Hand Play?

Eliza has recently discovered her hands. She is now 4 months old and supposedly this discovery is fairly common at this age.  The funniest thing about this is that it is known as 'hand play' in parenting books. The accompanying images are a tribute to hand play.

Albuquerque Art Museum - Gate

Here is a series of images taken on Memorial Day weekend in Albuquerque at the art museum. These fused metal plaques are part of a metal gate to the courtyard on the south side of the museum. If you look closely at the individual plaques, you can see what recycled metal parts they are made of.

Eliza

Here are a couple of images of our new baby Eliza (born 2/17/10) taken with a Nikon D3000 and 18-55mm kit lens. The B & W images were converted to monochrome using in-camera editing features.

New Projects

Here is a progression of pictures through my most recent project. I have a basic knife/chisel tool design patterned after a Graham Knives Razel. I made this tool from flat ground O-1 tool steel in 1/8 inch by 3/4 inch dimension, here it is cut to length.
After cutting to length, I transferred the design to the metal and ground the knife's outline and then ground one side only on the bench grinder and belt sander. When I finished sanding, I heat treated it to around 1500 degrees and quenched in vegetable oil. I tempered it in the oven at 450 degrees for 1 hour. After tempering, I did the final sanding. The knife is now awaiting a handle and it will be finished.

Bicycle Cog Linocut

I am starting a new linocut of a bicycle cog. It would be a 13t if you could see all of it. Kind of cool considering that I got the set of linoleum cutters from the bike shop I worked at this summer; South Shore Cyclery in Milwaukee. Tomorrow I will post pics of the work along with a picture of the box that my vintage Speedball linoleum cutter set came in.

Thinking about blogging again...

I think if I post something that says that I will start posting, I will feel more accountable and actually post something substantive... we'll see.

The Move to the Midwest

We took an arduous journey of 3 and 1/2 days to travel from Seattle to Milwaukee this summer on our move. It seemed fitting that the morning we left Seattle, we were ushered out by a summer rainstorm. Leaving our house was hard to do..... above was our last picture of the house in Maple Leaf.



We had the Subaru loaded up with some of our belongings, 2 cats and a dog and as many of the houseplants that we could fit. We thought we would take our bikes in case the moving truck didn't arrive in Milwaukee for a while.










Our first night was spent in Wallace, Idaho at the
Stardust Hotel. We have stayed in this small
mining town before and it is one of my favorite
places that I have been recently.
It is also home to the trail of the Hiawatha.





Before we left Wallace, Henry and I took a morning walk to explore some of the back streets which seem unchanged by time. Here is Henry taking in some of this historic town.