Craft Fair Recovery

The Fine Craft and Design fair went very well. My sales were on par with previous years at the Convention Centre, which I take as a big success, given the move to a new venue, the new 10-day format, the recession, and H1N1. There were lots of reasons to expect things to be down this year, but they weren't. The Arts and Culture Centre had a great atmosphere and I didn't hear from a single customer or exhibitor who didn't like the new location. I saw lots of old friends and met lots of new people. We even did a little shopping ourselves -- including this great hand forged pot rack from Green Family Forge.

One trend that was strong this year was an interest in flintknapping workshops. There was enough interest that I'm planning to do two workshops early in the new year, one on pressure flaking and one on percussion knapping. I'll post more details as they get worked out, but for now, if you are in the St. John's area and interested in learning to knap, send me an e-mail and I'll keep you posted.

Today is a bit of a slow day. The 12 hour days at the fair are long. I find it to be a big shock going from the isolation of the workshop in the weeks leading up to the fair to being immersed in crowds of Christmas shoppers for 5 days straight.

I'll slowly start re-assembling the house today. There's always a mess to clean up in the house after a craft fair because everything else leading up to the fair takes a back seat. This year the problem was compounded by the fact that Lori was sick in bed for the week and a half leading up to the fair. I was left unsupervised during that entire time and the craft fair preparation crept into every nook and cranny of the house.

Photo Credits:
First, Second: Tim Rast
Third: Lori White
Fourth, Fifth: Tim Rast

Photo Captions:
First: Elfshot Booth at 2009 Fine Craft and Design Fair
Second: Green Family Forge Pot Rack
Third: Beer Bottle to Arrowhead Workshop
Fourth, Fifth: The state of our house this morning.

Only Three Days Left!

So far, the Fine Craft and Design Fair at the Arts and Culture Centre in St. John's has been fantastic! I'm loving the new venue and there were actually artisans in the first fair who enjoyed themselves so much during the first 5 days that they signed up to do it all over again at this week's fair!

The fair is Open 10AM to 10PM on Friday and Saturday and 10AM to 6PM on Sunday. Free Parking and Admission.

Don't forget the Flintknapping demonstration - Saturday, November 14th, 10AM to 12 Noon. Hope to see you there!

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Photo Captions:

All: The Elfshot Booth (#512) at the 2009 Fine Craft and Design Fair

Remembering

When I think about Remembrance Day, I think about my dad's dad, Gustav Rast. He enlisted with the Polish army in World War I. At the time it was a good opportunity for a young man. He joined because they would send regular pay back to his family. Although living in Poland, grandpa was German and his brothers joined the German army, but grandpa didn't like how strict the Germans were so he joined the Polish forces instead. However, the fighting didn't end for Gustav when the Great War ended in 1918. Poland found itself an occupied country and grandpa continued fighting against the Bolsheviks between 1918 and 1921 for Poland's Independence from Russia.

Even when the fighting was over and Grandpa sold his team of horses for passage on a ship to Canada in the 1920s the war never left him. After a year of saving, he sent money back to Poland to bring his young wife and 3 small children (they had five more later) over to Saskatchewan. He exchanged letters for many years with his brothers who continued to live in Germany after the War, but when World War II broke out Grandpa destroyed all those correspondences. Grandpa didn't talk to his kids about his experiences in the First World War at that time, that would come later.

During World War II grandpa became very paranoid. German immigrants in Canada weren't allowed to own guns. Grandpa had a .22 rifle that he used for hunting rabbits to feed the family. He wrapped it in tar paper and took it out on to the prairie to hide in a rock pile until after the war. His oldest son, Erwin, followed grandpa to see where the gun was hidden. Erwin would have been 12 or 13 and he took his seven or eight year old brother Otto out to the rock pile to show him the gun. Erwin convinced Otto that since he knew where the gun was now he would get in trouble if his parents ever found out that Erwin was sneaking out and playing with it. Eventually Erwin broke the gun and threw it away. When grandpa went to retrieve the .22 after the war and found it missing he spent years wondering who found it and was convinced that the government was watching him. Erwin died in a car accident when he was still a teen and Otto didn't want to tarnish his memory with his father so he never told Gustav the truth about the rifle.

Grandpa didn't talk about the war until much later, but he spoke of it often after my grandma died. My earliest memories of my grandpa are of him sitting at his kitchen table in Saskatchewan talking to my dad in English and German about the War. It was over 60 years later and those memories were still right on the surface for him. He talked a lot about his friends and how random it was between who lived and who died. He'd say over and over again "Where was my bullet? So many good boys got killed... where was my bullet?" In fact, he was shot on at least one occasion and he could recall listening to the two Russian soldiers standing over him debating whether or not to shoot him again. They decided to leave him there. Grandpa could understand Russian and he heard one soldier convince the other not to waste a bullet, because this one would die anyway. On that occasion the Red Cross found young Gustav and patched him up. But thinking back, grandpa carried all those wounds in his head for the rest of his life. He dwelled on all his friends being lost and the many times he was held as a prisoner of war.

