A fairly eventful couple weeks.

While I'm home nursing the cold that seems to have the whole town in its grip, I'll catch up on the past two weeks.

Isabel had four unscheduled days off school because of an overfilled heating oil tank that spewed oil through a pipe onto the school roof. While they were cleaning that up, she hung out with Rosalee, learned to play Carcassone, worked on writing and illustrating a story, and in general took advantage of the time off. The Saturday following, we took Rosalee and her fiance Toby to dinner as a thanks for their flexibility in taking on extra childcare at zero notice.

Last week, her class did a lot of alien-themed work tying into the space topics they've been studying. That peaked with "Alien Day" on Friday:



The edge-tool sharpening course that Bernard Allen runs primarily for the benefit of the books department was suddenly rescheduled for this past week. Although I did the course last year, I did it again this year because, given the theft of my toolbox early this summer, I have a lot to do to get my tools in working order. Over the course of three days, I made two leather paring knives from hacksaw blades (one right-handed English-style knife, one with a curved right-facing edge). We also did some exercises in forging, hardening, and tempering steel; I have two roughly-shaped protoknives from that. The preceding Sunday, I had taken a blacksmithing "taster day"; I attempted to make a lifting spatula. Number 4 on this page was what I was going for, but I wasn't able to forge the blades anywhere near thin enough or flat enough. So I worked on grinding that down; it's still not there yet. And I worked on flattening the back of the blade to my new spokeshave.
Summary:
2 new tools completed.
3 incomplete new tools.
1 existing tool worked on
0 existing tools completed.
Which means that I have three more things waiting to be sharpened than I did before the course! The new paring knives are shiny and viciously sharp -- when I work on leather paring knives, I'm always uneasily reminded that the blade angle and keenness are optimal for cutting quickly and easily through skin.

I have no pictures of me from the sharpening, but here are some of the other bookies hard at work:

In the far left, you can glimpse Bernard and two of the furniture students conferring around the grinding wheels.

Notes for my next post: socks, scarf, sourdough, and the Apple Affair.

New year, new leaf.

Today was the first day of my postgraduate year (the year that should culminate in a master's degree). It got off to a pretty good start. I sat in on some of the standard-issue start-of-year nonsense, but also had time to sharpen a couple knives and document and photograph my first project for the year.

The pictures I took today are on the department camera at the college, so for your bookie viewing pleasure I present a couple of pictures of
table books, taken during my stint at the British Library. No, I didn't conserve these, they're just cool.

I forget what this one is -- I'll look at my notes tomorrow.


This one is from John Dowland's Lachrimae.


In the meantime, Small has been growing like mad and being her usual fiendishly charming self.

Here's the very first post.

My long-promised weekly updates with photos will be published here. I hope they'll be enjoyable.