The Long Dark

Lawdy lawdy, it's amazing what a two months of traveling, two feet of snow, and two weeks of being sick can do to hamper your aspirations as a blacksmith; anvils aren't famous for being easy to move, snow isn't a lot of help with getting metal blazing hot, and it's hard to swing a hammer when your bod feels like it's made of candy canes. But, as episode two of The Wire reminds us all, You Cannot Lose If You Do Not Play. So for the past little bit I've been directing my energy into side projects.

I wanted to send my friends and family some handmade (admittedly late) Christmas cards, and my usual modus operandi is to rummage through the recycling bin for papers without too much junk on them, draw some pictures on them, slap the ol' John Doe on there and then wait until the next time I see the person (because postage is expensive y'all). But last year mi padre reminded me of that Douglas Adams quote: "He had been extremely chastened to realize that although he originally came from a world which had cars and computers and ballet and Armagnac, he didn't, by himself, know how any of it worked. He couldn't do it. Left to his own devices he couldn't build a toaster. He could just about make a sandwich and that was it."

A good reminder to us that standing on the shoulders of giants isn't all about enjoying the view - sometimes you gotta get right back down to bedrock. Taking a page (HAH) out of m'grammy's playbook, I decided to start with making paper. Full disclosure, I may have started like 10 meters up from bedrock (and if you know anything about Minecraft, you'll know this is where the most diamonds are found) and skipped trying to gather yard clippings from under the snow. Instead I turned to our mysteriously enormous collection of paper bags.

This is post (HAH) paper making project too.

My suspicion that they may come in handy might have been a self-fulfilling prophecy, nevertheless it was proved correct. The steps in making paper are actually super simple. You make a pulp, you strain the pulp, you dry the pulp.

You don't need paper to make paper (unless it has some very specific combination of numbers, symbols, and dead people printed on it, in which case you need quite a lot of paper to do anything at all, it seems) - you can use grass, leaves, or just about any plant material - but I chose the paper bags because I already had a ton of it inside and because I wanted my paper to be brown. Since my project list was already a few arms long, I needed my coffee inside me, not dyeing paper.

I quickly eviscerated several of the bags with some scissors and left them to soak in a bowl of warm water for a few hours. While they soaked, I checked around all our windows to see which was the smallest one, and then popped the screen off of it. I spent the rest of the soak time trying to find a container big enough for our smallest screen. Unsurprisingly the bathtub was the only suitable vessel.

Knock knock. Who's there? Dwaine. Dwaine who? Dwaine the tub before your landlord finds out you're making paper in his bathtub using his window screens.

I didn't take any other pictures of this because though it worked just fine, it was a little impractical. The next day I went out and got a smaller screen for a couple bucks from the ReStore. Once the paper was good and soaked, I ground it into a pulp with a mortar and pestle. Just kidding, I used an immersion blender because time is money, people. My new screen fit almost exactly into the kitchen sink, so I dumped the pulpy goodness in there with a dash of cold water and corn starch (to keep the ink from running).  Next I swished it around and sloshed the screen in, trying to get as even a distribution of pulp as I could on the screen without getting big bare patches.

Sorry so many of these next ones are blurry. I foolishly assumed that blinding florescent lighting would produce crisp, if hideous, pictures.

If our butts were printer shaped, this is absolutely what our poop would look like.

At this stage, it's got a TON of water in it still, so I gently pressed out as much as I could over the sink with a washcloth before transferring it to a towel on the ground for some heavy petting. It's really easy to accidentally rip a chunk off at this step, so it's kind of time consuming.

Mmmmmmmmm...

Pat pat pat pat pat pat pat pat pat pat pat.

Now it's ready to get off the screen. I chose to liberate the paper straight onto our bathroom floor since we have a heater fan in there already for the booch.

Once it's dry enough to hold together, I hung them up on the clothesline I made for the cyanotypes to dry a bit straighter.

Paper accomplished. This paper went on to be cut up, folded, and glued into envelopes designed to protect the letters inside. Now, the purpose of the letters was to let people know that their Christmas present from me (whether they like it or not) is for me to make them something out of metal. I decided since I have so much equipment for cyanotypes [see here for more on that project] that I should try making the cards that way to save time.

