Earphones Box

Hi all,
You will be pleased to know that my finger is healing well after I managed to slash it last week. I have however, stayed away from carving by concentrating on woodturning, pyrography and digital art.

A few moths ago I purchased some blue tooth earphones, which are brilliant for use with my kindle. The only downside was that they came in a strange little velvet bag that was difficult to keep track of.  So I turned a box that I could keep on shelf next to my chair next to my other essentials, a bottle opener and a tooth pick pot.

I'd already made the two latter items so this week I turned and did the pyrography on the earphones box. Here it is finished.

I'm very pleased with the way it turned out and you will see in the next photo how I used the same pyrography design so that it fitted in with the other two items.

Very harmonious don't you think, well it keeps the mrs happy.


On the digital painting front I was photographing some bees on a bush called "Lady In Red" and one of the images just needed to be painted. Here is the finished painting, done digitally on my ipad using a app called procreate.

If you would like to see how I painted it please watch this short video.

Please consider subscribing if you want to see more.

One last thing. sometime in the next couple of months I'm going to unpublish my books. I am doing this because the rewards are no longer worth effort. I am well past retirement age, but because I'm selling books I am trading. This means I have to keep records of all transactions, maintain a business bank account and fill in tax forms.

,I'm too old and had enough of that malarkey, so I'm knocking it on the head during the next couple of months. This means my books will no longer be available, which is sad but I've had a good run. In fact, I have sold a lot more books than expected especially in the early days. Now that there are literally thousands of free books available to everyone on Amazon the bottom has fallen out of the market for me and I expect it is the same for lots of other independent publishers.

See you soon, any questions or comments welcome.

Carving

Hi all,
I'm afraid I'm going to have to give up carving wood. I only did it for about a year an have enjoyed most of it, but it has come to an end. Here's why.
You may recall that I was going to do another shelfie based on this character that I modelled with Plasticine.

I drew out the design on piece of lime wood and cut a big chunk out behind the legs so that I wouldn't have so much wood to remove with my knife.

I cut that piece of wood out with my bandsaw and was all set to chop a few more corners off but the blade came off the wheel on the bandsaw. This was most annoying. I tried to get the blade back on the wheels and managed that, but it didn't seem to want to stay on. It is a hobby bandsaw from Axminster so not that robust. I use it infrequently and slacken off the tension when I'm not going to use it for a bit. Anyway, either I'm crap at setting up bandsaws or the saw is temperamental, probably a bit of both.

So given these problems with the saw I decided that I'd just have to cut all the wood out with my knife. I was doing pretty well, here you can see I've started to remove some wood.

It was a lovely sunny afternoon and I was sitting in the garden when disaster stuck. I lost concentration and managed to slice through a finger on the hand that was holding the wood. Blood was flowing freely so I legged it up to the house and got some kitchen towel around it while my wife sorted out some plasters. I held the wound together in an attempt to stop the flow of blood and quickly wrapped it in plasters.

It turns out that it wasn't as bad as I first thought it was, but even so it was a shock to the system.

Why weren't you wearing a safety glove I hear you ask? Well here is the sad thing about the whole episode. I was wearing a glove, but I'd put it on the hand that was holding the knife. Very funny really, but very dangerous. I hope it was just tiredness and lack of concentration that allowed me to put the glove on the wrong hand, and to also to use my knife to cut in the direction of my fingers.

I was so unnerved by whole episode that I chucked the wood in the bin and vowed to give up carving.
In fact, I'm carefully considering all my activities at the moment and, those which present any danger to me in my old age, are going to get the chop.

The reasons for this are simple. My wife has had two stints in hospital this year for unrelated problems. I won't go into detail, but I was left in no doubt that it is a really place where you don't want to be. I have lost all confidence in the medical profession and therefore I want to avoid doctors and hospitals like the plague.

I'm sure all the doctors and nurses are putting in a great effort, but something just ain't right.

On the bright side I have managed to do another digital painting of a robin and some autumnal leaves.

If you would like to see how I painted it, here is a short video.

If you enjoyed it please subscribe to see another one soon and if you are carving wood, please take care>