This talk as of late, of these things not getting done, of not being satisfied with progress. This has not stopped. It came up again at my NaNo novel group on Saturday. Things I’m not doing. Things I want to do, to accomplish. Feeling as though the vast majority of otherthings are a complete and total waste of time. This thing, that thing, the work thing, the day job thing, the doing laundry thing, the cleaning house thing, the eating, the sleeping – these are all sucking the life out of my life.
I had an excellent Saturday afternoon where I worked on the pottery that I’ve been painting for the past three months or so. It’s total amateur work, but it’s fun, you know? I like it. One of the girls who works there now jokes with me. “Done yet?” she asks when I come to pay my fees for another 90 minutes of studio time. I told her there’s a light at the end of the tunnel finally. I love the work, and I wish I could do more.
In a phone call with my friend Jem (she’s totally outrageous. totally.) I commented on how I’d like to do a lot more ceramic work. “I’d like to do a plate to go with it. Shoot, what I’d really like to do is an entire set of plates, but at three month’s worth of Saturdays for a single bowl, we’re looking at a year and a half for six plates.”
Just then I walked by the dining room table where my box of six pounds of marbles sits. “Oh, Outrageous One,” I said, “these marbles are just sitting right here. The whole box of them. I’m telling you how I’d like to do a whole set of dinner plates, and here is a box of marbles I ordered months ago, none of them used yet.” I picked up handfuls of them and let them fall into the box, admiring them. “They’re gorgeous, and I’ve not used a one of them. This is terrible, and that’s the thing. I have to keep doing all this other stuff, and it’s getting in the way of the real stuff I want to do! I want to use these things! I want to build a bunch of sculpture! I want to paint pottery or build cars or write books or whatever, and all I’m getting is about two hours a week to do any single one of these things. This sucks, man!”
“Yeah, that sucks, man,” quoth Her Outrageousness. “I gotta go. I’m at Old Navy and my roommate is giving me a nasty look. I gotta try this stuff on and get out of here.”
“See, you understand,” I said. “Later.”
That conversation only got me more exasperated. I was determined that somehow I was going to get something done before the weekend was over. This situation sucked, and I wanted to put a bullet in the suck. Something was going to happen.
This is what happens to harmonicas when they die.
I had no free time until 1pm the following day (Sunday for those keeping track). At that point the house needed some stab at cleaning from me being sick and non-active the previous week, so I cleaned up crap, and in the process wound up with a bunch of dead harmonicas that needed to be parted-out for their brass. See aside there. It’ll be used for sculpture work – at least I hope so.
Soon after, my brother arrived and work had to be done on the Chevelle for some time. This is, again, one of those things that seems to get in the way, but if I want to race in the spring, it makes more sense to fix the car now rather than fixing it when we should be racing. Once we got all the clutch and carb linkage hooked back up, he took off, and it was back to the basement again.
I managed to get nearly three more hours of sculpture work done. Stuff happened, as they say.
Sometimes it takes a lot of wood to make a wire sculpture. Who knew?
This picture looks really odd, but I couldn’t get it to come out any better. At least you can get some idea of the foolishness I went through. This stuff looks all lovely and floaty when its assebembled, the marbless swirling and wooshing through their graceful little curves and bends and all that jazz, but when you’re putting it together, you just go, “Huh – how am I going to get that to stay up there all floaty-like while I hold a hot blue flame up to it and melt metal to it?”
Wood. Lots of wood. Well, that, and a pair of trusty Third Hands. I could probably use another Third Hand (oh, the jokes! bah.), but I have two for now, and I get away with it. You see here how I have the craziness all blocked up and wedged together very delicately and precariously and stuff? Quite an adventure, I assure you.
There were many minutes of prep work before I even reached that stage. Lots of filing of pieces, and scrubbing with steel wool, fitting of things together, double-checking, application of flux – it was all groovy, and went splendidly well, I have to say.
Following all of that, it was time to take the plunge. Torch time. I often get to these points and really have no clue if what I’m going to do will really work or not. There are all these subtle little angles at work, and it’s always possible that I’ll execute the maneuver, and then find out that what I did wasn’t what needed to be done, or what will logically work in a real-world situation (I don’t really like the real world, but it interjects itself into my work). Usually, there’s a little praying involved, and then I just bear down with the torch and start heating stuff up.
Top view of soldered spiral.
Lo and behold, it appears I got lucky! Check it out. Not only does this crazy contraption hold itself upright (an early concern), but you can actually roll a marble on it. The starting ramp is a little flatter than I’d like, but I think that has to do with the whole sculpture sagging a bit under the weight of the added metal. This will have to be dealt with as I progress. Looks prett y hip so far, though, and I did get one really fantastic solder joint made. It looks like a little piece of solder-y museum artwork. I’m happy to note that tiny bit of improvement.
Bottom view of soldered spiral. That's some majestic-looking stuff there.
Ah, and check out the awesomeness from below. Kind of cool, eh? For some reason the whole thing takes on a rather 1970s feel from this angle. Kind of looks like a prop out of Star Trek, maybe something that Spock would have had in his private room. You know, something to chill out to while he was listening to his Lionel Hampton LPs and drinking a Miller High Life.
Anyway, the cool thing in this picture is that you can see the solder joints are good enough to hold the spiral out there in midair by itself. It’ll need more support work in a spot or two, but this is a very good start.
So, after several hours I have one new element added to the frame. It doesn’t look like adding the others will be as straightforward as I thought, but…eh, whatever. I guess the fun of this is figuring it out.
By the way, I’m all happy about this progress and all, but I want to have at least twenty hours a week to devote to stuff like this, if not forty. I love this stuff. I love making stuff, building stuff, creating stuff. I’m feeling a definite lack in this right now, and it’s driving me mildly nuts. Glad I could get a little out of my system. I guess I got to work some anger out.
Here’s what you get. Three hours of work is apparently enough to make a six-inch long little ramp. This stuff always seems like it should go so much faster, but doesn’t. There are all these tiny details that come into play, at least when I do it. I have to figure out what direction the ramp comes off at, check how it will line up with the rest of the sculpture lines, figure out how much of a rise I need to get the marbles rolling, figure out where to make the appropriate bends, get stuff bent, cut, and filed down appropriately, and then lots of times I just have to shrug my shoulders and say, “I have no friggin’ clue if this is right or not, but if I keep sitting here it will never get done. If it’s wrong, it’s wrong, but I’ll figure out some way to fix it somewhere down the road.”
