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.

Harvest Time (Small Scale)

We have been drying out some of our onion flowers in some paper bags so we could harvest the seeds.  Today I sat down and sorted through the detritus and picked out the seeds.  Here are a few pictures of the progression of flower to seed:

Onion flower still growing.

Dried Onion Flower after a month in a paper bag.

A Pile of seeds from about 6 flowers.

We plan to plant most of the seeds this fall in hopes of a big onion harvest in the spring.  We’ll see how it goes.  We also plan to let our lettuce, cilantro, carrots, leeks, basil, rosemary, dill, parsley, and sage go to seed, as well as collecting seed from the rest of our plants.