Books and Shelves.

This week was spent finishing up the last two shelves for the house.  Here is a work in progress photo of the shelf for the office.

The office shelf will be about 6 feet tall and 3 feet wide.

 I’ve also been working on making a sketch book from scratch.  So I started by folding all the paper and trying to make each section as uniform as possible.  I ended up with enough paper for two books, but I wanted to finish one before I started on the other so I could make mistakes on the first one that I (hopefully) won’t make on the second one. 

After getting all the paper folded I sewed them together using some silk thread that Keturah had lying around.  

After a few days of looking at what I did, I decided to move on to the next stage.  This involves gluing the spine with a piece of card stock (this I found out after I used some cardboard), and clamping it all down so the spine is as tight as possible.  Here is a photo of the clamping and gluing of the spine and a picture of the piece of cardboard that I glued to the spine…

 

 

 In between working on the book I slowly add another shelf to the office shelf.  I’m using dowel rods to put the whole thing together so I have to wait for the glue to dry before I can remove the clamps.  It seems to be working so far, this is how I make these two shelves for the living room, and the one that’s going into Ewan’s room (Ewan is the baby boy that will be born most likely within 30 days…).  

That’s what I’ve been working on this past week, this week will be used to finish that shelf and the first book, and then start on the second one.  I also want to clean up the studio and get it in working order so I can start making pottery.  I also have fallen off the horse with sketching and reading but I will remedy that tonight.  I’m currently reading Contemporary Ceramics by Emmanuel Cooper, it has lots of great pictures but the reading is going a little slow (there are no dragons, wizards, or T.A.R.D.I.S’s), but it will be finished so I can start another book from my small library.  Hope all of you had a good week and we’ll see you next week.

Wait, wait. Don't tell me..

I'm back (hopefully)...

 

Okay, it’s been a while (to say the least) since I’ve been down to this old blog.  I thought I might pop in and give a little update, since the last time you heard we were trying to expand our garden.  That didn’t go so well, I did manage to kill all the grass and leave the plastic out in the sun for far too long.  It ended up breaking down, and it took me a good afternoon to pick up all the little, brittle pieces.  I never got around to tilling the soil or laying out newspaper, what I did end up doing was buying a house (we were renting before).  My mother-in-law found a house after we just about gave up, we were looking for a house with some property so I could build a studio and have a kiln and couldn’t find anything we really liked.  The house my mother-in-law found already had a studio (30x30, high ceiling garage with bathroom), and they had converted the old two car garage into a large living room, which makes the house feel much larger.  So for the last six months or so my time has been spent on painting, making big holes in walls, and custom building shelves for books and such.  Now I’m on the last two shelving units that I will build for the house for a while, one for the office and one for the baby room.  Speaking of which we are going to have a little boy come live with us sometime in May (that’s when Keturah is due).  We’re both pretty excited to have him so we can make cool costumes for him for Halloween (New Year’s, birthdays, thanksgiving, Con’s, and Tuesdays).  We’re thinking a run of Doctor Who themed outfits, mostly so Keturah can make herself into a weeping angel, and she thinks I would make a good Ood (I'm not sure what the think about that). 

Anyway, I seem to be getting a little antsy with so little art going on.  I’m going to start work on the studio as soon as I’m finished with these last two shelves and a little paint touch up.  My mother-in-law also found a potter on Kick starter who was able to get funding to buy a gas kiln, so I think I might try to do something like that to get some of the money to purchase a kiln for the studio.  I would really love to have a kiln by the end of the year, but in the mean time I will start making new work.  Probably a mixture of functional pieces and art pieces, likely it will be mostly functional.  I need to stretch my mind a little to get back into the art side of pottery, so I’ve started ready some of the many books I have and have been trying to sketch a little every day.  So by the time I get to making I should have quite a few ideas to kick around.  

I would also like to get out in the garden, I really like having fresh tomatoes and carrots to munch on, maybe some green beans too.  I don’t think I will have a very large garden this year, likely it will be a few tomato plants, carrots, green beans, maybe some cucumbers, and a lot of herbs.  Anyway here are some pictures of the house, the studio, and a few other things.  I hope to be back sooner than nine months, let’s plan on a week.  See you then!

 This is one of the holes I put in the wall, but it needed it.  It's finished now, I will post another picture once I take one...

 

 This is the wall where I put the hole, it is on the far left.  This is the dinning room and the hole opens up to the living room. 

Next are a few pictures of the studio, I've put a few more things in here since I took this photo back in November.  I'll post that as soon as I take it...

 please forgive any spelling or grammatical errors, I didn't have Keturah read it before I posted it...

Garden Expansion

 

This blog is all about the new expansion to our garden.  I have been thinking about expanding our garden for a while, and I’m just getting around to it.  When we made the raised bed garden that we are currently using, I thought that it was pretty big (at least if felt pretty big as I was hauling all of the compost one wheelbarrow full at a time…), but the more experience I get with our garden the more I realize that I would like to have a bigger garden.  So we can grow more of our own foods, and we can experiment with different types and varieties of vegetables.  I would like to grow at least two new types of vegetables per season to see how they grow and if we like them or not, and the new garden space will give me the room to do that, as well as the space to grow the staples that we love. 

To start I had to figure out where a good place to put the garden would be.  When we did the raised beds we got lucky, we didn’t see where the shade was during the day, and we only had one place to put it, which was on top of a bunch of grave someone had used to fill in a storm shelter.   It worked out pretty good because it gets plenty of sun during the day, and allows the soil to drain really well.  This time I had some knowledge of where the shade is during the day, since this time I could put the garden anywhere in the backyard that I wanted, I needed to know this.  I decided to put the new garden just south of where our raised beds are.  This gives them the most sun during the day and a wind break because there is a fence just to the west of the new bed. 

 Here is where I plan to put the new garden, next problem is how to get rid of the grass.  Last time I put a garden in the yard like this, I just tilled the ground and raked up most of the grass.  This seemed to work for a while, but after about a month it was completely over grown again, and now you cannot even tell where we had that garden (it was also right under a tree that shaded the whole bed all day).  This time I plan to kill the grass first, then till and rake all the roots out.  To kill the grass I laid out a 4 mill sheet of clear plastic and placed bricks around the edge and a few in the middle to keep it from blowing away.  The sheet of plastic is 10 feet wide by 25 feet long, which gives us a new garden bed that is 250 square feet; I believe this more than doubles our current garden size (I’m very excited about that).

 

This is as far as I have gotten so far, the plastic has been down for about 5 days and the grass under it has turned brown.  I’m not sure how long I will leave it down, but in the mean time I need to plan what I want to grow this fall and spring and map out where in the garden all of these plants will go.  I also plant to grow our tomato plants a little differently this coming year, I’m going to try something called espalier, which is the idea of training a plant to grow in/on a flat plane.  It should at least be interesting to look at.

Here is a list of the seeds that I recently purchased, they are all heirloom varieties, and hopefully will be tasty.  Please let me know if you have any suggestions of what else we should try to grow, I will gladly try to grow anything!

Bean (Pole): Blue Lake Green Bean  

Bean: Romano Pole Bean  

Broccoli: De Cicco  

Brussel Sprouts

Carrot: Scarlet Nantes  

Cauliflower: Snowball  

Chia  

Cilantro

Common German Chamomile  

Corn: Golden Bantam Yellow Sweet Corn  

Cucumber: Boston Pickling  

Cumin  

Dill Dukat  

Echinacea Purpurea

English Marigold  

Hyssop  

Kale: Dwarf Blue Curled Scotch Kale

Lettuce: Parris Island Cos Romaine

Lettuce: Rouge de Hiver Romaine Lettuce  

Okra: Emerald  

Oregano  

Parsley: Single (Broad) Leaf  

Pea: Early Alaska Pea  

Pepper: Cayenne Long Red Thin Hot Pepper  

Pepper: Jalapeno Pepper  

Spinach: Bloomsdale Long Standing Spinach  

Spinach: New Zealand Spinach  

Squash: Prolific Straightneck Summer Squash  

Thyme: Common Thyme  

Tomato: Cherokee Purple  

Tomato: Large Red Cherry  

Tomato: Roma  

Vera Lavender  

Watermelon: Sugar Baby  

Wild Bergamot  

Yarrow - White 

Zucchini: Black Beauty Summer Squash

Zucchini: Round Zucchini Summer Squash