On Friday 8 June, Mavis, Diane and I flew from JFK to Portland in Maine. We rented a car for the trip to Castine through the beautiful green country side and lots of delightful little towns.
We stopped in Camden for lunch and I bought this lovely painting by John Pa....? at Lucy's Dollhouse shop, I can't figure out the last few letters of the name, I suspect it is a British artist, if anyone knows who the artist is, please let me know. Lucy's also sell beautiful antique dolls, wonderful to look at if you are a doll lover.
Late that afternoon we arrived in Castine, it was great to meet new and old friends and spend Saturday peacefully just relaxing a bit before the busy week kicked of with the opening dinner on Saturday night.
Sunday morning our classes started, mine was a full day class and more, the brass bed has 165 parts, wow, that is a lot of turning, just look at that pile of brass blanks waiting to be turned into a bed. I have never done any metal turning before and wasn't really sure what to expect, well, once I got the hang of how the tools worked which took about the first day, I really started to enjoy myself and then it was a race against time, I was determined to at least go home with all the parts finished and I did manage to do that.
Here is a photo of Bill Robertson's finished prototype bed that I took in the exhibition room, mine is still a pile of brass pieces, hopefully I will have it finished in a week or so. One of the tasks I found the hardest was drilling holes through all the brass ball bearings that is used to join all the pieces together. The task itself wasn't too difficult, but my poor hands just got sore from the handle on the drill tail stock that was just a piece of metal with no soft covering and we had to drill holes through about 50 ball bearings.
Here we are all hard at work. All in all it was a fantastic class and I learned more than I ever expected and I am eager to use my new found skills on some fire screens that has brass parts on them, like the original full scale ones in the following two photos .
Can you see the tiny brass finial on the top of this one?
And look at that brass pole on this one.
And here are some of my brass pieces together with a half stitched William Morris rug, wallpaper and fabrics that I am thinking of using in the bedroom that still needs to be built.
Castine is just an awesome experience and if you have ever wanted to go, don't wait too long, you won't be sorry
Elga.
Color & Sparkle & Cut!
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One of the really fun parts of working this job is when a box arrives that
we aren’t expecting – …
4 hours ago