Winding Down

It's the end of term now and the students are all on their way. I've finished off "A Forest" and have been tidying up the workshops. On Monday, I went through to Edinburgh for an exceptionally rapid visit to see Sue Amendolara who is having a holiday here and which has resulted in me returning the visit to see her in Edinboro when I'm in Pennsylvania. All good!

I've been working on the box for "A Forest", which is an old cutlery box I found at the flea-market. It was full of cutlery which, fortunately, is both attractive and in good condition, so it is now in my kitchen drawers as the box is on my workbench:

This is the box just after I scraped a lot of the crud off the surface. There is a horrible varnish stuff on it, which is flaking off in patches and which nothing seems to move. I don't want to use paint-stripper on it as that is such a horrible material that I try to never use it if I can.

Eventually, I used a lot of coarse and fine steel wool to move the worst of it, then covered it with beeswax:

It is absorbing a LOT of beeswax! This is it after about five coats, allowing each coat to dry between. You can see the right side of the box isn't nearly coated enough yet. I like the scuffed look caused by the uneven soaking of the varnish into the wood.

The plaque on the top has lettering very similar to that on the pendant itself and I used the "girl" that I cut too big earlier in the project!

Other than that, I've started in a casual way on the next project, "Future Legend", based on the Bowie song of the same name. I say "casual" as I know that there is no way this will be progressing at all before I break for the summer: