Bending

I have rather lost the thread of "What I did today" as a theme for the blog. It is easy to slip into thinking that what one does is of little interest, but I must persevere and try to remember that it may be of interest even to me once a little bit of time has elapsed.
This is the kind of approach we adopted at the recent stage decoration event. Two guys cut the bamboo the day before and some other helpers split it into rough quarters on the Saturday morning. I had some arch shaped offcuts of 1 inch plywood from that turntable project last year and some others from the arch in the shop, also a few last scraps of 2x4 from the bin at a local store. I made three sturdy little rostrums on the platform area and bent bamboo into them while Sammy was strung like a fish on the other end. Actually not applying stress, but keeping the thin end as high as possible to keep the stress to a minimum. A couple of coarse thread screws held the fat ends in place and the thin end was bound with twine and adjusted later to make a kind of uneven arrangement with the thin ends so that all the bits weren't bunched up together. We lost one piece that snapped during the night before the performance. That was just cut out while rehearsals were going on. I do worry that one of the suckers will snap during the solemn proceedings one day, but so far we have been lucky. Praise each and every one of the little Shinto deities.
Today I was again preparing timber, but finally beginning to get a feel of what I have on hand for one of the projects. It all takes time and particularly so in the sluggish heat we are enjoying at present.