I opted to make post-card style letters with a photo print on one side and the letter on the back, so I started by whipping up some sensitizer and painting it on both sides of some watercolor paper. Once they were hung up to dry with the envelope paper in the darkroom, it was time to hit the Photoshop. I picked photos out for everyone and then overlaid a B&W gradient on them, fiddled with the curves to make them super contrasty, gave them a high pass filter to really make the edges pop, applied a second overlay of salmony orange (which seems to help control the exposure rate a bit better than plain B&W does), and then inverted them to make them negatives. The negatives were printed onto 8.5x11 transparency paper and with that it was time to start sun printing!

Now, a problem I ran into a few months ago when I was last making a lot of sun prints was that it was really hard for me to hold the negatives flat against the paper without moving it at all and still be able to check for exposure. I figured with the number of prints I'd be doing, it was time to buckle down and make a contact printer. For another two bucks at the ReStore I picked up a nasty picture frame, which, Frankensteined together with a creased wood ply panel I had leftover from a computer cabinet held on with some spring steel canvas clips, made a pretty decent printer.

Some negatives next to the printer.

The canvas clips don't add that much pressure, but it's enough that with my hand on the back of the top half of the panel, the prints are firmly held in place. Here you can see the letter and one of the prints I used.

The fold in the center of the panel makes it easy to check on the print and see how it's doing quickly without losing the alignment on the negative.

On the day that I had everything ready to print, I checked the forecast and saw about eight days of cloudy weather ahead of me. Of course I should have waited it out, but then I didn't. The first round of prints I made spent a whopping three minutes per-side out in the "sun" (which is a long time in sun printing), and I'm happy to report that the contact printer worked great, none of the images were blurry at all! Sadly, they were also invisible because three minutes in the shade is as useful for exposing cyanotypes as fly fishing is without any line - a lot of running back and forth waving your arms and standing with your body in unnatural positions, but no dinner.

So back to painting sensitizer in the darkroom. I tried again in a few days when the sun popped out for a couple hours, but this time I learned to make extra sensitized papers so I have room to dial in on the right exposure depending on what the sun is up to (since its strength varies depending on relative humidity, time of day/year, temperature, mood, etc.), and this saved me some labor pains.

I wanted to include a hand written letter too, so I experimentally stenciled a little tree onto some card stock with the leftover sensitizer I had. I didn't expose them, so the cards were green upon mailing, but should turn blue once they're opened - I'm excited to hear if this worked.

I had a lot of leftover botched prints, but they'll come in handy for future projects

Now, I know what you're thinking - you went through all this and you're just going to glue the envelopes shut like a peasant?! That would be so déclassé, no of course not. I decided to make a wax seal because wax seals are so damn classy there should be a class action lawsuit against them.

The first hurdle in making a wax seal is that they're fantastically useless without any wax. Sealing wax is unique among waxes because among its laundry list of qualifications are that it shouldn't evaporate when melted, should dry fast, needs to be hard but not brittle, must stick to paper without being so oily that it is absorbed and looks ugly or stains the letter inside, and can't be so sticky that it gloms onto the seal when it's pressed.

You can buy it at Michael's or online if you're a CHUMP who wants to spend hard-earned cash on WAX which your ears make for FREE. I personally didn't produce enough from my ears to make a substantial contribution to the project in the timeframe I had, so I toyed around with some different candles around the house, but they were all made of disappointment, not sealing wax. I had tried this before in high school, and I remember thinking crayons were practically designed for this, but I found they smoked too much and dried way too brittle. In an act of providence, Bucket had just bought a hot glue gun over the holidays, and I felt that what I want is a wax that is almost like hot glue, so I figured...

They melt around the same temperature, right? The glue actually melts a little slower, but it, amazingly, worked perfectly. Approximately two crayons to half a glue stick over the stove for a couple minutes and poured into a little aluminum foil mold makes a stick of sealing wax you'd pay good money for like a CHUMP.

