Fog

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Its getting late in the season

After a couple days of sunshine a big system has rolled in over us.  Yesterday was a rain day and today is a snow day.  Its time to get caught up on paperwork.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

A bit of snow on the ground

Snow in front of the house

 We've had some cold and snowy weather in St. John's over the past couple
of weeks. The storm last night only left 15-20 cm of snow in the city, but its a damp heavy snow. It feels like winter has caught up to us now.

The city is halfway through a major sewer upgrade along our street and there has been a construction zone in front of our house for most of the fall.  We've had a combination of related and unrelated plumbing problems in our basement since last spring and have been waiting for the upgrade to get to our house so that we could put the basement back together and finally be done with it all.  Of course, the contractors stopped one house short of us, so we get to be the first house hooked up in the spring, but we can't really make the basement livable again until that work is done.  It feels like it could be a long winter.

Our street has been put back together just in time for winter.  

The backyard is peaceful, though.  I hope to use the downstairs deck through the winter. It looks like it should be easy to keep clear.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Sea Ice and Fog

Its been a great summer for photos of rolling fog banks.  

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Waiting out the rain

Its been a wet, foggy summer

Photo Credit: Tim Rast

Back to Business

Points to notch

I just got home from a Craft Council of Newfoundland and Labrador board meeting.  I'm currently the Treasurer and board representative for the Human Resources committee.  We try to have board meetings every two months.  At the moment we have 19 board members, which is a lot of people to coordinate with, but we managed to get a quorum this morning and had some good discussions about finances (we're in pretty good shape) and the upcoming Craft Fair (still a few spaces available in the second half of the fair if you haven't booked yet).

Hurricane rations

This afternoon, I'm back to work in the workshop.  I missed a day of work on Wednesday from the effects of Hurricane Igor.  We didn't have any property damage, but I was without power for 24 hours.  The clock stopped at 3:14 on Tuesday afternoon and when I went to set the time after the power came on Wednesday afternoon it was reading the correct time, so it must have started up again at 3:14 on Wednesday.  My phone and internet came on a few hours after that and my e-mail and website (www.elfshotgallery.com) came back online yesterday evening.  I lost a bit of food in the fridge, but the freezer seems fine.  I only had to prepare one meal over a propane torch, but it was kind of fun and since Lori is still out of town I might have another wiener roast in the fireplace this evening.

Obsidian, Fibre Optic and Recycled Glass

I'm working on a wholesale order of jewelry that I need to ship as early as possible next week.  I have all the blanks made and I'll get them notched this afternoon.  I'll take a bit of time to assemble them into necklaces and earrings on the weekend since I missed a day of work on Wednesday.  I usually try to keep to a 9 to 5 work schedule with Elfshot, just so it doesn't get overwhelming.  Its easy to always be at work when you are self-employed.  I'll make an exception this weekend, because the assembly can be done indoors with the TV on and I can sleep better when I'm making progress on an order.

Photo Credit: Tim Rast

Still in the Dark from Igor

Candlelight blackout

We had hurricane Igor blow through Newfoundland yesterday.  At the moment about 50,000 people are still without power - apparently 75 lines were down across the province including 32 down in St. John's.  Our house is in the dark, which meant Lori was packing for her New York trip by candlelight.

Lori's New York Feet

We got up at 4am this morning and I drove her to the airport. There were still lots of tree branches on the roads and many of the traffic signals are still out around town. Its weird to see so many blank spots in the city where the lights are out.  Since the airport has power I decided to hang out here for a few minutes, charge my laptop batteries and stick up a quick blog post before heading back home to our neighborhood blackout. 

Cards, Candles, CBC

Our house really wasn't impacted that much.  There was a lot of wind and rain, but no damage done.  Lori did her nails by the last bit of daylight and when it got dark we lit some candles and played a card game.  We turned on the radio and listened to CBC for updates.  Other communities weren't so lucky, there are several towns cut off by washed out bridges and at least one man was reported to have been swept out to sea when the driveway he was standing on washed away. 

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Digging Out

Its a digging out day in St. John's. We had our first big snowfall of the season with 38 cm blowing in and sticking around. That's a short cubit, if you are reading somewhere without the metric system. We've got the car to free and a path to the workshop to dig out. Compared to lots of people we don't have a big area to shovel, so I really can't complain too much, and until the winter storm season leaves in the spring we'll be defending our parking space and the workshop path against infilling.

The truth is I find the winter shovelling season kind of enjoyable. I've decided to let heavy snow shovelling days count against running days this winter. I've switched to the treadmill entirely now, but the novelty has lost lots of its shine. Shovelling seems much more like exercise than mowing the lawn and I really like the strategy of it all. Planning out the piles of snow is just the tip of the iceberg. There is the psychological warfare that goes on up and down the street as everyone with on street parking defends their territory. Establishing your parking space early and maintaining it throughout the winter is as necessary for on street parkers as scratching open a breathing hole is for seals. People looking for a parking space will tend to avoid a well cared for and maintained parking spot because its an obvious sign that someone is using that space. Its like smelling another dog's yellow snow.

But its not an entirely defensive strategy - there is plenty of room for diplomacy and a carefully executed preemptive shovelling of a neighbor's sidewalk can establish an important ally and get them on your side early in the battle. Which is especially useful later in the season when you need them to stop the surly teenager in their family from shovelling their snow into your space!

