chisel mallet

i've been working on building my tool kit lately- mostly because i want to be able to transition smoothly from my father's shop to my own work space when the time is right (i'm really hoping the time will be right around mid-may. but we'll see.) i'm also trying to get back to a heavier and more continuous project-load in all areas (both art and various crafts) as well as build and hone my somewhat rusty and limited skills. thus, i have started assigning myself little workshop projects. the first of these projects was a small chisel mallet.

i started with a little chunk of some very hard, heavy, tight grained wood that i scavenged from a friend's scrap pile. i bet it is teak, as he is a sailor, though it could be one of many exotic hardwoods that i don't have experience with (i try to stick to more local stuff when i buy material) (ed: he says it is probably ipe). for the handle i found a scrap of maple.

i cut a piece from the block for the mallet head and then cut a flared through-mortise by drilling out the excess and then bringing the walls to relative flatness with a bench chisel. the front and back of the mortise flare about an eighth of an inch from bottom to top- this will be important later. i cut the tenon on the handle on the router table and then cleaned up the shoulders with a chisel:

then the handle got a quick spin on the lathe and a couple of notches in the tenon:

then i mounted the head and drove wedges into the notches to lock the pieces together (remember that flare i mentioned earlier- that's so the tenon will have room to spread).

see-

finally, i cut the wedges flush with the tenon, rounded the bottom of the handle with the stationary disk sander and carved a maker's mark into the head:

in the end, it was a good little project. i really do need practice cutting clean mortises (did you see the tear-out in the second to last picture? i sure did) and nice, tight shoulders, and i haven't done much spindle work on the lathe. oh, and i got a nice little hammer out of it- just the right weight for controlled joinery cuts.

preserved lemons

i mentioned preserved lemons yesterday, with the thought that i had mentioned them before. but i don't think i have. "so what are they and why should i care, you jerk?" you wonder aloud to yourself. well, first off, rude. but also, i'll tell you:


they are lemons, cut up, rolled in kosher salt, sprinkled with more kosher salt and unceremoniously crammed into a jar.

the cramming comes next.

when we first heard of them, via food in jars, i believe, but also an indian cookbook and maybe a few other places, i was not terribly enthusiastic. "what ever will we put them on?" i asked. "i bet they'll be hella nasty" i opined. but my lady friend, sarah, told me to shut up and cram lemons and i sure am glad she did.

you see, after the lemons have been crammed, you just give them a little shake every day until all the salt is dissolved and the liquid has covered the fruit (if it doesn't, add a bit more lemon juice) and then you just kind of forget about them for a month or so (seeing as the mix is super salty acid, there isn't really any fear of spoilage). by that point, the juice has thickened to a briny syrup and the rinds have become tender. the flavor is powerful- something like a savory lemon candy.

i now find myself chopping up a piece and incorporating it into salad dressing or stirring it into a soup that just needs that last little something and sarah just puts them in everything, as far as i can tell. we have yet to use them in anything moroccan, which seems to be the point of origin for this idea, or with meat (as i don't eat the stuff) but i've heard they go great with both.

marmalade

after a year of preserves projects, my lady friend got me a great jamming book for christmas- the blue chair jam cookbook by rachel saunders. all the recipes are very thorough and seem to stem from a desire for very consistent and delicious results. so, for our first test drive, we bastardized her delicately crafted page mandarin marmalade recipe and made it with blood oranges instead.

according to ms. saunders (and i thoroughly misquote and make things up here), you have to sneak up on citrus fruits, lull them into a false sense of security and then trick them into being marmalade in a process that takes three days. after an overnight soak in water, the fruit is cooked down...

you can't tell, but there are two pots going here. this one has quartered fruit that will be strained out on day three, the other has the pretty little slices of fruit that will be part of the finished product.

on day three the reserved syrup from one pot is combined with the slices from the other, a bunch of (in this case) lemon juice and a whole lot of sugar. then it is back to the stove...

but only to get the marmalade up to the temperature needed for the jelly to set.

we had extra assistants for this project who kept us on top of the set testing process which involved frozen spoons...

 

this is how you know it's done.

we ended up with around 10 jars of product (half for our wonderful assistants) and, since there were some extra fruit, a new jar of preserved lemons...

now, to be honest, i don't love marmalade. the bitterness doesn't really do it for me. but, that being said, this stuff is pretty dang good.

one sock

i bought the yarn and needles and a pattern to knit a pair of socks sometime in the early fall and promptly started to knit.

and then i found out that #2 double pointed needles suck and big ol' hands make for a terrible sock knitting experience.

and then i learned that i had been knitting wrong all this time!

so i re-learned how to knit (i had been putting some weird extra twist in each stitch that was really ruining my cable work on that orange scarf and lead to me restarting that project as well). and then i learned to knit the magic loop (this tutorial looks pretty good, but there are tons of them on google). and then, after christmas, i re-started my sock.

the heel is blue, too.

it was slow going for a while as i worked through the once-knit (and thus all twisted and bad) yarn but things really picked up after that. i also used the countless rows of straight knit stitches to work on my technique. i can now form a stitch with fewer movements of my wrists and without dropping the yarn between stitches. the drawing below is the wrapping method that works best for me although i think i would drop the pinky wrap for a heavier weight yarn. unfortunately, i haven't gotten purls down nearly as well.

i went to art school.

the pattern also expanded my repertoire of stitches as rectangular scarves don't require reductions or the picking up of stitches. (i also got a lot of practice saving dropped stitches with a crochet hook.) huzzah learning experiences!

now all i have to do is make another one, the exact same way.