I’m nearing completion on the bookcase. (So, so slow.) At this point I just need to apply some wood filler in a couple of spots and then stain it. Things I’ve learned: It’s hard to align and glue large pieces together by yourself, so it’s really handy when you have a kind and patient wife to help you out. Also, to talk you down because it happened at the end of a long day and I was convinced the whole thing was a pile of crap fit only for burning.
Proof of concept for some shoe boxes I’m making for Rachel.
Finally completed the stool (using this Steve Ramsey video). The build was delayed first by illness and then because I decided to redo the legs. I picked up a shop vac this week but my problem now is finding an adaptor to connect it to the dust collection port on my table saw. It’s proving more difficult than I would have imagined. Next up: a small bookcase.
Over the weekend I completed one side of the trellis on the grape arbor. I’ll put up another on the opposite side. The rabbet is exposed on the ends at the top and bottom; I’ll put some wood putty there before Rachel paints it. Another thing: if you’re going to put up trellis like this and you have a table saw, don’t buy the frame pieces they sell with the trellis.
Dana O’Driscoll writes about “The Way of Wood”—about humanity’s interaction with wood, the loss of that interaction, and ways to find our way back to it.
I finished a wooden mallet today with some scrap leather on the ends. It’s very amateurish but I am an amateur.
Caroline Ross: When we cannot touch, cannot be held, do not regularly make things with our hands, work so hard that we do not have time to press seeds into the ground in a garden, nor to sew the button back on our shirt, which is so cheaply made we throw it away rather than invest our precious finger-tip-time, which anyway we must keep sacred for our devices… We no longer settle into the never ending now-time of the hands.
Happy winter solstice! I went into the woods yesterday intending to cut a larger Yule log from a downed tree but working with a hand saw lowers your expectations. 😂
I’m making fire cider in an attempt to beat back all the sickness going around right now. Unfortunately it won’t be ready for a couple of weeks. Anyone ever tried this stuff?
Rachel and I made Julia Child’s “Fluffy Pumpkin Pie”—which will forevermore be called Floofy Pie in our house. Rachel used Julia Child’s pie crust recipe and it was outstanding. We used fresh pumpkin instead of canned and this, I believe, was the source of the only problem we had: too much liquid. The pie did firm up but the bottom crust wasn’t as dry as we’d like. Cooked, not raw, but also not dry.