Rolling On One

When I was in high school, I took a ceramics class. One of the things I made was a dreidle, as in “I have a little dreidle, I made it out of clay.” It started out spinning on a potter’s wheel, and I always thought that was why it was a particularly good dreidle. The same way, I was expecting that dreidles made on a lathe should be particularly good at spinning, but from what I’ve done so far, you wouldn’t know it. Here are my three latest woodturning efforts, from last weekend.

I think these are all from beech wood, stuff that fell in our woods in Maine. Most of the fallen beech is soft or rotted (punky) in parts, and not all that easy to get a good chunk of turning stock out of. But mostly, let’s face it, I still need a lot of practice at this stuff.

Do they count as dreidles if they don’t have letters on them? That’s the least of my worries.

I took some pictures at last week’s klezmer band meeting —

Barry (our director, or teacher as the case may be) and Joyce, the new pianist. I don’t remember what they were laughing about.

Joyce again, Tobie (the pianist with more seniority) and Barbara, with her C-melody saxophone (and Jim’s clarinet in the foreground).

Barbara, Jeffery, and Jim

Sarah, who used to play cello but switched to violin a few years ago

— not bad for existing-light iPhone pictures.

We (in this case, Arlene, Charley, Anne, Matt, and Dean) went to see Sweet Charity at the Boston Conservatory’s temporary theatre in the former Fort Point Studios in Southie (South Boston if you’re not from around here). Patsy was not in the party because she’s the production stage manager and the comp tickets come from her — and she wasn’t there to see it, but to make sure it came off. We didn’t get home until 11:30 so I’m not going to write more about it tonight.

Here’s my latest woodturning project.

First, here’s what I was trying to do. This picture was taken at the end of August at a native American basket sale and demo at the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village:

These are forms for making baskets around. They’re smaller at the top than in the middle — so how do you get the form out of the finished basket that fits tight around them? Look at the one in the top of the picture, and you can see that it’s not a single piece of wood, but multiple pieces held together by a string around the middle. The central block of wood, the one with the handle, pulls out of the form when the basket’s finished, and then the whole form falls apart and the other pieces will fall right out.

Looking at the baskets at that sale, I knew I’d never develop the skill to make them. But maybe I could learn enough woodturning to make basket molds. So I thought I’d try. Unfortunately, I wasn’t looking at the picture when I started, but I did remember the basic idea.

The weekend before last (Oct 10, I guess) I cut a piece of scrap 2 x 6 into a square cross-section piece and two smaller pieces of the same thickness, and two pieces of scrap pine that we had bought at the Hancock Bargain Barn in a bag of kindling into four 3 x 3/4 strips. I planed and sanded them all smooth and glued them up into one piece to turn. The secret to getting it apart, according to something I had read on the rec.crafts.woodturning newsgroup, is to glue a piece of paper between each two pieces of wood that are going together. I had never tried that, and wasn’t sure that my block wouldn’t either fly apart in the lathe or not split properly. I used some newspaper and Elmer’s white glue, and crossed my fingers.

It didn’t fly apart, but turned down fine. Here’s what it looked like late Sunday Oct 11 (appropriate Maine magazine for scale):

Then I emailed my basketmaker contact, including that photo, and asked if she wanted it and had any suggestions. She did, but I may not have understood properly. I think, looking at the picture on top, that I should have made the knob on top smaller. At any rate, I did cut a little more out around the top, cut a groove in the middle so you can put a string or elastic around it while using it, rounded off the bottom a little, and cut it off the turning block.

Then I took a deep breath, place a chisel very carefully right along one newspaper glue line, and tapped several times with a mallet. Voila! The newspaper split right down the middle. You’re looking at one piece of newspaper from the middle of the sheet here!

If you look carefully at the bottom of the mold, you can see some letters I wrote on it. That’s so you can match A to A, B to B, and put it all together the way it was before I split it — because the pieces opposite each other are undoubtedly not exactly the same size, and it won’t be smooth and symmetrical if it goes together in a different order.

