The Snake

Hi all,
 Sorry for the delays between my posts, but after moving house there are hundreds of jobs waiting to be done and there aren't enough hours in the day. For almost eight weeks I've dedicated all my time to the house even though I keep telling myself that I need to have a better balance between work and play.

I will have a day off every week to do some writing I say to myself, and I will make time for pyrography and scroll sawing, but then I look at the list of jobs that need doing and I'm back to square one. However, I feel a slight shift in the air and I'm determined to put more priority into writing, pyrography, and scroll sawing. A couple of days ago I made a step in this direction whilst gaining some brownie points off my good lady wife by curing one of her problems.

Since we moved into the new house our washing machine is now in the kitchen instead of the utility room, this is a peril that comes with down sizing. Anyway, to cut a long story short, the knob on the front of her washing machine protrudes in such a way that she kept bumping it with various bits of her anatomy as she went about her daily tasks. On wash days, utterances of vile nature would pour from the kitchen as she yet again nudged the button and sent the machine into a crazy cycle that usually meant the washing would need to be started again from scratch.

She was not best pleased with this state of affairs and asked for my help regarding the solution she'd come up with. "What I need is something that I can jamb between the top of the washing machine and work surface, that protrudes further out than the knob, " she said.

Seeing an opportunity to do a bit of craft work I set about cutting a piece of wood that would do the trick. I wanted it to be slightly bulbous at one end so that it didn't have any sharp corners and I wanted a slight taper on it so that she could push it under the work surface until it gripped. I cut a piece out on my scroll saw and sanded it roughly to the shape I desire. I tried it in situ and after a few tweaks to the thickness it worked just as my wife thought it would.

However, it looked boring so I grabbed the chance to do a bit of pyrography on it. To me, the stick looked a bit like a snake, so I modified the end of it with my new sander, which I will tell you about in my next post, and then did some pyrography on it. Because time wasn't on my side, I drew what I thought a snake's head looked like on the end of the stick and burnt it in with my pyrography iron. I then gave it two coats of varnish and presented to my wife. She was chuffed and my snake now comes out at least once a week and all is well with the world.