more stone carving

 Yesterday was "Barnensdag" in Vallen, a pretty village 20 km from were we live in Lövånger. As they have done for many years, they asked Keldor to please come do stuff in the smithy as part of the general atmosphere of the day's activities, and I came along and worked on my cooking pot in progress. The smithy has mounted on display on the wall an older set of bellows, which was made in 1766, so it is at least that old.

We were there five hours, which was enough time to use my pointy chisel to carve 48 in curved lines from the edge to the middle, then use a broader chisel to remove much of the ridges between, and then start using the curved axe to begin turning the high spots of the new surface (which is at least 0.5 cm deeper than the last, and might be as much as 1 cm deeper) into powder before I start the next set of lines. This time he made a short film of my carving, if you are curious to see how it is coming along, take a look.

When I carve in such a public setting people always ask how long it takes to make a pot. I didn't know, so we tried guestmating yesterday, and came up with a guess of around 50 hours.  Today I went through the various logs on my phone (one past me set up a subcategory "soapstone carving" under exercise logs, and another set up a top level category "soapstone carving" with sub headings for the various projects I have worked on, so it took a bit of effort to consolidate the info and calculate totals.  And, of course, I can't guarantee that I logged all of my carving sessions at all, and some of them I never clocked out of, so I gave those end times of 15 to 30 minutes later, which at least gives a number that is reasonable.

So, the pot in the video is, by that count, up to 87.9 hours, spread over 41 days during the past seven years (ranging from 2 to 14 days a year of recorded rock carving time for this project).

The forge stone I made for Lofotr took 50.6 hours over 12 days working at their visitor center.

I have a total of 170 recorded hours stone carving on those two big projects, plus various small projects I have done over the past seven years (66 days during which I did stone carving).

Spending time at home can be productive

 I gave myself a long weekend by doing Friday morning's cleaning of the Health Centre on Thursday after they closed. This meant I could take Friday as a lazy day, Saturday, as already blogged at Barnensdag, which meant that today I had energy.

I started the day with cleaning the stuff that had accumulated off the kitchen table and doing some vacuuming.  Then a 25 minute workout and looked up how many hours I have dpent stone carving (see last post).

By then Keldor was up, so we played Qurikle over breakfast, and then got to work. We took down the kitchen windows and covered the inside with a heavy plastic so the cats can't get out, snd the mosquitoes can't get in. We also mounted a tarp from the rafywrs over the window, and running out to a couple of awning poles from our SCA camp, so there is shade when we work, and if it rains before we are fone the window won't get wet.

Then he took a rondel with sandpaper to the window frame to remove the old flaky paint, while Henry,  the kid who is helping with the project, use gentler power sanders on one of the windows, and I painted one we'd gotten sanded a couple of weeks ago. By the time I finised that Keldor had finished the window frame, so I painted that too. By the time I finished that Henry had finished sanding his window and went home. Then I took a break for some food before giving the wondow fram and one window their second coats of paint, and the other window its first.

They are all looking much better, both because they are no longer peeling paint, but also because the black I am using looks much better against the yellow brick house than the white did. With luck the kitchen window will be done this week and we can move on to the next window.