On my mom's side, she lost an uncle, Leonard Johnson, in World War II. He was an observer on board an RCAF bomber and went missing on July 29, 1943 in a raid over Hamburg. Like so many Canadian families, my mom's family were left wondering for decades whatever happened to him. In the family portrait on the left, Ragna was my grandma. Leonard was missing for years, although his grave has been located since. I believe he's buried in the Netherlands. Maybe someone in my family reading this could help fill in more details on my Great-Uncle Leonard.

Edit: Leonard is buried in the British Cemetery in Hamburg, Germany.

Photo Credits:
First-Third: Family Photos
Bottom: Family Photos from Mabel Johnson's self published memoir "Yesterday Remembered"

Photo Captions:
First: Gustav Rast, my grandpa. The photo has the following caption handwritten in ink on the back: 1919 G Rast awarded the bravery award for occupying the city of Litau by Poland's army at Easter
Second: Grandma Eva and children, Erma, Otto, and Frieda in Canada 1930/31
Third: Grandpa and his friends. Grandpa is seated in the middle
Bottom: My Great Uncle Leonard Johnson, and Leonard with his siblings and parents.

Fair and Ballistic Gel Seal Anticipation Builds!

I needed to pick up some shelves and other display items for my craft fair booth yesterday and had a chance to briefly stop by the Fine Craft and Design Fair to check out the show and my booth space. This was my first time visiting the fair in the Arts and Culture Centre and I'm really excited now about joining the fair this week. The place was hopping! At 10 days, the fair is twice as long as it has ever been and the layout and auxiliary events create a big festive atmosphere. The Craft Fair fits into the space so well, that its almost like a new mall dedicated to craft has sprung up in the middle of St. John's. The show is closed Monday and Tuesday to switch over booths and re-opens on Wednesday November 11th at 4:00pm with a new set of craft producers.

But of course, the inside of my head still looks something like this:

(You can make make your own Wordle at Wordle.Net!)

I spent more time working on the ballistics gel seal model. The current version is the 3 layer pop bottle seal. There is a rawhide skin layer, the smooshy fat layer and the sinew laced meat layer. I cut the top end off the two litre pop bottle and used it for a funnel so that I could cut a relatively small hole in the bottom to fill it from. I stretched a wet rawhide skin from a soaked chew toy for dogs over the top, like a drum skin. I flipped it over and filled it up upside down. The initial gelatin pour seeped through the wet rawhide. It was kind of messy, but in the end it helped keep the rawhide rubbery and more skin like when the gelatin set. I used 5 packs of Knox gelatin for 700 ml of water for the fat layer. I did that twice, so 10 packs for 1400 ml of water would be the same thing. For the meat layer I used 7 packs for 700 ml of water and poured it in 3 stages. Between each stage I let it gel slightly and sprinkled soaked sinew strips into the mix. That gives me about 4 inches of "fat" and 2 inches of "meat".

That's as far as I've got. I'll know later today if they work and what changes need to be made.

Photo Credits:
Top, Tim Rast
Second, Wordle.Net
Third & Fourth, Tim Rast

Photo Captions:
Top, Earrings ready for the 2009 Fine Craft and Design Fair, St. John's
Second, Wordle created using the text from the past week's blog posts
Third, Filling the ballistic gel seal. If you expand the photo you can see the sinew in the "meat" layer.
Fourth, Ready to test!

Craft Fair Update

Its been a hectic week of preparation for my run in the Fine Craft and Design Fair at the Arts and Culture Centre in St. John's next week. I've ran into a couple of people who said that they thought the fair was this week. It is, but I won't be there until next week. It runs for 5 days this week and 5 days next week, for a total of 10 days. There are a dozen or more exhibitors attending for the full 10 days and 60 or so exhibitors attending either the first 5 days (Nov 4-8) or the last 5 days (Nov 11-15). You can see the full list of craft producers and the days they'll be attending here.

Elfshot will be there for November 11-15th, and I'll be demonstrating flintknapping on Saturday November 14th for two hours starting at 10AM.

The reason for the move to the Arts and Culture Centre is the Convention Centre downtown kept raising their prices on us. Every year we had to pay more and it was impossible for the Craft Council to break even on the event. There is no comparable sized venue in St. John's. We needed a place with room for 70-100 booths. We picked the Arts and Culture Centre, for a lot of reasons, but the smaller floor space meant that we needed to create two back to back fairs to fit in all the booth holders.

There are some really big benefits to the Arts and Culture Centre for everyone. One is the parking - there are hundreds of free parking spaces, which was a big issue for a lot of people at the downtown location. Since its a public space and so much cheaper for us to rent than the Convention Centre, the admission is free. You can come as often as you want and it won't cost you anything. Although, if you are in the Christmas Spirit, the Craft Council of Newfoundland and Labrador has partnered with the CBC and the Community Food Sharing Association and there will be locations for donating non-perishable food items or cash at the door.

Photo Credits:
Top: Tim Rast
Middle: From the Arts and Culture Centre Website
Bottom: Tim Rast

Photo Captions:
Top: Lost Stone Obsidian Necklace and Earrings ready for the show!
Middle: The Arts and Culture Centre in St. John's
Bottom: More Lost Stone Obsidian

Harpoon Foreshafts and Gelatin Seals

Between the leftover Halloween candy and visions of giant gummy seals I hardly slept at all last night. I've been thinking a lot more about the ballistic gel seal idea.