Now I had some confidence that it was all going to split apart properly. The remaining chisel taps still needed to be done carefully, but I wasn’t worried. Here are the seven pieces separated properly. I sanded them all to get rid of some of the newspaper and make sure they were smooth.

… and by now it’s on it’s way to Hampden, Maine. Maybe with some critiquing and practice I’ll be able to make these well enough to trade five or six for one basket — I think that’s about the ratio of time for making things.

We have several new songs to learn in klezmer band this session. For one of them, a waltz called “Mazel”, (means ‘luck’, music by Abraham Ellstein, lyrics by Molly Picon, that go something like “Luck shines once on everyone, everyone but not me…”) we only have 2/3 of the music written out. Barry, our director, wants us to learn the last part by ear. That works pretty well for me, but some members of the band are very resistant. Our new pianist Joyce, in particular, wants written-out music.

I recorded what Barry played on my iPhone, read it into the computer, trimmed the recording down to just the part we need to learn with a program called Audacity (there was talking, some me, some not me, and other extraneous sound before and after the music to learn), turned it into an mp3, and emailed it back out around the band.

Here you go: Mazel third strain

The iPhone recorder app lets me put a picture with the recording, so I took a picture of Barry playing it:

Ha! I bet you thought I forgot how to do this here now blog thing. I haven’t really, but let’s see if it still all hangs together.

I took a day off for Columbus Day (it’s not a standard company holiday where I work, but I have enough vacation days left over that it’s OK) so we were in Maine for three days. One of them, and I think it was Sunday, we went a little farther afield than usual for a walk — to Streaked Mountain, off the road from Paris to Buckfield. It was a very pretty drive — well, the last part, past Paris, anyway; the road from Oxford to Paris is low-density commercial sprawl, dominated by prefabricated house builders, the Oxford Plains Speedway car racetrack, and then a short strip of ordinary fast-food shops and gas stations. But starting in downtown Paris it’s good small-town and rural Maine, with sweeping views off route 117.

Streaked (pronounce the “ed” at the end, not just the “d”. It rhymes with “you’re looking a little peaked”. Let me look around here for an accent grave è. There it is! Streakèd) Mountain is named that because of long streaks of bare rock. The trailhead is by a very pretty little stream, and the very steep trail parallels the stream for a little way. We didn’t get very far up the mountain — just a little way up the first expanse of steep bare rock — but there was a lovely view from there, and even from quite close to the trailhead. This picture is just from my iPhone. How about that color? That’s the late afternoon, close to sunset, light, not adjusted in photoshop or anything. Does it look more like a painting than most photos? I couldn’t have done that on purpose if I was trying.
 

This lunch hour I saw the smallest northern water snake I’ve seen yet at Cutler Pond. It was about the length of a garter snake, and only a little big bigger around than one of those — maybe 5/8 inches diameter, certainly less than half as big around as one of the bigger ones I was seeing in July. I hadn’t seen any of them at all in August and was beginning to think I had forgotten how to look for them, but this one caught my eye even though it was holding perfectly still. I wonder if this one is the young of this year — if so they must grow pretty fast, but this year’s baby Canada geese are lots bigger than this guy — or if it’s a year or two old.

One of the next few people behind me on the path turned out to be the guy who had first pointed out two water snakes to me two years ago. He hadn’t seen this one. He turns out to work for another group in my company, a product we acquired 2 1/2 or 3 years ago. He asked me if I knew about plants as well as snakes, and then asked me if I recognized poison ivy. I was a little surprised that he didn’t know it, but maybe not, because he speaks English with a non-native accent that I couldn’t identify. There’s plenty of poison ivy to point out around Cutler Park, so he ought to be able to recognize it by now!

Arlene was in charge of hanging an art exhibit for the Newton Art Association that’s on display for the month of September at the Newton Public Library. The opening reception was last night. She got to hand out the awards and read the judge’s (except that it’s called the juror in this context) comments about the winning pieces. It was a tiny bit like the academy awards “the envelope, please” in that she knew who had won for a couple of days in advance and wasn’t allowed to tell people, even to say to friends, “I hope you’re coming to the opening.”

