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Fall has arrived in the Midwest. The maples are especially gorgeous right now. It’s very hard for me to have time to shoot stuff outside of the work day, but these are in my yard, and I just had to try and capture some in the fading light of a cloudy day. Aren’t the colors gorgeous?
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And, following on yesterday’s post, here we have pop giving me a hand with the rolling ball sculpture project. I wanted to put a wood base underneath it so that it would be a little easier for the kids to pick up and move and possibly not quite so likely that they’d grab onto the frame itself and bend it. (I hope, anyway.) Plus, it eliminates the possibility of the bare wire scratching any tabletops.
I asked dad if he had any scrap, and my only desire was that it not be plywood, because the sandwiched nature of that wood looks unattractive when viewed from the edge, which this would show. Pop leads me over the the scrap box and says, “Well, here’s what I have – some pine…here’s some mahogany if that’ll work…” and he has real wood! I grabbed this kind of streaky-looking piece and said, “What’s this?”
“Oh, that’s some spalted maple a fella gave me. Most of it was too water damaged and I had to throw it out.”
It was awesome looking, but an extremely rough cut.
“Sure. I can plane it or maybe sand it.”
So here’s dad doing some sanding on the piece after we got it cut down to size. Turns out it’s going to need some planing, as it’s just too rough for the sander to do an adequate job, but it’s going to be awesome. Spalted maple has all these black lines in the grain where water got in and discolored it. It’s a very unique look. Can’t wait to show it to you guys when it’s finished!
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Did I say I was finished with this? I think I did…the other day. Maybe? Silly me. I can never stop improving something. In this photo there’s one improvement that’s readily viewable, and that’s the little leg there at the lower right corner. You can even see I haven’t soldered it in place yet. I removed the simple spiraled curl that had previously been the terminus of the whole shebang, and I added a ramp to that last spiral and had it curve around to the lower right there. Nice, eh? Makes it a lot easier for little kids to get at the marbles and put them back up top for another trip.
Next up is to have dad help me make a nice wood base for it.
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On Saturday morning I awoke, slightly unrefreshed from five hours of sleep, and went to meet up with my dad and go to an estate sale. One of the fellas in his Model T Ford club had passed away, and prior to doing a public auction, the family had been kind enough to do a separate sale where they invited the Ford club members to come and go through all of it. Pops was interested, of course, and while I don’t have a T of my own at this time, it’s really hard to deny the allure of a trip through hundreds of must boxes and crates and shelves in search of buried treasure of some sort or another.
Dad got a speedometer he’s been wanting for ages, but my little visual gold (or brass, as the case may be), was coming across this doodad. What is it, you ask? You mean you don’t know??? Why, it’s very obviously a horn! What else could it be?
This is the business end of one of those old, circular brass horns you would have seen on a car in the teens. It had a big rubber bulb on it, and you just squeezed it to let the buggies ahead of you know that your flivver was hot on their heels at a blistering sixteen miles per hour. This one had a bulb, and I tried it, but it was out of shape, and I just got a gaspy sort of wheeze from it.
The had a lathe there too, folks. A lathe. Haven’t I addressed my desire for a lathe here just recently? If not, well, I want one. They wanted a grand for the one they had, which I thought was on the high side. That, and I’m broke anyway. No lathe for me.
And, though I try to limit my One Pic A Day posts to one picture, Melissa will doubtless be all OMG(!) over the old Fords and ask to see one, so here’s a lovely Ford truck that just needs a little scrubbing and maybe some new tires to get it back on the road.
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I’ll take a moment to say that I’m very happy with today’s image. It’s a lot more interesting than my drives to work, eh? Really the sort of thing I hope to bring you a little more often. I hope that I’m able to get out and do some more interesting subjects as the year goes on. My desire is to stretch out a little bit and do more than simply give you a visual diary of my daily life. I’m glad that for once I have something a little out of the ordinary for you.
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There was just enough light to do this. I had to go with a slower shutter speed, but I like how the drumstick is obviously moving, yet I managed to get the drummer’s face sharp. At my last photo club meeting we were encouraged to do some work with longer shutter speeds even when shooting action stuff. This one turned out kind of nicely as an experiment.
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At the art center where my photo club meets they do a big thing on the celebration of the Day of the Dead, which is the Latino remembrance of friends and family members who have passed. The idea is that November 1st and 2nd are days when it is easier for the souls of the departed to visit the living, and so altars of sorts are constructed to encourage this connection. They do a bunch of pretty involved altars and decorations at the art center, and they even teach classes on making stuff like sugar skulls. This is just one small portion of a very large altar that someone had constructed. Everyone loves those little skeletons. Admit it, you do too.
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Fourth installment by my count on this particular project. Jem came over tonight, and we worked on adding more color to our drawings. They’re coming along a lot faster than we’d thought they would. She wasn’t mad that I’d worked on the one a little bit. I still feel I’m a little behind, but I asked, and she said it was okay if I worked on it just a little more before we get together again. They’re looking pretty good now, but it’s still hard to tell what they’ll look like when they’re completely finished. We’re already starting to try and think of new ideas for the next project, though!
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I was pretty busy today. Only got to shoot on the way to work. I like this whole angled thing, though. Kinda makes the drive to work look a lot more exciting than it actually is. I’m going to have to keep that little trick in mind.
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I do so love these. Anyone who has been hanging around here for a while knows that I love these things. Rolling ball sculptures. They’re pointless. You put a marble at the top, and it rolls down to the bottom. It doesn’t accomplish anything useful, not in that “We have work to do! Money must be made! Mountains must be leveled! Paper must be shredded!” However, they’re just friggin’ fun as all get out.
I haven’t done a lot of work with these lately. Seems like RBS building and reading have taken a back seat recently. I afforded time for this one a few weeks ago, however, during the Masterpiece in a Day event, which, I just realized, I never did fully devote an entry to, so you’ve not seen this thing until now! My apologies. I’m sure you were all chomping at the bit.
Any rate, here it is! It looks a little different than it did on the day of the event. I spent the evening tweaking it. I recurved the legs so that they sweep in toward the base more. This makes it look a little more groovy, plus the base I’m going to make for it will be able to be cut smaller. I also fixed one major support issue. When I first built it the thing was very wobbly. After looking at it for a while and playing with it, I realized it would benefit from one support piece in a strategic place. I made one up and installed it. You can’t even really see it in this photo, but it reaches from the bottom of the first spiral down to the very beginning of the third spiral.
What really surprised me was just how much of a difference this made. I mean, I knew it would help, but had no idea how much! It stands about as solid as any frame of copper could possibly do, even better than I could have planned. I should have been an engineer, you know it? Friggin’ architect. Look at that thing!
Well, it’s base-makin’ time for this bad boy. Since I basically threw it together in six hours, and it’s missing a lot of the refinements of one of my usual pieces, this one is going straight to my 3-year-old nephew. He’ll think it’s cool, and I won’t lay awake at night wondering what someone will think of it.
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Today’s blog post is brought to you by the numbers 1, 2, and 3, and the letter “M.”
Here’s another look at the triangle stuff my friend Jem and I are working on. I actually cheated. This is the half that I worked on all by my self for several hours on Sunday. Jem was way ahead of me on her half, and I was feeling like I was holding things up, so I took some time to play catch up. It still sort of looks like I didn’t do much, but there’s more color on the page, so I’ll call it good for now. I kind of like that little purpley squiggle thing, yes I do. Go me and my attempts at color blending.