The first three days

So I've now come to the end of my first three days of classes. Tomorrow I have off, but as of next week, Fridays will be in a conserva-
tion upholstery shop.

In one of my classes, we are building a chair. We were given the beautiful drawings on huge paper, as well as a treatise on how to cut every piece, shape each piece, etc., as though one were a chair maker. I've had my first experience with planers in the wood shop, though we are expected to hand plane the rest of it, I think. It's a ladderback chair. It amazes me that they think I can do this.

I'm coming face to face with my preconceptions. I would have thought that the students would be sort of arty and serious, but in the chairmaking class, which we share with firstyear BA furniture students, they are young people who in any other setting might be seen as, well,...thugs. I can barely understand them, they look very rough indeed, and yet here they are studying furniture, and restoration. The people in my program, the MA, are a little more what you'd call mature, but some of them seem kind of tough. It's a diverse group.

Today we started learning about French polish, and the wax sticks one has to make for repairing wood surfaces. There are two waxes, beeswax and carnuba, which is a natural wax that is hand scraped off the bottom side of the carnuba palmleaf by women in Polynesia. It's fantastically tough, and expensive, and is added in tiny quantities to beeswax to toughen it. We melted the waxes and added natural pigments, one recipe at a time, pouring each color into molds, then unmolding to let it dry on racks. We had to clean up after each color, quite fanatically, so there was no "contamination" between colors. The recipes are for different woods, boxwood, oak, mahogany, etc.

We also spent time this week starting to make a chandelier out of "composition" which we will then guild. We had to design it first, based on a wire frame, and using antique blocks of wood that were carved for plaster trimmings. In the first picture I am cutting out a leaf design with a scalpel. It's kind of like being in playschool! But next week I have to learn how to guild, and hopefully it won't be too hard, because my second project is going to be a guilded sofa.

Bruce and I are looking at more flats tomorrow, some with very silly sounding road names, like Shrubbery Close.

And that's the news from HW, love, Ellie.