some drinks.

Depending on the event, start time in the morning can be anything between 08:00 and 10:00. If it’s 08:00, you would be expected to be on site by 07:30, and if you’re camped a distance away that means getting up at 06:00 (or even earlier).

During the day you spend most of your time standing (don’t prowl around or sit on a chair, either indicates to your customers that you are not happy). You need to be alert all the time, friendly, happy, welcoming, but not overpowering. This then carries on until closing time, which can be anytime between 17:00 and 20:00. After that it’s off to the campsite, evening routine, etc. Lather, rinse, repeat.

On the last day, everybody tries to get their van onto site (which is usually prevented by the event organisers). Trading as normal, but usually the closing time is a little earlier. Then 2 hours of frantic activity: pack away all your goods, break down the stand, get the van in, load it and off you go. By the time the van is loaded, you are again bathed in sweat and you smell like a pig. And then you still have to offload the van when you arrive home (or you get up real early the next day).

Now imagine you do all of this, and you have spent quite a bit of money (say £750 for the pitch, £100 for camping, another £120 for the van and £30 for fuel, so around £1000 in total), and you have done your best. And you get loads of tire kicking. Loads of nibbles on the bait. Alas, no bites. No sales, nothing. By the end of day 1 you’re not a happy camper. By the end of day 2 you are angry. And by the end of the show you are trying to figure out how you are going to recover from this.

That is precisely what we had over the last two weekends. I haven’t totalled the figures, it’s just too disparaging, but a rough guess would be that we spent about £2k, and we took a total of £400 or maybe £500. In reality I would have been better off making a nice little pile in my back garden and setting the lot on fire.

Having said that: there are upsides. We were not the only ones. Most other traders also suffered losses, and in some cases way more than us. We know of some folks who paid close to £10,000 (yes, that’s tenthousand pounds) for their pitch, and had very little to show for it. That really hurts.
We had plenty of feedback from fellow traders telling us that our stall is fantastic and the products top notch, and they cannot understand why nobody is buying. We got advice on which shows are good and which organisers are bad.

So, yes, we are battered and we are bruised, and we are smarting. But we are not beaten.

 

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The force behind the scene

Posted on 2. August 2016 by fuzzy

I met Helen in the most unlikely place you can imagine. I was cruising around town in Johannesburg, and ended up at around 01:00 AM in a club where the majority of people were about half my age. I spotted Helen in the company of some of these youngsters, playing pool. So I walked over and asked whether she would play a game with me. We had a whale of a time, and I am not going to bore you with further detail (it is a private matter, after all) other than to say we have now been married for 10 years. 10 glorious, adventurous, fulfilling, exciting and very, very satisfying years.

When I started my adventures in woodturning, she supported me from the word go. I can bounce ideas off her, and I can rely on getting an honest answer (not always what I want to hear, but certainly always what I need to hear). Many a good idea has come from her.

When I decided to get a little more serious and do some shows, again she was behind me right away. She got involved in building the stall and organising hundreds of little details.

She has shown genuine interest in my work, and is constantly learning about the types of wood used, the finishes, the ideas behind each piece and how they compare to work from other turners. We go to shows together, which are like mini-holidays for us, and we make new friends with lots of other traders all the time.

Without Helen, none of this would have happened. Without her, I would have a much more difficult journey. So here’s to Helen and her never-ending support for my adventures.

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Price tags

Posted on 19. July 2016 by fuzzy

This is a little post about stall design and price tags.

I had many comments from the general public and other traders about my stall. It was designed to look like a mobile gallery, and this was pretty much achieved. Clearly the overall design was important, but so are little details.

Pricetag-3

These are my price tags on their holders. The holders are simply pieces of wood which have a slot angled at about 15 degrees off vertical, and then sanded lightly and oiled. I have used various woods, and the only thing they have in common is that the bark is still on the wood. There is cherry, apple, laburnum, yew, plum and so on. Essentially these are all pieces that would otherwise have gone into the firewood pile.

The price tags themselves have the same clean design as the stall. Just the logo, a few lines to help with the writing, framed by a grey line.

The slots are a little uneven, which is down to the fact that they were cut with the chop saw, and my chop saw is not of the sliding type, therefore the bottom of the cut is round and on some holders this is not centred. Something I will need to address at some point, as it looks untidy (and that’s NOT in keeping with the design of the stall).

Other than that, I am very happy with them. Cost was next to nothing, only a bit of time. I think in total I spent maybe 3 hours on making about 80 of them. The price tags were designed in a word document, and printed at a local print shop on 350gsm paper, then cut on a guillotine. Again, very cheap, I think I spent about £12 on 20 sheets with 6 tags each, so that works out to about 10p per tag.

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