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).

Earlier this year I was put in touch with a woman at the Silvermuseet in Arjeplog, who, my contact tells me, had collected a fair bit of soapstone artefacts from the Viking Age. When I wrote to her she replied that they were really busy just then with some applications, but perhaps I could come visit in March? Since Josie would be here for all of March and wanted to do at least one road trip that wasn't for an SCA event, I replied that March was perfect, and we agreed on Friday the 22nd, but didn't discuss a time.

When my surgery was scheduled for the 14th I wondered how I would be doing and if I would be up for that trip, but decided to wait till after surgery--if I needed to cancel the trip, then doing so early in the week would probably be fine, and if not there was no need to to let her know that I had wondered if I would be up for it. But the first half of the week was busy, and I didn't get around to writing her till Wednesday evening to ask if we were still on for Friday, and what time would be good for her? Given that it is a three hour drive to Arjeplog from here Josie and I decided that it would make sense to head out Thursday evening, so that we would have the day there on Friday. Then Josie decided that she didn't want to drive after dark, which meant we should go Thursday afternoon.

When I didn't see a reply to my email on Thursday morning I tried calling the lady, but her office phone didn't answer, and the mobile number she sent didn't work at all. So I tried the main museum number, and the lady I spoke with (in Swedish!) explained that my contact was in Piteå giving a lecture, but she would contact her for me and ask her to give me a call. While waiting for the call we finished packing and loading up the car, taking longer about it than normal, since I still need to take it easy. About 15:00, right when we really should have been leaving if we wanted to get there before full dark, I she finally called, to say that yes, tomorrow is still good, but she isn't available till 14:00.

At which point Joise and I decided that it would make more sense to stay home one more night, and head out in the morning. So we changed our hotel reservations to Friday night instead, did a short visit to Gammelstad, relaxed a bit, and then did yoga and went to bed early.

Today, if we get on the road in good time, we should have time to stop by Storforsen on the way.