Saturday, November 08, 2008

Spiral of the present


Back to whitling away at wood for materials as well as working on some translation related stuff. Sammy was down in the shop for a while making up a little necklace as a present for the birthday girl of last weekend. It was kind of fun working out how to position everything in a left handed manner for him with the torch the hammer and the anvil all the "wrong" way round. It is easy to say, just hammer in the same place and move the hot metal back and forth adjusting the power of the blows like this. But the reality requires a lot of getting used to. The good thing is that once you have learned to do something like swing a hammer it can be applied in so many other processes of great merit for the budding object maker. There is a spiral of information as the "object" you have envisioned in your imagination takes a form in reality and then your mind responds to that in its turn creating a kind of circuitous dialog. That seems to be the point in all these activities where things stand or fall. If the process grabs you sufficiently, your hand-eye coordination improves to a point where you can do something to entice your internal vision to see a little further and you have yourself a pleasant time as the two types of vision encourage each other. Anyway a lot of these processes are enjoyable in themselves, so if none of that happens you still get to play with fire and whatnot. If even the process isn't fun, there may be some other happy purpose for which you are intended and it might be best to move on in search of it.
Sammy practiced reducing the metal rod section, twisting the hot metal, bending it to shape, then finally did a little silver solder application on the copper ring.