On to the fun part - Some of y'all may have noticed the logo I whipped up a couple months back when I was gathering internet real estate where which to flog m'blog, and I thought it would make a great seal, so I got to I test carving a few different materials. A handy lump of silly putty (delivered to me in another providential move by my other grammy) worked ideally for testing the seal periodically to see what the positive impression would look like. Once I had a design I liked in wood, I decided that the end of a bolt had the aesthetic I was going for.  My trusty Dremel Stylus once again girded itself for battle, and together we gnawed away at the bolt in half-hour increments until we had a decent approximation of what I was going for. I put a little heat on it with a torch and added some accents with a little star punch I had on hand, cleaned up the center lines with a flathead drill bit, and that was that!

I did a few test seals on some scraps leftover from making the envelopes and then got to packing and sealing letters.

It seals really nicely, but I glued most of them before putting the wax on because I don't trust me or the USPS.

Do a lyric search for I'm Too Sexy by Right Said Fred and then do a find and replace for "sexy" with "Etsy".

I used the ice pack (bottom right) to keep the seal cold between impressions, which keeps the wax from sticking to it and also sort of flash-hardens the wax in place.

Thus they were ready for mailing and the saga of The Letters Wot I Made From Scratch comes to a close.

This might seem like a lot of work not forging, and that's absolutely true. I'm really excited to get back to the forge - in the week I had home between traveling to St. Louis for Thanksgiving and Atlanta for Christmas, I picked up a whole bevy of new tools and resources, chief among them is a beautiful post vice I picked up for a song and a "How'd'y'do", which I'm eager to write about later. For now though, I'll close with a bit of more off-topic news - some of you know that I've been tossing around an idea for a pirate/Master & Commander-themed board game for a few years now, and while I was home for Christmas I experienced another one of those huge surges in enthusiasm for working on it. This time it has made it all the way to prototyping!

Most of the pieces are bits of foam or borrowed from other games for now. Instead of printing and cutting out the hex tiles I drew, I just traced a Catan hex and made 3d hex parts to set on top of the map.

I've been using ProCreate on my iPad to do most of the design work, which has been a lot of fun. 

The ships and islands are made out of a sort of salt dough baked hard in the oven. I got the idea from my Aunt who made tree ornaments from the stuff. My dad ate one thinking it was a cookie - a mistake he will not likely repeat. I patterned the ships using a cookie cutter I made out of strips of soda can.

Bucket and I have been playing around with it for a few days, and I'm excited to say that maybe by the end of the year I'll have it for sale on thegamecrafter.com!

More on the forge soon. Here's a sneak peak.

2015 Sweet Hollow Forge calendars forthcoming.

BLB

Firsts and Futures

Time was, so I'm told, when a body could open up a shop with naught but brow sweat and boot strap exercises and still come out with enough change to pop down to the barber shop for a mustache trim. Times they are a changin', my friends. Yesterday was a day of many firsts, one of which was the forking over of my first thousand bucks of "skin in the game". I feel safe declaring myself officially "in the game".

Of course, $1k is small fish on the grander scale of business investments and I'm sure that those my senior are having many a knowing chuckle and head wag at my childlike innocence, but considering I'm both living off and investing from my savings, scant to begin with and rapidly becoming scanter-er, perhaps I may be forgiven.

However for all my hyperventilating in the Lowes plumbing isle over $2 pipe fittings, yesterday was a day of many auspicious firsts as well. BEHOLD!

 Wait, that's not the right one...

BEHOLD!

Tada! Tada! Tada! Tada forever!

The fruits of Nail Forge 1.0.2, a pair that only a mother could love. Nevertheless at least one of them is not so ugly that it didn't prevent me from canvasing the internet with my new business. The astute and/or slightly creepy of you may have noticed that since yesterday, you can now find me on Etsy, Facebook, for some reason Twitter, as well as, I'm sure your favorite, here. Which brings me to the part where you may have noticed that the forge proper has got a proper forge name now! If you're curious as to why Sweet Hollow Forge rather than a different combination of letters and sounds, it doesn't have a huge story. You may recall that it took a while to get the details in order and paperwork drawn up for the space, but I did get a "contract" eventually. In there, G&J (the owners) agreed to rent me space in "The Hollow". And I was like cool, the barn has a name I guess, but The Hollow is a little forbidding and dirge-like, and initially I was going to go with Fox Hollow (on account of my home turf in Georgia) but I'm not positive there are even foxes around here, and if there are they probably aren't very good blacksmiths. Anyway, Sweet Hollow has a nice kind of faintly southern ring to it, and so do I sometimes*, so there it is.