Since we were going to be in Maine for all three days of the weekend, we thought it would be a good opportunity to travel a little farther around the state than we usually do. Last year we had a good time going to Pemaquid with Charley on Labor Day Weekend. Arlene looked at listings of events in the newspaper and found that there was going to be a windjammer festival in Camden; so we headed up midcoast.

Maine touring maps seem to divide the coast — and so do the residents, it seems — into the southern beaches, mid-coast, and down east. The beach part of the southern shore is mostly in York, Ogunquit, and Old Orchard Beach. That section of coast goes just past Portland to the end of Casco Bay (no relation, except linguistic, to the town of Casco.) As soon as you’re past Casco Bay, say in Harpswell or Bailey’s Island, you’re in mid coast. That’s where you start to get — well that’s not fair, because the islands in Casco Bay are plenty rocky — I was saying, that’s where you start to get the rockbound coast of Maine. If you look at a map you can see that ragged shoreline. The through roads are , or specifically route 1 is, twenty miles from the ocean through most of mid-coast, because there are long rocky peninsulas with long bays dug out by the glaciers between them. Mid-coast is full of small fishing and lobstering ports and is very picturesque. In my mind at least, mid-coast goes through Ellsworth and Bar Harbor. Some businesses in those towns call themselves “Down East” this or that, but I think Down East starts on the other side of Ellsworth. And there’s no question how far east it goes; all the way to the New Brunswick border. Down East has tiny towns, except for Machias which is just small, and Calais, right at the border, pronounced “callus” like on your big toe, which is a small city. But in general, tourist facilities are few and far between past Bar Harbor.

We started out early but got bogged down at a couple of yard sales before we got past route 26. We got on the Maine Turnpike at Auburn and went two exits, which wasn’t the most direct way — just one exit would have been better, Lewiston instead of Lisbon, but the wrong road turned out to be prettier than the quicker one so we didn’t mind. We got a bottle of Moxie in Lisbon Falls or Topsham, close to I-295 anyway, and got on route 1 north before getting into downtown Brunswick.

We stopped at the Indian crafts store on route 1 (I forget if it was before or after lunch) and stopped for lunch in Damariscotta (that’s pronounced dam-ris-cotta; the first syllable rhymes with ‘am’, not ‘ham’). The restaurant (Schooner Landing?) was right on the water. We watched people going out in kayaks directly below our window. We walked along the street and into the original Reny’s store, which has a picture of opening day in, I think it was, October 1949.

There’s a perpetual fleamarket just off (the southbound side of, darn it) route 1 up there near Damariscotta and Wiscasset. We couldn’t resist. I bought an antique jeweler’s hammer and an offset screwdriver to add to my father’s tool collection, and an old plane just to have the plane iron to make a dowel turning jig. By now it was getting pretty late, but Camden wasn’t really an awful lot farther.

We got to Camden as the boat parade was about wrapping up. We didn’t realize it was going on for a while, but looked around the parking lot where there were several exhibits set up:

That’s a solar-powered Stirling cycle engine, not doing much except spinning a wheel to show you that it can do at least that, faster or slower depending on how accurately the reflector is focusing the sun on the engine itself. The guy showing it off also had several antique gasoline engines and a sign for the Maine antique power society (or something like that) which had been a big participant at the Harrison Back to the Past event in July. He hadn’t been in Harrison himself.

This gorgeous wooden canoe was next to a display of canoe ribs in various stages. You could see how they were cut, several at a time from a thick board, by bandsaw.

We finally caught on to what was happening and went over to the wharf to look. The harbormaster was giving a play-by-play account of the boats as they passed in review,

[Dean! You’re supposed to look at the viewfinder and not have handicapped parking signs covering the center of interest of the picture!]  with names of the captain (and of the ship’s dog, in those cases where he knew, which was a lot of cases), year the ship was built and where, type of rig for sailboats or type and size of motor for motorboats, and whatever else he felt like talking about. One that he did feel like talking about was the Headhunter, the pump-out boat that will come over and pump out your boat’s sewage holding tank, gratis, paid for by the state, to keep you from polluting Penobscot Bay. Its motto is, “We don’t take any crap from anybody! Except you.”

