The Colour Of Magic

Posted on 5. June 2018 by fuzzy

I have always been a big fan of the large diameter work by Douglas J Fisher, but at the same time it’s always been clear to me that simply copying him would not cut the mustard. Plus, since I don’t live on the Pacific coast, it would be culturally inappropriate. In other words, I have to find my own style, and it has to express my cultural background and surroundings.

I cannot claim that I have found that style yet, but at the least I have started the journey.

This is 20″ in diameter, made from a single piece of rippled sycamore, and then carved with rotary tools (for the black dimples) and reciprocating or hand tools (for the rays), and finally coloured with textile dyes, black acrylic paint and gilt varnish.

Initially I was tempted to call this “The Light Fantastic”, but then decided that that didn’t quite hit the nail on the head, so I changed it to “The Colour Of Magic.

As Terry himself makes one of his characters say: “It was octarine, the colour of magic. It was alive and glowing and vibrant and it was the undisputed pigment of the imagination, because wherever it appeared it was a sign that mere matter was a servant of the powers of the magical mind. It was enchantment itself. But Rincewind always thought it looked a sort of greenish-purple.”

Now, clearly digital photographic cameras cannot make a picture of octarine, that would be just too mundane. It might work if you had a camera magica, but I am jnot sure. At any rate, I don’t have one of those. So you’ll just have to be content with swirling greens and purples. Sorry for that.

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Finally!

Posted on 4. June 2018 by fuzzy

Last weekend I have finally found my tripod again. We still have a large number of boxes unpacked and waiting in the garage for work on the house to complete, and it was buried in one of them. I have over the last 18 months taken a few pictures with the camera freehand, but despite good lights and high ASA settings, it’s not the same. Must be my age…

At any rate, there was a lot of stuff to photograph, and I haven’t even covered all of it, since some of the new work is already packed away with my other stock. So, watch this space, there will be plenty of new stuff coming out, either in some blog posts or as new items for sale.

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Little Helper

Posted on 16. May 2018 by fuzzy

Here’s my little helper in the workshop:

This is Gizmo, one of our two cats. He came to us about 10 years ago, from a friend who had rescued him from a litter of kittens that came from a street cat somewhere in Bilston. She took him in out of mercy, and had him for some time. Then she noticed that other cats in the neighbourhood were being mistreated badly by some yobs, and asked us whether we would have him. At the time we already had two cats, Flossy and Boyo, and we weren’t quite sure how he would fit in. Initially he was very timid, but they got along just fine after a short while.

Boyo passed away a few years ago, and is now buried in the backyard of our previous home in Pepper Hill. He crossed a road at the same time as a car came along, and needless to say, the car won. That was a real shame, as Boyo was a bundle of fun. You could put him on a skateboard and roll him down the road and he would enjoy the ride.

Gizmo is very laid back, but also very curious. He always comes exploring to the workshop, stays for a short while, sticks his head in every open cupboard, then meows at me over the lack of suitable prey and makes his departure. On this occasion I got sitting nicely for me on the floor, right in the middle of the workshop, so I couldn’t really do anything else than take a picture and wait for him to leave. He’s now 12 years old, and hopefully we’ll have him for a good few years more. We will miss him badly when it is his time.

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Holly trouble

Posted on 16. May 2018 by fuzzy

No, this is not a story about anything holy. It’s about holly, the spiky stuff growing in many gardens and used as Christmas decorations. About 6 months ago I got a whole holly tree from a good friend. She had wanted to cut it down the previous summer, but after talking to me agreed to let it stand until the growing season was over, so it was finally taken down some time early December 2017.

I have now started looking into using the first few bits. If harvested in winter, most of the sugar content is gone from the sap in the tree, and as a result the wood turns out almost white, a much sought-after property. In addition, due to the slow growth,  holly is quite hard (not when green), and it turns beautifully. It is an absolute pleasure to work with.

There are two severe downsides to holly, though. The first one is that it cracks like hell. The slightest knot or other disturbance of even grain, and bang, there goes the crack. These two little hollow forms were turned from green, and as you can see, I managed to get the wall thickness quite even. Nevertheless, the one on the left has developed this mighty cleft, and although the one on the right looks only warped to a high degree, I can tell you it has its cracks on the underside.

SO: green turning holly is not a guarantee to avoid cracking. And, at any rate, the warping is so bad that you need to leave extra thickness to compensate. Or you work to a finished surface from green, and accept that you will end up with highly oval bowls.

The second downside concerns the colour. When freshly cut, the wood is an ivory white, with a slight greenish tinge to it. This will last for a few hours, and the slowly turn into a darker colour. This is not a mould growing on the wood, it’s a checmical process caused by the exposure to oxygen and light.

This can be counteracted by immediately boiling the wood for approx. 30 minutes for every 10mm of thickness. However, that puts its own stress on the wood, and in reality: who can boil a 12″ bowl?

The colour change goes quite deep, several millimetres, and I have yet to find a way to prevent it. The only known way for it not to happen is to air-dry the wood completely and then work it. And that requires a lot of patience. No wonder properly dried, white holly is expensive.

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Great Expectations

Posted on 16. April 2018 by fuzzy

So, last weekend Helen and I attended the British Craft Trade Fair 2018 in Harrogate. We’d been to the hall before, but as punters for a different event, and only on a day visit. This time we had booked ourselves 3 nights in a AirBnB.

In difference to the title of this post, I did not actually have great expectations. Although the even organisers were keen to show pictures of busy walkways, and talk about the thousands of visitors they have every year, the reality was starkly different. But let’s begin at the beginning.

We did a trial run of loading the car, only to realize we couldn’t fit everything into the Merc. In the end we decided to go with 2 cars, it’s still cheaper than renting a van for the weekend. It did mean, though, that maximum speed was about 65 mph (downhill and with the wind in the back), just to make sure my wife’s 19 year old Astra wouldn’t pack up in the middle of nowhere.

Travel went without surprises, and I do have to say the entire event was very well organised. We got a spot right next to the loading bay, and the stall was set up and fitted with goods in about 2 hours.

Sunday was always going to be the quietest day of the three, and so it was. Come Monday and it got a little busier, but by 15:00 I could see clear through to the wall on the other side of the hall on most aisles. There were 460 stalls in the hall and probably only around 250 punters. And Tuesday was very much the same.

In the end we received 2 tentative orders, covering about 50% of our costs, plus about a dozen contacts that may yield one more order. So, all in all, I do feel quite substantially underwhelmed. The only consolation was that it wasn’t just us. I spoke to several people who’d done this event many times in the past and they all agreed that 2018 was the worst of the lot.

In hindsight we could probably have managed with the Merc. We had too many things that didn’t get used, and we had too much merchandise on the stall. We brought 6 LED picture lights, and only used 4 (and probably only needed 3), we didn’t use either of the batteries or the inverter as somebody left us with a socket on the stall. The little desk was of some use, but this could be done in a different way. I am pretty sure that we can come up with a way of doing this with one car, if we actually do it again at all.

Well, at least we tried. SO, on to the next event : The Curborough Festival of Artists. Now here clearly the expectation is not on any sales, it’s simply a marketing exercise. On the other hand, the price tag is very different: whereas Harrogate cost us around £1000, Curborough will be less than 200 (and only 25 if we don’t need to hire a van). Just one lucky sale could mean I am actually making some money.

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