*I seem to have a southern accent in direct proportion to the southern accented-ness of the people I'm talking to.

But before I get too far ahead, let's get back to that first picture.

The worst meringue.

Pretty wild, huh? So I mixed up some of my freshly cooked water glass...

Almost the exact same consistency as those corn syrup hourglasses. Notice the deformation in the plastic - fun fact: peanut butter jars exhibit fascinating behaviors when you fill them with scalding hot liquids and then panic and dump them out again really fast.

...with ~100ml water and a quart of rough pumice to make a sort of cement. However, lacking aluminum oxide (which apparently nobody in Bend possesses or has heard of - there are a lot of fun "standing in a store being stared at blankly" stories behind that sentence), it thus lacked quite a lot in terms of refractory properties. But heat resistance be damned, I was going to whack flat some nails come hell or high water, so I crammed it in a tomato sauce can with a bit of pipe and a drill bit.

The drill bit was the only 1/2" thing I could find that I could put in the oven. I'm not crazy.

Now water glass cures by simple gas exchange so at that point I had three options to set it up: let it sit and dry for a week, inject it with compressed CO2 or heat the everlovin' jessy out of it. Lacking patience or a Soda Stream, I opted for the oven.

Nail Forge 1.0.1 was a real beauty. I wish I had pictures to show you, but in my enthusiasm to make progress, I forwent documentation. Suffice to say that after an hour of as-close-to-broil-as-possible treatment, the cement cemented. It cemented hard. Too hard. It fused to the center form and burner tube form like something out of The African Queen, and no amount of hammering, cajoling, sweating, or desperate scrabbling was going to persuade it out. At one point I literally tied a rope to the center form, tied the other end of the rope to Big Bgog's trailer hitch, and spent ten minutes yanking on it stubborn-loose-tooth-when-you-were-a-kid-style. Eventually though, I did get it free at the expense of cutting a hole in the bottom of the can and hammering it back and forth until it pulverized 50% of the rock and came out. There was about a 1/4" of cement stuck to the form that I could only get off by flattening the pipe with a hammer. C'est la vie, but at least it wasn't much work to whip up another batch and try again.

Unfortunately, being the disenfranchised, Recession Era, twenty-somethings that we are, Bucket and I only have one tomato sauce can to our names, so I had to repack the same can for Nail Forge 1.0.2 (as I said previously, taking the precaution of greasing up the forms this time around). The unforeseen complication introduced was, to quote Dear Henry, there was a hole in it. A quite alarming amount of that hard-earned water glass percolated out the bottom, oozing and boiling into that fantastic goo you saw earlier.

Undeterred, I cleared Nail Forge 1.0.2 for duty and got to forging.

During operation, the propane torch is lovingly crammed into the side of the forge. 

Soaring new heights for the non-literal use of the phrase "baby steps".

It took a lot longer than I expected to preheat the little sucker (close to 15 minutes), but once it was up to temp, I had fun experimenting with the duplex nails, seeing what kind of swords I could turn them into. I opted to start with the traditional Flat Duplex Nail style, and then moved on to a more conventional Sword An Extra Might Be Given to Hold in a Period Piece style. After that my mind started simmering with ideas of how to do this better (a simmer which, lucky me, boiled over at around 3am today with dreams of katanas, sabers, and epees), but before I could play around too much, I started to get worried about how much the forge was melting and smoking. Though ventilation was good and every measure to make this safe was observed, the forge started degassing some sort of tomato/pumice miasma after about an hour of duty, so I decided to shut things down until the snow clears enough for me to move into... The Hollow†.

† sotto Batman voce

Speaking of which, here's a quick peep tour of the space. I went over on Monday and did a little work clearing it of petrifying horse poop and forklift pallets, and doing my best to level out the ground a bit.

It's hard to tell how much like standing on a 1:1000 scale model of the Himalayas this is, but I promise it was Not Good before I shoveled my little heart out on it.

