This spring has been rough. Among other challenges, last year we bought non-refundable plane tickets for a vacation over Charlene's spring break, and then this winter interest rates plummeted, and we decided to refinance. But, of course, before refinancing we wanted to do everything we possibly could to eek every penny out of the appraisal, which somehow escalated into a whole bunch of repair work and re-painting the inside of the house.
Which our awesome contractor, Carl Dreyer, finished while we were on vacation, but it also meant that we came home to a discombobulated house, were struggling to get all the shelves back in place and put that together and get the refi started, then I went out and won the Bodega Bay Wooden Boat Challenge again, and somewhere in there we managed to fit in a day of square dancing on a float in the Sebastopol Apple Blossom Festival parade, running another session of 4H Junk Drawer Robotics, volunteering at the 4H ChickenQue, and...
Yeah, we were wiped. So this weekend was awesome. We had to do nothing. On Saturday evening we wandered downtown to see a movie, and after that finished sauntered around downtown Petaluma, looking in various galleries, and Riverfront Gallery had the work of a local woodworker. Charlene was looking at one of his boxes with a "I need to carry a few small things for work, I wonder if this could be worked into a bracelet."
On Sunday afternoon I wandered into the shop and was overwhelmed with possibilities. I ground a little bit off of a big redwood stump that we think would make a cool outdoor sculpture but haven't managed to see the path through to that, I grabbed a piece of electrical wire and tried to bend it in to a butterfly, and then I started thinking about bracelets and bands.
So this is a prototype. Careful readers will note that the inlay in that lid was cut out of the fret board from Daniel's guitar that I screwed up, I'm still working on how to get the lid to a nice friction fit, so I still need to set in some small magnets to act as a lid catch, and I'll probably end up re-bending the loops for the band out of brass, with pliers that don't leave marks.
But it was wonderful to spend a day in the shop, making sawdust, without pressure or direction. Need more of that.
