sock blocking part IV

the finished sock blockers are now ready to shape some socks, see it stage by stage here, here and here...

sock blocking part III

I've done the 'filling in' bit for my sock blocker, see earlier posts about them here and here. Now for sealing/waterproofing:

sock blocking part II

Recently I started doing the second design for my pair of sock blockers; the first one is here. After a lengthy drawing/design process I began burning the outline onto the MDF:

So that's the hard bit done...

the chairs: part II

See part I here

...And now for sanding. Gave my chair (the armless one) a keying, ready for some paint. I chose a garden furniture paint for durability. After sanding the back, I realised the chair had been varnished somewhere in between it's initiation and my purchase of it. It has a quite wonderful shiny brass inlay that had been varnished over:

Decided to paint right over the inlay for my chair.

I used 'tru oil' on the other chair which preserved the inlay nicely, and made it super shiny too:

the chairs: part I

I purchased a couple of second hand chairs many months ago with the intention of restoring/changing them; the armless one for myself, and the carver for my mother. This is a back blog from a few months back. Here they are as bought:

I began with re-upholstering them. Nice new squarey fabric:

Then I spent quite a bit of time 'fixing' my chair; in that one of the legs wasn't sitting straight. I took it apart, sanded, glued and re-set it, filled in the holey bits, but now that I've been using it, it's gone back to how it was before, which was a shoogly chair at best.

Part II here

sock blocking beats!

I have been working on a little drawing/design for some sock blockers, influenced by a combination of pictish carvings and polynesian tattoos. I have just begun to woodburn the design onto the blockers, which I cut and shaped out of MDF:

The other blocker will feature a different design, I'll update about that soon.

knitted sock hanger

I have a south facing wall which I hesitate to put pictures up on, in case of fading etc., so I decided to make it a feature for my knitted socks, a wall-mounted washing line if you will. I thought dolly pegs would be excellent for this, so I painted a few of them badboys up:

and later drilled some holes in them. I don't have any more 'process' photos of me making it, so here it is the final product:

framing/shaming

Following on from my previous post about frame-making, I bought a band clamp so I could cheaply and easily make some more frames (glass-less, obviously).

I ended up splitting the corners and re-setting it about three times, trying to get it straight. Also wrecked one of the corners trying to do the job of a rebate plane with a chisel, ha. But I filled it in and it's fine. The whole shitness of the frame correlates with the shabbiness of the painting, yes, that's my statement for that. 

7-inch vinyl box... that I didn't really make.

Been trying to find vinyl storage for a while now, decided to build my own instead, cue the 6mm MDF.
Previously I made a 12-inch vinyl box out of 12mm MDF, glue and nails, but it came out a little... sarah-y, so you won't be seeing it here.
So I came up with a similar design(minus the nails), cut the board, and began glueing:

After several hours of setting/clamping, it promptly fell apart. I brought in my father to do the job properly:

IT STAYED TOGETHER. I tried again with the next piece:

IT FELL APART AGAIN. Feeling like an utter failure at woodwork, I call on my father again:

PERFECT! So the box became his project after that - dads just know how to make shit out of MDF:

And I just painted it:

Nice one, dad!