An arial view of my brilliant dirt layout of the space. Labeling to follow. 

I'm colonizing the right side to start, but theoretically I'm allowed to expand anywhere under the eave... 

...Or, as I said under my breath when I thought G couldn't hear me, "Everything the eave touches...is our kingdom."

Tentative layout labeled for your convenience.

That's it that's all for now. Bucket and I are off to St. Louis for Thanksgiving today, so enjoy your weeklong reprieve from my prolixity.

BLB

Nail Forge...ASSEMBLE

They say you can't make a cake without breaking a few eggs, and if that's true then I'm absolutely doing it right. I'm crackin' eggs like the rapture's hot on my tail. There's certainly something to be said for taking the scenic route on your way to a goal. You can learn a lot by asking yourself, "Can I figure out how to make this?" Unfortunately, it's easy to forget what you were doing in the first place while you agonize over a specific component.

Things have been a little up and down the past few days. I've finally successfully produced a batch of (EXTREMELY) concentrated water glass, which was a major confidence boost, and a big step forwards to getting a forge in place. In case you're curious, my efforts to make it from some local silicate didn't work out. At the last COMAG meeting, I talked to a lovely geologist and she told me I should hunt down some diatomite, which is a more rock-like form of diatomaceous earth and similarly composed of trillions of bitty critters of yesteryear. I then left town for a week and then it promptly dumped a foot and a half of snow on all my hopes and dreams. So I conceded to buying some flower drying silica from Michaels just so I could move forward with the project.

I've been throwing a lot of money at some of these miscellaneous projects like that, and it's become a little frustrating. Lots of DIY sites/YouTubers like to brag about how cheap it was for them to throw together something that would have cost them a pretty penny at a box store, but a lot of times they sidestep the cost of not being established and networked. They throw out things like, "I have these 5 lb sacks of silica gel lying around so I used them as..." or "I borrowed my buddy's welder to..." What starts as a $10 forge burner quadruples in price when you realize you don't have the tap you need to thread that one vital piece. It'd be nice if Bend had a tool library like Portland's.

Anyway, now that I have the water glass made up, I've spent about the whole day experimenting with it and the pumice I collected back in the fall. My goal today has been to make a nail forge. My Paw told me about this guy he met who was taking duplex nails and flattening them out into little swords. I thought that'd be a swell reason to make a forge in miniature to test some of the components I've been assembling.

So as I write this, I've got a tomato sauce can full of home-brewed refractory speed-curing in the oven. I made one earlier today which set up beautifully. A little too beautifully in fact - it practically melded to the tube form, and I ended up destroying it just trying to get it out. I took the advice of ye venerable internet and coated the form pieces with vegetable oil this time around, but so far this seems to be having the effect of making the water glass bubble into a sort of glass meringue. Probably I will not eat it.

Lord almighty, if our landlord could see what's going on in here right now, his head would probably explode. Anyhow, we'll see how this all shakes down (or at least I will - I realize that I may be the only one reading this anymore). Fingers crossed. Big money, no whammies.

BLB

Storm's a Brewin'

Well it's definitely been longer than I expected since I last updated ya'll on things. Let me set that aright.

Things were slow for a while, I spent a lot of time reading through some new books: New Edge of the Anvil by Jack Andrews and Metal Techniques for Craftsmen by Oppi Untracht, as well as every book on blacksmithing that the library has available (which is three). So my head is fairly swimming with terminology, metallurgical data, and techniques, and I'm super pumped to start putting some of it all to use.

Which will be SOON. A couple nights ago, I went back over to the meet with the folks with some barn space they might be willing to rent out, and we fleshed out all the necessaries and quid pro quo's, etc., and I got a brief look at the specific area they've got in mind for me. I head over again on Monday to, I think, sign a rough agreement and get working.

The past couple months I've been lurking at the Central Oregon Metal Artist Guild (COMAG) meetings and getting to know some of the peeps in this neck of the woods that are working metal. There are a lot of incredibly talented people here, and they've been incredibly generous with their knowledge and advice. To that end, I've been talking more with Hunter and Kellen (who I met back in April, but never had much opportunity to get to know) - two unbelievably talented, hilarious, and gregarious smiths who own/operate at the Orion and Dry Canyon Forges.

