Setting up for Halloween

Here's the house decked out for Halloween. I still have to decorate the porch but the yard and window are done. At night the crosses have electric tea lights to make them visible and the window is lit; it is really pretty.

New cartoneria cat for Halloween!

A friend of mine posted a picture of a miniature Dia de los Muertos inspired cat figurine on his Facebook page and it inspired me to make a full-size cat skeleton. I wasn't going to do a cartoneria cat this year; my first priority was butterflies followed by another pair of cartoneria skeletons. I have been unusually unmotivated this year and have now abandoned the idea of the extra skeletons, but the cat will satisfy my craving for paper mache.

To start I made the wire frame using 16.5 gauge wire sold in the hardware store as "tie wire". It is cheap but has a greasy coating that will quickly turn your fingers black from handling it.



I learned my lesson from my first experience making skeletons: it is much harder to go back and try to force wires through a finished piece of paper mache than it is to incorporate the wires in the first place. If you are going to make something that will be suspended in the air, go ahead and plan for that from the start! For my skeletons I made each piece separately for flexibility in posing and ease of storage but with this cat I don't think that will work, so I am making a fixed figure that will likely have to be stored outside of a box. Oh, well.

Then I built up the figure using well-crumpled newspaper and pieces of masking tape.



Next will be the application of glue soaked strips of newspaper...

Butterfly decorations for Halloween

Because butterflies are something you think of for Halloween decorations, right? Well, maybe not.

My goal is to make my Halloween decorations a little more elaborate every year. This year I am making butterflies to hang up on my porch or wherever seems interesting. I cut the basic butterfly shapes out of 1/8 inch tempered hardboard (Masonite) using a bandsaw, then coated one side with store-bought acrylic gesso. Now I am painting the butterflies in bright colors. It is a fun project and a great way to reactivate my rusty painting skills.

My goal is to make them pretty, but somewhat creepy. Am I succeeding?

Progress on refinishing an old desk chair

My favorite part of finishing wood is being finished with it. I'm a ways away from that now so I had better suck it up and keep working.

After I finally finished sanding I wiped it down with a cloth and mineral spirits to get the dust off of it. Then I applied two coats of Varathane brand oil-based stain in a color they used to call "Mission Oak" and now call "Gunstock". I applied the second coat two hours after the first. There are a few really deep scratches that I left because I would have had to sand away a ridiculous amount of wood; besides, it is an old chair so having some character is OK with me.

I could not for the life of me find my blonde shellac flakes and I was really upset because I want to keep up the momentum and get this chair finished. So I used some of my garnet shellac for the first coat of shellac. I had planned on using some after doing a first coat of blonde, now the order is just rearranged a bit. It looks a little bit shiny, enough to notice a difference but a long ways from where I want it to be.

Doesn't it already look better than the "before" picture!?

To be continued...

Refinishing an old chair

I bought this old desk chair at the same time I bought the church pews. It's a great old chair but the photo doesn't do justice to the poor condition of the finish. It was pretty scuffed and scratched. I have been working to get the chair in better shape. Here it is as it was when I bought it (on the left) and here it is now (on the right). Once the stripping and sanding process is finished I'll stain and varnish it and it'll be ready to come in the house.

Time to prepare for Halloween

Halloween is my favorite decorating holiday of the year. Ever since the time I was a child trick-or-treating and came across a neighbor's yard decorated like a cemetery I was smitten. In my growing up years (and beyond) it was one of my dreams to have a house with a front yard in a neighborhood where I could decorate and people would come by the house on Halloween. Now I have that yard, and I decorate it. Every year I work to make it a little better.

It takes months of preparation, working intermittently when I am not at work or doing other things, to make more decorations. In 2008 I made some tall skinny crosses for a graveyard. They look great, come apart for easy storage, and are useful for a variety of Halloween themes.

How I made them:

I used inexpensive 1 x 2 inch lumber, cut the pieces to desired lengths for the cross shapes, then used a dado blade in a table saw to quickly cut lap joints. I allowed some slop in the joints to account for the space taken by the paint.

To get the aged look I first painted all the wood black. Then I painted it with a crackle glaze I purchased at the hardware store in the paint department. Finally I painted the wood with a very light gray paint. White paint would have been too bright for the aged look I was attempting but the grey appears to be white but is not too bright.

In the picture below I have three pieces of wood. One is black with the clear crackle glaze, the middle piece is wood that had just been painted with the light gray but has not started to crackle, and the third piece is a piece that has been painted and partially dried and crackled.

Anatomy of an antique church pew

As mentioned in a previous post, I bought some 100 year old church pews from a Church in San Francisco that is remodeling. All they had left were the longest pews at over 20 feet. That is too long to be useful, or even to transport, so I cut them in order to load them on a trailer and now they are at my house.

I always like to see how things are made, and my cutting of the pews allowed me to see how they were constructed; it wasn't what I might have guessed. Because the pews were centered around an altar in a corner of a room instead of the front (do Methodists call their center of attention an altar? I don't know), the pews were built curved to fit the room. I imagine there was some industrial steam powered wood bending machinery involved. What I thought interesting is that they appeared to have made a "lumber sandwich" and instead of using 3 pieces of wood they split one piece in two and sandwiched a different wood inbetween. That way the grain is the same on the front and back of the finished bench. What a thoughtful method of construction. Not like the frankenlumber you see today in furniture. Also note that the thicker top of the bench back is different pieces fitted together. The seat of the bench is small pieces fitted together and shaped for comfortable sitting.

My plan is to leave one end of each pew intact, saw to desired length, then attach another end to the other side, resulting in something that looks like the original, only shorter. The person selling the benches told me there were a bunch of shorter ones that fit in corners, but all the shortest ones were the first to go. Only the long ones remained as they were only useful to someone with access to a woodworker. So here I am, the "junior woodworker" as my BF calls me; ready, willing, and hopefully able to take this project. I've set myself a deadline for end of summer to get this done. Luckily the finish has a lovely patina that I don't want to mess with. I'll have to repair some scratches and scrape the gum off the underside and not much else.