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Photo Captions:
Top: Looking out the front door
Middle: Looking out the back window
Bottom: Halfway up the mother-in-law door already!

Antler Reproductions and Apple Picking

We had a new addition to our backyard thanks to Wednesday's windstorm. Our neighbor's 30ft apple tree blew over into our yard, right across my path to work. St. John's was reported to have received 50 mm of rain and had wind gusts up to 122km/hour. When the tree went down it was being plastered by slush pellets and weighed down by its own leaves and apples. There was no damage done and in about 90 minutes on Thursday morning Lori and I picked 3 bags of apples and chopped up the tree and returned it to the neighbor's yard in 4 big piles. She's going to have a bit of a surprise when she gets back from Vegas!

I don't have any trips to The Rooms this week, but my plan is to have everything from the Parks job finished for my next visit. There are always things to tweak the first time I think things are finished, so realistically I'll need at least one more trip after that to really be done, but I need to wrap this job up and dedicate more time to Craft Fair preparation.

Here's a look at the latest finished Parks Canada Inuvialuit reproductions:

Composite Barbed Antler Point: Aulavik National Park. This was a one of the more complicated pieces in the job, because its a composite of two separate antler pieces and three iron rivets (plus at least a half dozen different lichen varieties) . I made the antler point and brace longer than necessary so that I could break them to the correct length and antique them. For the rivets I used sections out of a wire coat hanger, heated and hammered to create the rivet heads and then rusted with Muriatic acid. The final stage was gluing on the lichen. This is one of those pieces that I get confused on which is the artifact and which is the reproduction when they are side by side (artifact is on the left and reproduction is on the right). Barbs like that often mean fishing, but I'm not certain if that's the function of this artifact or not. I don't know a lot about the site it was found at.

Drilled Antler: Aulavik National Park. The artifact is on the left and the reproduction is on the right. This is a little antler brace piece that would probably would have functioned similarly to the small piece on the composite barbed antler. Both the original and the reproduction are made from caribou antler that has been weathered white and covered in lichen. The biggest difference is that the lichen grew on the original piece and I lifted mine from rocks near St. John's. The bright orange lichen is called jewel lichen and it grows on rocks fertilized by birds. Fortunately there are varieties that grow in Newfoundland that are a pretty good match for the jewel lichen that grows in the Arctic.

Photo Credits:
Top: Tim Rast
Second: Lori White
Third-sixth: Tim Rast

Photo Captions:
Top: The new addition to our back yard
Second: Disassembling the apple tree so I could walk to work.
Third: Side by side comparison of the composite antler barbed point (original left, reproduction right)
Fourth: Side by side comparison of the composite antler barbed point (original foreground, reproduction back)
Fifth: Side by Side comparison of the drilled caribou antler artifact (original left, reproduction right)
Sixth: Side by side comparison of the drilled caribou antler artifact (original background, reproduction foreground)

A Tipping Point -- The First Finished Parks Pieces

We have some leaves scattered around the back yard, so it must have been windy last night, but we seem to have come off pretty lightly in St. John's from the passing of what was left of Hurricane Bill. The biggest impact on our household was the loss of the satellite signal for 5 minutes in the middle of last night's episode of True Blood. Mercifully, the storm broke the humidity that we had all day and the wind and rain made for perfect sleeping weather.

Today is a normal workday. I'm in the shed making the modifications to the Parks reproductions that I mapped out on Friday. The Rooms visits to check on the progress are getting kind of overwhelming. I have pretty much every piece on the go now, which is a lot to keep track of in my head. However, I'm hoping that I'm passed a tipping point in the project -- some of the pieces are finished and won't have to go back for comparisons anymore. Hopefully, from now until the end of the project, there will be a steady stream of finished reproductions. I'm looking forward to having fewer pieces to keep track of. Here are the first pieces that I finished.

Net Gauge, Ivvavik National Park: The original artifact is in the middle and the reproductions are above and below it. I've talked a bit about this artifact in a previous post. Its a key shaped tool used to measure the diameter of the gaps in a fishnet. Its made on softwood and I tried to match the weathered surface using a combination of wood stain, rock dust, ochre, and a clear matte spray finish.

Stone Scraper, Banks Island: This one was a little challenging, but unless I can figure out how to stain the stone more I think it will stay in the finished pile. This little scraper was made on what looks to be a pebble with a reddish cortex and green interior, with blue and white layers in between. Its such a specific combination of colours and textures that even if I had complete access to the source of the stone (which I don't) it would still be unlikely that I'd come across an identical stone. I went through boxes and boxes of rock and found a heat treated flake from a source that I'm not certain off (Florida, maybe) that had a similar red cortex and colourful interior. I knapped the scraper to keep the patch of cortex in the same location as on the original and tried staining the stone darker with ochre and shoe polish, with mixed results. Maybe green shoe polish would give a closer match - does that exist? For now its in the finished pile, because I don't know what else to do to make it any closer to the original.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Photo Captions:
Top: Aftermath of Bill - note the scattered leaves.
Second: Net Gauges. The original artifact is in the middle.
Third: Scraper and flake
Fourth: Scraper and scraper reproduction made on the flake in the previous photo.