It’s a start

I actually sold a couple small boxes from my Etsy store yesterday. I think these are my first official sales. Yay me!

So today in the shop I was spinning some more of them. I haven’t had a lot of time there in the past few days, thanks to kid schedules.

This is what the stuff I was producing looked like:

Meanwhile, in the morning while I was doing mom stuff my father started making a couple beer mugs. By the time I got there, he was soldering on the handles:

Here’s what he had by the end of the day:

Aren’t they pretty? He spun them using several different chucks – far beyond where I am at. I can make some pretty things, but I have a way to go …

Successes

I may have seemed a little whiny in that last post. But I didn’t want to give the impression that this is just all easy, or that it is just this steady climb towards success. There are ups and downs, and last week was kind of a down. So I figured today I’ll tell you about a couple successes. A little while ago, I tried spinning the pieces for a large candleholder. I managed a couple, but then popped the bottom off two in a row, which was frustrating, so my dad offered to spin the rest of them.

Please note that there are THREE spun tops here with their bottoms popped off.

I would suspect him of trying to make me feel better, and except (thankfully), he’s not the sort of person who would coddle me that way. I actually love spinning. It feels kind of powerful to take a piece of metal and so quickly form a shape out of it. And I am improving. I spun the outer pieces and inner pieces for this candle holder.

Candleholder waiting to be buffed all shiny.

The first time I spun the outer piece, it was surprisingly difficult to get one ridge formed properly. By the 6th and final one, it was a breeze. I can’t figure out how it goes from feeling impossibly awkward to easy, just like that. My father not only does not coddle me, he appears to have great faith in my nascent abilities. Back when we first started, he showed me how to spin porringer bowls, which involves rolling the lip of the bowl at the end. (This adds strength to the bowl so it isn’t as easy to dent out of shape during use, which is important with such a soft metal.) I wasn’t very successful at that part. I wasn’t so successful at any of it, really, but it was the first thing I tried to spin. Nevertheless, when he was going to be away for the afternoon, he suggested I spin some more, and left me to it. I confess to thinking him a wee bit nuts, but I do know the basics of spinning and it is a small bowl, so really, how hard could it be?

Not yet a bowl

Hey, bowl shaped! Trimming the edge before rolling the lip.

Not hard at all, actually. Even rolling the lip, something I am not sure I did successful at all last time, was quite easy. I was ridiculously pleased with myself.

Rolled lip!

A couple of days ago, he and my mother were going out, so he suggested I could try making the lids for some round boxes he’d spun. Wooden lids. Would you like to know the last time I tried turning wood on the lathe? Never, that’s when. But he handed me this:

And told me to turn it into this:

Then he left. And I did. Even more fun, because the piece of wood was thicker, I got to taper the top as well.

Turning wood is fun, although the sawdust isn’t. Now, this is pretty simple stuff, but still, it is simple stuff I didn’t know how to do before, and now I do.

because it’s hard …

There are moments, in the shop, when I feel overwhelmed. There’s so much to learn. My father had the advantage of being a metallurgical engineer when he started, and my lack of a scientific background sometimes makes me feel as though I really started from behind the 8 ball. It isn’t just the pewtering, but the machines we use to create the finished product. When the lathe or the buffer doesn’t work properly, I don’t know how to fix them and just have to wait for my father.

I want to learn it all fast. I’m now 47 years old. One thing I am working on, with age, is letting go of regrets, such as ‘I wish I’d started this sooner’. Regrets really are completely pointless. But that doesn’t mean I don’t feel the pressure of time. And, while I am admitting things, I do wonder if it is crazy to try to learn a whole new skill set at my age.

Add to that my fibromyalgia and the separation process – mediation, endless discussions and looking for a new place to live – and sometimes I want to just curl up into a fetal ball under the bed. I’ve been in a great deal of pain the past few days. A good way to describe it is to think of how your whole body aches when you have a bad fever. Add exhaustion, stomach pain too severe to really eat and upset guts and you’ll have a fairly accurate picture of where I am at right now. It makes pewtering tougher. Which is why I am writing this instead.

Plus, I am working on setting up an Etsy shop, and possibly eBay too. My dad has a website, but I am trying to drag him even further onto the internet. He’s being remarkably willing to go along with all this, but then, my parents have embraced all the 21st century has to offer. (They may be in their 70s, but they both have iPads!) So stay turned for more info on our expanding online presence.

Anyway, two things made me feel somewhat better this week, despite the pain and doubt. One was a quote by Neil deGrasse Tyson:  “In whatever you choose to do, do it because it is hard, not because it is easy.” I think he might be paraphrasing John F. Kennedy. Whatever – it helped me focus on the fact that true accomplishment doesn’t come from mastering something easy. It’s succeeding at the difficult stuff that matters.

The other thing was fun in the workshop. It doesn’t take much to amuse me, I should point out. First, my dad showed me how to use this machine:

Up until now, it has had a cover over it and we used it to put stuff on. Unfortunately, I forgot my camera, so I only have photos I took with my iPod that aren’t the greatest quality. This machine is filled with tiny smooth pieces of metal. The little tube on the left pours in a soap solution and the machine spins the contents around, vibrating them, which polishes them.  My father uses it for small cast items, which are very difficult to buff. We tossed in handles and spoons and Christmas decorations.

It was so fun to watch and the child in me wanted to just grab all kinds of things and toss them in to see what happens. In fact, I’ve already warned my father that my youngest and I would be back here with rocks,  to see what the polisher does to them.

Filtering out the polished pieces.

The other thing we did was take all the pewter dust, shavings and trimmings from sweeping up the shop and melt it down. Because it burns off a lot of garbage, my father moves the hot pot outside for the job. So I took the contents of this:

Melted it down:

And turned it into these:

Melting stuff is fun.

The apprentice’s apprentice

I cannot believe it has been so long since I updated the blog! I swear that I write it all the time in my head. Yes, I am aware that’s also known as talking to yourself …

So, what have I been up to? I made some more little boxes, but really must stop now. I need people to actually buy some before I make more. It is fun coming up with things to put on the lids, though.

It’s a pomegranate!

This is my younger daughter, who is 10. She loves the workshop and is quite desperate to learn how to pewter as well. Much of it is beyond her right now, but she loves to help as much as she can, so she worked with me on the little boxes.

Preparing lids for painting

She also likes to poke around. There is a lot to explore – drawers filled with stuff that my father has cast, or even that Doug cast, are a favorite. Half the time my father doesn’t even know what is in them.

She found dolphins that were originally Doug’s and loved them. She wanted to make something out of them as a birthday gift for a friend, so this is what we came up with. I buffed them and soldered them on to the piece of pewter for her. She planished the pewter first for ‘waves’, then painted it. She loved it so much that she then didn’t want to give it away. But she did. She will make herself one at some point.