I had a chance to go over to Dry Canyon yesterday and meet up with Kellen for a day of tool making. He was mega patient with me and let me work at my own pace, which I was soooo grateful for. His style of teaching really strongly reminded me of climbing with El Jefé. Jefé is a way better climber than me, and I always feel really intimidated and self-conscious of how annoying it must be to have to belay for someone so agonizingly slow and ignorant. But that embarrassment and intimidation is entirely self-imposed - Jefé manages to be effortlessly patient and forgiving of my childish flailing and screaming, and seems to enjoy hanging out with me regardless of the vast difference in our ability levels, which makes it way easier to learn at my own pace. Kellen has a lot of those same qualities, and it was great to be able to make mistakes and ask questions without feeling worried about asking something stupid or not getting it perfect on the first try and I flailed and screamed a pair of tongs into the world.

For grasping square stock in the 5/8"- 1 1/4" range.

Especially in contrast to my first* tong making experience in Michigan, which involved being crowded into a very small garage with a great number of hot objects with an especially grumpy old man, who would frequently become flustered and pry the metal from my hands and try to reshape my mess to match his increasingly terse instructions.

* First actual - as proud as I am of what I accomplished in Oz, the products of my work there are as close to tongs as Atlanta is to Tokyo.

Exhibit A: Tongs
Exhibit B: Panic Tongs

While to be fair, I did spend about an hour and a half on the Michigan tongs and the better part of an entire day on this pair, I think Kellen's attitude and willingness to let me do it for myself is the biggest difference between them.

As an aside, let's get just...balls to the wall, high school drama up here for a minute or two. Now most of you will not be shocked to know that I'm a huge dork. I have Serious Thoughts about freshwater macro-invertebrates. I am easily enraged by poor board game box design. I know more words to camp songs than [musician you think is cool][/musician you think is cool]'s. I make jokes that have a passing knowledge of HTML coding as a prereq. I do pretty convincing pigeon and eagle impressions. I run a Minecraft server.

I'm not particularly worried that anybody know this about me, because I am a generally confident person. I take pride in many of my personal accomplishments. Maybe I should be embarrassed that I've spent days constructing making a 1:1 scale model of Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Water in a video game populated these days mostly by 8 year olds, but I'll happily brag about it if you ask (it took forever to get the fireplaces right). However, I am often very worried that knowing this will stop someone from considering getting to know me any further. In the same way that I'm worried that someday Bucket's parents might find out someday that I've donated money to NPR, I find myself moving through a lot of social interactions like I'm made entirely of knees to avoid revealing things about myself that I think might cause someone to narrow their eyes and think, "We are not alike."

Yesterday was a great example. Kellen and Hunter have talked a little bit about possibly extending an "internship" type deal to me - work here and there in exchange for valuable experience and "literally dozens of dollars" - which would be an actual dream come true for me. Now, I don't know a lot about Kellen and Hunter, but they're cool dudes - I'd like to work with them and I'd really like to be friends with them, and the part of me that I'm talking about is worried that if they knew how much money I have spent on virtual space ships, they might decide not to talk to me anymore. Inconveniently, my strategy for concealing this information is torn out of the playbooks of Behaving Like a Marionette-Person, and How to Maintain a Mistrustful Awareness of Your Hands and What They are Doing, and Talking Like You're a Big Fancy Grownup. Especially having spent the past several months interacting almost exclusively with large groups of 2nd-7th graders, I have to be extremely careful to modulate my voice so it doesn't get too loud and/or start doing Arnold Schwarzenegger impressions.

I think probably a lot of introverted people tend to mirror the personality that is expected of them in a social situation and, if it leads to a connection, sort of side-door their actual personality into the relationship as it evolves, but the flaw in this strategy for me is that the personality that I front isn't actually super good at making friends.

Also, jeezy chreezy, I'm so flip flappin' exhausted with being the person in a social situation at a disadvantage. Trying to make friends and network is so hard when you're the only one in the conversation that really needs a connection to form. I know that the healthy reaction to this frustration is not to burrow deeper, but to force yourself to stand woodenly and maintain eye contact (but not too much eye contact); still I'm seriously looking forward to having my own, private space if not just to have somewhere to build my confidence.

