Doing all them crafts
Hi everyone,
I’ve had a very productive, crafty, weekend and would love to talk about that today. But first, thank you all so much for your kind and encouraging responses to my previous post! It was good to hear about all your experiences with similar situations and how you dealt with them. It truly warmed my heart that so many of you reached out to me and I felt a lot better equipped to face my fears afterwards, so thank you all so much!
I’m very happy to say that I’ve some good news: I had my very first bookbinding class last week and I loved it! I had the time of my life there, the class exceeded all my expectations. The bookbinding studio there is great, very spacious, with lots of hidden corners and interesting machinery to explore. My classmates seem really nice. I haven’t talked to all of them yet, but the ones I did talk to were lovely. And then there’s the teacher, who’s fantastic! He spent a few hours enthusiastically talking about bookbinding and I wasn’t feeling bored or impatient for a single second. I really liked my previous bookbinding teacher as well, but her teaching method didn’t work for me and I found it difficult to communicate that to her. I don’t have to worry about that with my new teacher, however, because he already uses a teaching method I like! I can’t tell you how much of a relief that is. Having a teacher that works for you can make a huge difference.
On top of all that, I learned a ton in the first class. I didn’t think I would because I knew we’d start at zero, but I filled quite a few pages in my notebook with new tips, tricks and insights. I haven’t completely lost the fear I mentioned in my previous post yet, but I’m really happy I took the plunge and signed up for these classes!
And now on to the craft projects :D
Woodworking: making a book press
After dropping out of Furniture Conservation, I was so disenchanted with woodworking that I didn’t so much as touch my woodworking tools for almost two years. I felt such a strong resistance to the idea of doing woodworking again, that I stayed as far away from it as I could. So it’s a huge testament to my new bookbinding teacher’s talent for motivation that when he advised us to make our own book presses out of wood, my first thought was: ‘Let’s do it!’
For those of you that don’t know, a book press acts like a glue clamp; it keeps everything tightly in place while the glue is drying. You can also use it to safely transport your half-finished books back home after class, so it’s very useful to have one. I always used a pile of books for this purpose, but a proper book press is much more practical. You can buy them, but they are usually very expensive and it’s a bit stupid to pay so much when it’s actually quite easy to make your own, so that’s what I did last Saturday. I wasn’t planning to make one this soon after the first bookbinding class, but I was visiting my parents and discovered that my father had all the materials and tools I needed. Also, the weather was good enough that I could work in the garden, so I had absolutely no excuse not to do it.
For the book press, I used plywood, screws and wingnuts. I had to saw the plywood and screws to size and drill holes in the wood for the screws to go through, and that was all. It was a pretty easy, relaxing project, and the end result is something I'll probably be using a lot in the next few years, so I'm very glad I took the time to do it!
Deciding where to saw. Those machete-like tools on the photo are Japanese saws. Lots of woodworkers prefer them to Western ones because of their thin, flexible blades. It takes some time getting used to them, because you have to saw towards you instead of away from you when you use them, but my father and I now prefer them as well.
Done sawing and now on to drilling the holes
The finished book press!
Soap making
This title probably seems very random, but I’ve been fascinated by soap making for a while and wanted to try it. I was also very intimidated by it, however, because of the sodium hydroxide, which is one of the main ingredients of soap. To make soap, you have to put the sodium hydroxide in water to make lye, and then mix that with oils. This will create a chemical reaction called saponification. Once the saponification is finished, you will have a fully functioning and completely harmless soap bar. That’s it. It sounds easy, and in some ways it is, but the lye can burn you quite badly if you aren’t careful, so I was a little nervous to start working with it. Luckily a friend of mine wanted to help, so we could brave the lye together, and that made everything a whole lot less scary.
With my friend’s help, the process was surprisingly fast. I think it took us a little over an hour to make the soap, which was much shorter than I had anticipated. I had picked an easy soap recipe because it was our first time, but I had still expected that it would take us much longer to figure out how to do everything.
For the actual soap we used lye, obviously, as well as olive and coconut oil. We mixed that together to create the soap batter and added a lavender scent. Then we put about a quarter of the mixture in another pot and added a purple colourant. The idea was to use that purple batter to create swirls in the soap, but it didn’t quite work out that way. The soap batter was very yellow because of the olive oil, and since purple and yellow are complementary colours, the purple became a lot less vivid when we mixed it in. You can still see the different colours in the soap, but it’s not as obvious as I had hoped. Oh well, I'll figure it out next time.
To finish the process, we poured the soap mixture into the mold and sprinkled some dried lavender on top. Then we put it away to cool down and harden.
The freshly poured soap batter. It looks like custard with raspberry jam, but it really is soap!
It’s Monday when I’m writing this and we made the soap yesterday, on Sunday. It’s not fully hard yet, so we’ll probably leave it alone until Wednesday. Once it’s hard, we can take the soap out of the mold and cut it into bars. Then it has to cure for about 6 weeks to give the lye the chance to fully saponify, and only then can we finally use it. Soap making is a craft for very patient people. I’m very glad I finally, finally, decided to give it a go though! I can’t wait to see what the soap looks like when it has been cut and I’m really looking forwards to trying it out once it has cured, probably in November. I’ll write another post about it by that time.
So that was my productive weekend. A little different from my usual posts, but I hope you enjoyed reading it all the same.
Have a good week!
