fall sale in the etsy shop: 25% off!

hey yall,

despite what i think of as some nice results on the lathe, i am still pretty new to turning. at this point, i feel like most of my pieces are created purely to hone my skills. and those pieces quickly stack up.  i set up my etsy shop as a way to get my bowls out of my house and into yours and set my prices at a point that pretty much just allows me to keep buying stock to fill that drawer back up.

but the price of a new tool rest and a full drawer of backstock have inspired me to have a fall sale! so visit my etsy shop and use the coupon code "autumn" at check-out for 25% off anything.

this is a somewhat limited time offer, though i'm not really sure what time it is limited to.

oh, and sorry for a lack of pictures. i'm out of the house today!

a lathe update and other things

here we see 7 of the 8 bowls i started last week. unfortunately, a broken tool rest has lead to a pause in production. but i got my brother kevin, a machinist (among many other things), making a new and improved version.

now that my art obligations have eased up, i have started in on a number of new craft projects, with the lathe leading the march. a new stack of sycamore logs collected from behind the benicia state capitol and some interesting new design concepts should keep me busy for a while. look for etsy announcements soon including things like drink muddlers, matched bowl sets and maybe even an end of summer sale...

as for the blog- look out for new posts on my rad new chuck, that tool rest i mentioned above, how to make beeswax bowl finish and even a post on how to fix and operate a loom (once i figure out how to fix and operate a loom).

a productive weekend

for some reason, sarah and i ran through a surprising number of projects this weekend.

there was plum jam- maybe the last jam of this summer. 5 pounds of very soft fruit from the farmers market with a yield of something like 6 pints... though that number now seems miraculously high. where did it all come from?

there were spicy refrigerator pickled carrots with plenty of thyme, mustard and garlic.

and i also got a hold of a big pile of thai peppers and strung them out to dry.

though there are no photos, i promise we made some delicious sauce from 101 cookbooks (i'm starting to think there should be a hell of a lot more paprika in my life) and sarah whipped up some great bran-nana bread.

good work, team.

dilly beans and fall garden

 

made 6 jars of dilly beans yesterday using this recipe and 3 pounds of beans from this farm.  we used this garlic.

also replanted a big part of the garden this morning with seeds from the seed bank. rocky top salad lettuce mix, siamese dragon sir-fry mix, tonda di parigi carrots and hardneck garlic.

it's been a while

poor ole' ghost town of a blog ain't got any attention since july. but these things happen, i suppose.

in an effort to catch up to current projects, i'm just skipping all the august and early september stuff and moving right on to the present. if i did do posts for that lost time, there would be things about making and canning pear butter, mixing beeswax wood finish, a few new turnings, picking blueberries in washington (and being gifted black & blueberry jam), salt preserving lemons, re-learning how to knit- properly this time, and trying- and failing- at natural dying. i figure i will try a lot of these things again, so i'll just tell you about them later.

as for the future: there are hopes for another canning project this weekend, some gardening and a few new knitting projects. and, if we are really lucky, a new loom.

but we'll just have to wait and see. check back soon!