Anyway, lest this morph into a Live Journal, the point is that I'm glad I had a chance to work with Kellen yesterday, but I wish there had been 30 seven year olds there because apparently that's really where I'm in my element these days.

Some tools gathering for the migration to the barn.

Que sera, sera. Any way you look at it, things are really clacking along at a good pace now. I'm hoping to pick up some nice Virginia Coal from a fella up in Hood River this weekend, and Hunter and Kellen lent me a coal forge firepot, so it's possible that as soon as a week from now, I might have a forge operational! Name suggestions are welcome. I'm leaning towards something unicorn themed*, but you never know...

*I don't know if this is a joke either.

I Digress

So I have been tinkering around with the geopolymers, without great success so far. I'm attempting to make a couple videos of the process, so I won't talk too much about it except to say if anyone knows any free video editing software, that would be helpful.

I have a couple of ideas of why it hasn't been working out, but I'm having a hard time justifying spending more money on it until I know I've got a place to put the eventual forge. The good news on that front is that Bucket met a nice lady at a get-together who might have some property she'd like to see used for something interesting. We're going out on Wednesday to meet her and her husband and see if we can work something out, I expect I'll write about that and how it went soon enough.

In the mean time, I thought some of you might be interested to see how my other side-project has been coming along! During the summer I taught a class on photography, and one of the projects I did with the kids was Cyanotypes, (sometimes called "Sun Prints"). They're a really basic, entry-level, relatively safe developing style that was used to make architectural blueprints, as they're cheap to prepare, quick to develop, and give you extremely high contrast contact prints. 

Anyway, I had a lot of the chemicals and resources I needed leftover after the summer, so I've been messing around with it and seeing how far I can take it. Most of these are just little 4"x5" watercolor paper prints, but I did get some bigger ones in.

This is the only 8"x10" print that turned out in the first batch. I plan on doing most of the rest in this size eventually.

All of the first batch were supersaturated with the chemicals because I had accidentally mixed about 50x more sensitizer than I had paper for. As a result, they all turned out a little weird except the two that I left what I thought was a "normal" amount of sensitizer.

You can see along the right edge where the sensitizer was laid on so thick that when I fixed it, the sun hadn't penetrated deep enough to expose anything attached to the paper, leaving a big white strip.

 I've also been experimenting with toning them so they aren't all that eye-watering cerulean. The lovely folks down at Lone Pine Coffee generously donated some used grounds to my cause, but unfortunately I came away with extremely mixed results. The process involves bleaching the photos with sodium carbonate, and then re-toning the remaining gel layer with a natural tannin. You can use tea, wine, coffee, etc.

This was the only one worth sharing of the lot. This was a direct contact print of a handful of grass.

 As you can see, it didn't go super hot. I toyed around with varying levels of bleaching (from none at all to ultra-mega-super-bleached) and coffee strength/soaking time. Strangely, every single one turned out completely differently, and in ways I wouldn't have expected. In any case, I plan on trying again with some new prints using espresso instead (my guess is that the tannins will be more concentrated and the oils better released this way). I talked to a lady down in the Maker District who paints with coffee and beer, and she suggested letting it dry out/boil down a bit so there's a closer ratio of oil:water. We'll see how it goes!

 You can really see the difference between the supersaturated prints and the ones that just had a light brushing of sensitizer (the oval ones). I got some really strange dark splotches on a few of them that look like finger prints, but whether they were made during the initial sensitizing, the exposure, or the fixing, I have no idea.

I used Photoshop to make black and white negatives of a bunch of my photos, and then printed them onto transparency paper. From there it was just a simple 30 to 90 second exposure in direct sunlight to print them out.

This one got a lovely finger print right in the middle. :/

My favorite one by far. I've done a few prints of this one, but none have turned out as nice as this one. Thanks to Bucket for brushing the sensitizer on this one - I think it made all the difference.

So there it is! We'll see what comes of it. Hopefully I can combine the two projects and make some nice frames for the prints out of wrought metal.

BLB