In which I become a blacksmith!

A friend of mine is, among other things, an amateur blacksmith and over the weekend I got to play with the forge!  Really, I only hammered for the first two heatings, after which Kel took over (there is a reason smiths have HUGE arms) and I acted as apprentice and held the rod while he bashed at it with a sledge hammer.   (I also art directed, the insanity of the spork (yes spork!!!)  is entirely my doing.)

 The following is a selection of pictures without much in the way of an explanation  as it would be along the lines of 'making the steel really hot', 'bashing it with a hammer', 'bashing it with a different hammer' and 'curling it into a spiral!'  all of which certainly have technical terms that I am wholly ignorant of.   Nonetheless -- I present blacksmithing fun!

tools!!   clockwise from bottom left: original steel rod to be fashioned, forge, oil cans, anvil and mini anvil and in the center, the anvil in all its glory with zillions and zillions of nifty hammers.

heating and hammering and shaping! oh my!

Clockwise from top left: removing the excess, rolling the scroll, adding the twist, more with the scroll.  As you can see, Kel loves trees.

ye old fancy spork.   Pretty damn awesome, if I say so myself.

Kel has yet to start a blog of his own, but he does have an etsy shop where you can see more of his work. (look at the prior sales section to see his knives)  

Popping up to say hello! PLUS bonus paper star tutorial!

The crazy has been in full force for the past week or so, what with deadlines at work.   Everyone is under firm instruction to think happy thoughts that everything goes my way, happens as I have planned and otherwise works out well.
Having more or less caught up on life, I'm still working on getting back into sewing.   There have been several aborted attempts to start something (or finish something)  but I'm fairly well tapped out just now, so mostly I've been mending.  (useful, but not so interesting.)  Actually - I lie - there was one interesting part of whole mending experience -- I finally figured out why a particular RTW shirt had always sort of bothered me -- the collar was all wrong.   So -- out came my trusty seam ripper, off came the collar, the stand was sewn up, and blamo -- mandarin collar (much more suited to the shirt.)

**************************************************************************************************

Now -- Paper stars!!!!    I'd taken these pictures months ago intending to do a snowflake tutorial, but they work just as well as stars.  I had them in half a dozen colors for my birthday and they invariably knock people's socks off despite being ridiculously easy to throw together.

Supplies:   6 square pieces of paper.   Size doesn't really matter, but about 4 inches is nice

                 tape, scissors, string (to hang them up)

      

1) fold a square in half to make a triangle.  On the right side, make three angled cuts from the fold toward the center - but fall short by about a centimeter or so.   Do the same on the left.

2) Lay the paper flat.  You should see a sort of diamond pattern -- take the two innermost points and tape them together.  Don't fold anything, just let the paper curve.

3) Flip the paper over and do the same thing -- tape the points of the diamond together, but this time curving in the opposite direction.  

4)Continue flipping and tapping points together with the next two diamonds.

 5) You should end up with something that looks like the picture above -- four diamonds with their points taped together  - alternating direction by layer.
6) Do all of the above five more times.

 7) Tape the center points together (I like to do two groups of three and then attach the sets.)  You can also tape the middle of the diamonds where they touch the other sections -- but a smaller star probably won't need the extra support.
8) Tie on some string and hang!