This entry was originally posted at https://antuhsa.dreamwidth.org/5997.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
I’ve had a very productive, crafty, weekend and would love to talk about that today. But first, thank you all so much for your kind and encouraging responses to my previous post! It was good to hear about all your experiences with similar situations and how you dealt with them. It truly warmed my heart that so many of you reached out to me and I felt a lot better equipped to face my fears afterwards, so thank you all so much!
I’m very happy to say that I’ve some good news: I had my very first bookbinding class last week and I loved it! I had the time of my life there, the class exceeded all my expectations. The bookbinding studio there is great, very spacious, with lots of hidden corners and interesting machinery to explore. My classmates seem really nice. I haven’t talked to all of them yet, but the ones I did talk to were lovely. And then there’s the teacher, who’s fantastic! He spent a few hours enthusiastically talking about bookbinding and I wasn’t feeling bored or impatient for a single second. I really liked my previous bookbinding teacher as well, but her teaching method didn’t work for me and I found it difficult to communicate that to her. I don’t have to worry about that with my new teacher, however, because he already uses a teaching method I like! I can’t tell you how much of a relief that is. Having a teacher that works for you can make a huge difference.
On top of all that, I learned a ton in the first class. I didn’t think I would because I knew we’d start at zero, but I filled quite a few pages in my notebook with new tips, tricks and insights. I haven’t completely lost the fear I mentioned in my previous post yet, but I’m really happy I took the plunge and signed up for these classes!
And now on to the craft projects :D
Woodworking: making a book press
After dropping out of Furniture Conservation, I was so disenchanted with woodworking that I didn’t so much as touch my woodworking tools for almost two years. I felt such a strong resistance to the idea of doing woodworking again, that I stayed as far away from it as I could. So it’s a huge testament to my new bookbinding teacher’s talent for motivation that when he advised us to make our own book presses out of wood, my first thought was: ‘Let’s do it!’
For those of you that don’t know, a book press acts like a glue clamp; it keeps everything tightly in place while the glue is drying. You can also use it to safely transport your half-finished books back home after class, so it’s very useful to have one. I always used a pile of books for this purpose, but a proper book press is much more practical. You can buy them, but they are usually very expensive and it’s a bit stupid to pay so much when it’s actually quite easy to make your own, so that’s what I did last Saturday. I wasn’t planning to make one this soon after the first bookbinding class, but I was visiting my parents and discovered that my father had all the materials and tools I needed. Also, the weather was good enough that I could work in the garden, so I had absolutely no excuse not to do it.
For the book press, I used plywood, screws and wingnuts. I had to saw the plywood and screws to size and drill holes in the wood for the screws to go through, and that was all. It was a pretty easy, relaxing project, and the end result is something I'll probably be using a lot in the next few years, so I'm very glad I took the time to do it!
Deciding where to saw. Those machete-like tools on the photo are Japanese saws. Lots of woodworkers prefer them to Western ones because of their thin, flexible blades. It takes some time getting used to them, because you have to saw towards you instead of away from you when you use them, but my father and I now prefer them as well.
Done sawing and now on to drilling the holes
The finished book press!
Soap making
This title probably seems very random, but I’ve been fascinated by soap making for a while and wanted to try it. I was also very intimidated by it, however, because of the sodium hydroxide, which is one of the main ingredients of soap. To make soap, you have to put the sodium hydroxide in water to make lye, and then mix that with oils. This will create a chemical reaction called saponification. Once the saponification is finished, you will have a fully functioning and completely harmless soap bar. That’s it. It sounds easy, and in some ways it is, but the lye can burn you quite badly if you aren’t careful, so I was a little nervous to start working with it. Luckily a friend of mine wanted to help, so we could brave the lye together, and that made everything a whole lot less scary.
With my friend’s help, the process was surprisingly fast. I think it took us a little over an hour to make the soap, which was much shorter than I had anticipated. I had picked an easy soap recipe because it was our first time, but I had still expected that it would take us much longer to figure out how to do everything.
For the actual soap we used lye, obviously, as well as olive and coconut oil. We mixed that together to create the soap batter and added a lavender scent. Then we put about a quarter of the mixture in another pot and added a purple colourant. The idea was to use that purple batter to create swirls in the soap, but it didn’t quite work out that way. The soap batter was very yellow because of the olive oil, and since purple and yellow are complementary colours, the purple became a lot less vivid when we mixed it in. You can still see the different colours in the soap, but it’s not as obvious as I had hoped. Oh well, I'll figure it out next time.
To finish the process, we poured the soap mixture into the mold and sprinkled some dried lavender on top. Then we put it away to cool down and harden.
The freshly poured soap batter. It looks like custard with raspberry jam, but it really is soap!
It’s Monday when I’m writing this and we made the soap yesterday, on Sunday. It’s not fully hard yet, so we’ll probably leave it alone until Wednesday. Once it’s hard, we can take the soap out of the mold and cut it into bars. Then it has to cure for about 6 weeks to give the lye the chance to fully saponify, and only then can we finally use it. Soap making is a craft for very patient people. I’m very glad I finally, finally, decided to give it a go though! I can’t wait to see what the soap looks like when it has been cut and I’m really looking forwards to trying it out once it has cured, probably in November. I’ll write another post about it by that time.
So that was my productive weekend. A little different from my usual posts, but I hope you enjoyed reading it all the same.
Have a good week!
This entry was originally posted at https://antuhsa.dreamwidth.org/5997.html. Please comment there using OpenID.