I think that in order to properly test both barbed and toggling harpoons the gel seal would have to have three layers. Skin, blubber, and meat. I think rawhide would work for the skin layer, and two layers of gel could serve as the blubber and meat layers. The meat layer would be a dense ballistic gel and the blubber layer would be a gel made with more water, so it would be a little squishier. If you aren't squeamish, you can see the layers that make up a seal here: culture camp how to butcher a seal demo.

I've been using Knox Gelatine (its spelled that way on the box) to make the ballistics gel. To make edible gelatin, the recipe is one packet of Knox's for 500 ml of water. I'm using about 700 ml of water and in the first batch I used 2 packets of Knox. This made jello. All it was missing was the sugar and the floating peas and chunks of ham. I remelted the gelatin by floating the tupperware in a sink full of hot water and mixed in a third pack of Knox. The 3 pack-700ml gelatin block is the one I used in these photos. It held together a little better although it still failed (the third picture in the triptych below). It might make an ok fat layer, but I think its still softer than any real animal fat. I'm melting it down again and I'll add a fourth pack. My guess now is that 4 packs of gelatin will make an alright fat layer and that I'll need at least 5 or 6 packs to the same volume of water to make a dense enough muscle layer.

One thing that this avenue of thinking has illustrated for me is the functional difference between the long foreshaft on the barbed harpoon and the short foreshaft on the toggling harpoon. They start to make sense if you think of a seal in three layers, with skin and fat near the surface and meat somewhere deep inside. The toggling harpoon head works in the fat near the skin while the barbed harpoon needs to grip the denser muscle tissue deep inside the animal. The different lengths of the foreshafts would deliver the harpoon heads to the appropriate depths inside the seal.

The harpoon reproductions on the left are two different cultures, and all of the tools made by the Palaeoeskimos were smaller than the Maritime Archaic equivelant, so its kind of like comparing apples and oranges. However, the Maritime Archaic Indians also made toggling harpoons, and the foreshafts for those are much shorter than the foreshafts on the barbed points. One recovered at Port au Choix with the Maritime Archaic toggling harpoon head still attached was only 18 cm long. Out of context, it could have passed for a large Palaeoeskimo foreshaft (the foreshaft in my Palaeoeskimo reproduction is 12 cm long). The Maritime Archaic made both barbed and toggling harpoon heads and they made both long and short foreshafts, which makes sense when you consider where each of these kinds of harpoon heads would work best inside the body of the marine mammals they were hunting.

Maybe an experiment built around foreshaft lengths would be a good excuse for stabbing blocks of ballistic gel with harpoons. I'm thinking about other tests involving barbed versus toggling harpoons and stone endblades versus self-bladed harpoon heads. Thank you everyone for commenting on the last post - keep the ideas coming.

Photo Credits:
First, Third, Fifth: Lori White
Second, Fourth: Tim Rast

Photo Captions:
First, Stabbing a gelatin block with a barbed harpoon head
Second, Knox' gelatin and the container of gel
Third, Stabbing rawhide and gel with a Dorset harpoon. The glass is there to give the harpoon head room to toggle, but it didn't happen.
Fourth, Maritime Archaic barbed harpoon, top, and Dorset Palaeoeskimo toggling harpoon, below
Fifth, still stabbing gelatin

Jewelry and Harpoon Head Ideas

Its a jewelry week here. I'll be focusing on glass, chert, and fibre optic glass. I have bags of points that I keep on hand for emergencies. I don't have a lot of time before the craft fair, so I'll try to avoid starting pieces from scratch and focus on what I already have that is ready to be assembled.

On the other side of the coin, Elfshot is in great shape for artifact reproductions and original knives. I don't usually have this many artifact reproductions on hand so I'm looking forward to seeing how the craft fair display will go together. I have two harpoons ready to go, one is Dorset Palaeoeskimo and the other is a Maritime Archaic Indian style, just waiting for a red ochre application. I put a braided line on the Maritime Archaic harpoon because I liked John's idea so much. The 4 strand round braid takes the relatively thin harp seal leather and turns it into a pliable strong rope. I still wish I could find some good strong bearded seal skin, but the braided line does look nice.

I don't often have extra harpoons around the house either, so I feel like I'd like to do a little extra photography with them. Its especially interesting because they are so different, the Maritime Archaic Harpoon is a self-bladed barbed point while the Dorset Palaeoeskimo harpoon has a stone endblade fitted into a toggling harpoon head. This would be a good opportunity to illustrate the differences in how they work. Thanks to Mythbuster's the internet is full of recipes for homemade ballistics gel. I think I'll make some and stab it. If I have some successful experiments I'll post pictures.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Photo Captions:
Top: Red glass points ready for jewelry.
Middle: Maritime Archaic indian harpoon head and braided line, around a Dorset Palaeoeskimo harpoon head and line
Bottom: Dorset Palaeoeskimo Harpoon Head (left) and Maritime Archaic Indian Harpoon Head (right)