There was supposed to be something of a Pirate theme to the festival. A few of the boats had crew or passengers dressed up as pirates, or pirate flags, or were just having a grand old time.

This one, the Heron, had a pirate flag —

— and was towing a surfboard with kids having a Pirate sword fight.

Before we started watching the parade we heard an announcement that open house hours on the schooners were now over. We walked out on the floating pier between the schooners anyway, because there was a better view there without being in the way of other spectators, and started talking to a member of the crew of schooner Nathaniel Bowditch. He said, “You’re welcome to come on board,” which surprised me because I thought we were too late for that, but we climbed on and looked around, including looking around the cabins below.

If you want to learn about using space efficiently, look around a boat. The kitchen looked just like a kitchen, with shelves with cookbooks and decorations, but in a tiny space.

There is something of an industry doing windjammer cruises along mid-coast Maine. That schooner does two- to six-day cruises in the area. I guess that part of the point of the windjammer festival is to let potential customers see all the boats they might be considering a trip on.

After walking around Camden and finding ourselves some ice cream there, we drove a few more miles up the shore of Penobscot Bay to Lincolnville. (Google Map it. Amazingly, they have a street view from downtown
Lincolnville. Did they do street views all along US 1?)

These boats off Lincolnville beach look to me like typical Maine lobster boats, with a cabin open on one side and lots of open deck at the rear for piling up lobster traps.

We walked on the beach (a gravel beach, not fine sand at all) and looked at the barnacles and periwinkles.

We found our way home through Augusta and Gardiner. The first part of the road inland from Camden on route 17 was very scenic, going along a couple of lakes with big hills right behind them. I was driving, so took no pictures; also, it was starting to get dark. Closer to Augusta, we realized that we were on the same road that we’ve taken to and from the Fiber Frolic at the Windsor fairgrounds. I was very pleased to feel that we’re beginning to be familiar with some of the major secondary roads in the state.

Between getting aboard the schooner, seeing the boat parade, and getting down to the beach, it was a totally satisfactory day trip to the coast.

I checked out the hazel patch early. Only three of the original ten chestnuts are still alive. Perhaps the worst part of that is that two of the three are “tree”, as opposed to “nut”, type trees — that is, they were bred for growing to impressive trees rather than for producing big crops. I had started with five of each type. That was more than there really was space for, and I wouldn’t have minded a 50% survival rate, but I was hoping for more like three “nut” trees and two “tree” ones.

The hazels are doing much better than the chestnuts, maybe 14 survivors of the original 22 plants. They haven’t put on much height, and some of the survivors don’t have as many leaves as they started with, but several of them are growing well. If they put down good root systems and come back next year I’ll be happy.

I got both my small gasoline engines started without trouble. I started with the string trimmer and cleaned up some of the roadside near our driveway (more than just our property, which only extends a few feet either side of the driveway along the road), the sides of the driveway, and the area straight ahead of the driveway. Then I took the chainsaw around the place to cut up two trees that had fallen across trails recently.

Arlene wanted to go to Mark’s garden center in Bridgton to see if they had any pansies to put in to overwinter. They had advertised a sale of trees for $10 each, also. The trees were gone by the time we got there, mostly because they hadn’t had all that many but also because we stopped at several yard sales along the way. I got three Forstner bits at one place on a side street near Crooked River, and Arlene found two Springbok puzzles at Wild Plum on route 302 in Naples. We went a little south out of our way and came home via the frozen custard stand on route 302.

I roasted a chicken on the Weber grill and was as pleased as usual with the results. I left the olive oil out of the grilled eggplant recipe, just sprinkled some spices on it, and was NOT as pleased as usual with the results. Memo to self: don’t forget the olive oil! Thanks.