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.

Something New

I’m alive! It’s summer – can I use that as my latest excuse for my appalling lax behaviour in updating my blog? Let’s go with that.

I have several posts on the go, but I am leap-frogging over them to show you the latest cool thing.

My father’s mentor, Doug Shenstone, had a very different style than my father has. One thing he did that I really like is fluting. Because pewter is soft, you have to reinforce bowl rims so they don’t dent. The easiest way is to roll the lip. Another way is fluting. It takes more time, but I think the result is very pretty. Here’s a bowl Doug made for my mother shortly before he died:

My father had no interest in fluting, so he actually got rid of some of the equipment Doug used (which, I confess, amazed me because my father is – how shall I put this? – an enormous pack rat). But since I was interested, we decided to try it.

First, we made this thing. We don’t know what the call it. It’s our fluting thingie. We made it from toasted maple, in case anyone is interested. It may be too soft for our purposes, but it works for now.

I spun a bowl and planished it. Then I put it on this sheet that let me mark the bowl evenly where I wanted to flute.

We first practiced on a crappy bowl that was kicking around the workshop. I think both my daughter and I used it to learn (in my case relearn) to planished.

To make the flute marks, you have to hold the bowl against the fluting thingie we don’t know the proper name for, then use a hammer and something sharp to create the line. The first thing we discovered is that the process requires three hands – one to hold the bowl steady, one to hold the wedge in the correct spot, and one to hammer. This is a mild annoyance, mostly because it seems that there really should be a way to make this a one-person job.

Doug used a brass wedge to make the lines in the bowl, but my dad figured that a wooden wedge would make for smoother lines, so we tried that out too, and he was right. So that is what I used to make the flute marks along my bowl.

The practice bowl, brass wedge and wooden wedge that we used.

Finally, I cut out and filed smooth little Vs to finish off the shape.

This is the final product. I am very happy with it and I think I will continue working with fluting, but I sure would love to figure out a way to make it a one-person job.

More planishing

My father tells me that I missed pointing out something important about planishing. I did mention it briefly when I first started this blog, but not in my last post. Before the use of spinning to shape the metal, pewtersmiths used wooden mallets to hammer the metal into the required shape – in fact, that is still the way it is done at times. However, doing so leaves marks. Spinning also frequently leaves marks. So, planishing is pretty, but it is also funtional – it gets rid of the marks created in shaping whatever we are making.

Here’s a disk I spun to make the lid to a sugar bowl. You can see the marks left by the stick I used to press the metal against the wooden chuck.

Here’s another of the disks, after I planished it, but before I did the final shaping or buffing:

The marks are gone.

After planishing, I put the disk back on the lathe and spun it a bit further, shaping the lip and then trimming it with a chisel. The final step is to solder the little acorn on as a handle.

Here’s what the lid looks like complete and buffed all shiny and pretty:

Fun with Casting, part 1

My daugher’s desire for more dolphins sent me poking through my father’s drawer of molds.

The secret treasury of molds for casting

He wasn’t sure he actually had a dolphin mold, speculating that the dolphins my daughter unearthed might have been cast by Doug himself (who, let’s remember, has been dead for over 20 years). I found it (which doesn’t mean that the ones my kid found weren’t still actually cast by Doug), as well as some other interesting molds, like one for this tiny seahorse, of which my father has absolutely no memory.

Casting is fun. My dad does have a centrifugal casting machine, but it is fiddly and capricious, so a lot of the stuff we need is made the old-fashioned way.

Much of the pewter you see in shops is cast. It is my opinion that the primary talent in casting is in creating the model for the initial mold, so I don’t see that as pewtering in the same way we pewter. I’m a snob. Sue  me.

Not that casting itself doesn’t require some finesse. If the metal isn’t hot enough, it won’t work its way into all the little crevices. Too hot and it shrinks as it cools, which ruins it. And it is different depending on which mold you are using.

