My Work Week

My work all last week quite mixed. It's been something of a strain really. I always feel this way when a new design hovers within my radar and I don't know what I am thinking of doing to make something come together. In my peripheral vision other things hover too and I have been able to make some new decisions affecting the future. In this mix some might at first call soupy the builders have started taking stuff apart and out of the house, replastering walls and bringing things up to date with electricity, outlets and such.

We have ordered new windows for the front bay and entryway and our neighbours think the new pressed fibreboard or really OSB doorway "Looks very attractive!"

So, though not at first glance exactly therapeutic, it is all in preparation for the home pieces by way my new furniture designs and I am building these in step phases with place holder cardboard models and then prototypes, all of which for this massive venture of unknowns is all the more essential.

We have been interviewing for two new members of staff these past few weeks and have yet to find the successful applicants even though there have been over 100 of them. Sensitivity in filming my work and my way of working must match my own sensitivity. Sensitivity and accuracy are interchangeable words in my work and in the work of true crafting artisans too. Without this level of connection to the work you either produce mundane work resulting from mundane methods or poor quality. To capture what I feel and try to convey is the art of the videographer who might have only one shot at that capture.

I found some new old stock saw files and then three-square files that can work on saws on eBay and it made me ever more thankful for eBay because before this such hand tools equipment might never have come to us. Well done eBay. You may be an international conglomerate worth multiple millions but you are also a market for what might be lost or even in the landfill rotting to no real earthly good.

These are the Stubbs saw files spoken of as "the best" by my mentoring craftsmen in the 60s but who soon after lamented the loss of as the factory closed. Anyway, I bought just a few, enough to keep me in luxury in my saw sharpening. Who knows when they will come up again as I haven't seen them in many years.