To cast items, we heat up the metal in in a small hot pot, using up scraps from producing other items and remelting failed attempts at casting.

Stuff to melt down

Pouring metal into a mold

To cast items, we heat up the metal in in a small hot pot, using up scraps from producing other items. While my spinning continues to improve, I also keep making mistakes. I hate making mistakes, particularly with the spinning. The good thing about pewter is that none of it goes to waste. We cut circles from the nice fresh sheets of metal. The small bits leftover from cutting those circles are welded together to make other items. Bits too small for that are melted down. We melt down everything, even the shavings created by trimming pieces spun on the lathe.

That being said, the metal reduces in value from what you can get for items made from the sheet metal to what you can get for cast items, so it is better to not destroy stuff on the lathe.

I tried to cast the little seahorse and horse mold, but could not get the metal to go into the corners properly. I finally improvised by lying the mold flat, pouring the molten metal straight onto it and then smushing a backing down quickly.

When I told my father of my innovation, he showed me a different backing to make pouring tiny molds easier. This sort of thing happens fairly frequently in the shop. My dad shows me how to do something. I then transfer that knowledge to something slightly different, such as another mold. It doesn’t work so well. He then says, “Oh, yes! When you do that one, you have to do it *this* way!” And shows me some modification to what he showed me originally. It’s not like he has a curriculum or anything. We are just winging it here.

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.

Little Boxes*

After messing up a few bowls and baby mugs, my father and I decided I should try spinning some smaller items, so we switched to candle snuffers. You would be amazed at how many people actually use snuffers to put out their candles rather than just blowing them out.

My father spun one to demonstrate, then went off to garden, leaving me to my own devices. Then I spun one, and it worked! It looked just like his. I put it beside the first one and started a third. My dad wandered back in to check on my progress and looked at the two snuffers on the table.

“They are too flared,” he said.

“That one is yours,” I pointed out.

“Oh,” he said. “Well they’re okay then.”

These are the joys of hand-made. I made the rest less flared. Now, if you want a candle snuffer, you have a more options. Isn’t that thoughtful of us?

Spun snuffers waiting to have handles attached.

Having successfully spun something small, I then wanted to try to make little boxes. I am somewhat obsessed with little boxes. I made a medium small square one, then I made a tiny one, about the size of a matchbox. I love it. It is cute. I forgot to take a photo, though, so you’ll just have to trust me on that.

My father pointed out that the effort that goes into cute little square boxes makes them a bad choice, because I’d have to charge too much money to make them worth the time. But spinning round boxes is much easier, so that is what I set out to do. He gave me a wooden chuck that he uses to make something else, but would work for this with a smaller disc of metal. I spun five.

Waiting to be spun

The box is almost finished. I use a chisel to trim the edge before pressing the lip up against the chuck to finish it.

Some of them I left smooth, and some I planished (hammered). My spinning wasn’t perfect, and with some of the boxes there were small lines in the pewter or the sides weren’t quite straight. Those ones I planished, which removes the small defects.

Now, lids. Hinged lids are appealing, but again take more time. So I cut out two circles of metal for each lid; one slightly bigger than the dimensions of the box, and one slightly smaller. I then soldered them together, so when you put the lid on the box, the smaller disc inside holds the lid on.

Waiting to have the lids assembled.

I left some plain, but I experimented with decorating the lids of most of them. A while ago, I made a smaller tzedakah box, and painted the letters. I really liked that effect, so I wanted to see what I could do with the little boxes.

Small tzedakah box with painted letters

The heart shape is soldered on, waiting to be painted.

Finished

A lid for a planished box

I’d show you the others, but they were already gone before I remembered to take photos. My father is in the Red Trillium Studio Tour this weekend, so the boxes are already there. If you are looking for something fun to do this weekend in the Ottawa area, you could go on the tour and see my dad’s awesome stuff for yourself, and tell me if you like the boxes. Any interesting ideas for decorations on the top of the boxes are welcome too!

*How many of you now have Pete Seeger going through your head?