washing chickens

Did someone order six chicken burritos? ;-)


Aaaannnd in other news... I mentioned this really awesomely beautiful scrim piece I have in the works. Well, working on being in the works.. I was asked about doing a custom pendant last month, and I sketched out two ideas for the potential client, one more simple and one very complex. Unfortunately by the time all the details got worked out it was too late to do it for Christmas. Whether it'll come up at a later date remains to be seen. The potential client had ultimately selected the more simple image, but I was left with the feeling that I HAVE TO scrim the more complex one. Because it's going to be awesome, and because it will be extremely hard, and I'm a sucker for that kind of thing apparently.

I wanted to work on mammoth ivory. I don't have all that much on hand, but I picked out one really rough piece and spent a good while polishing that down. It's cool, but totally doesn't lend itself to what I want to do, it doesn't have the right look.

So I picked out another small piece, which had a lot of brown coloration to it, so I'd have to cut off some of the "bark" to get into the whiter stuff. And here's where I have power-tool envy. About a third of the way through, I broke the blade on my little hand saw. Crap. So I rummaged around the barn... grinding it down was overpoweringly stinky (yes, I always wear a mask and goggles), the other small saw didn't cut it well. So I finally resorted to the 24" lumber saw. You know, the classic "saw" with the wood handle and the big toothy metal blade? All that, just to shave about a quarter of an inch off the face of scrap of ivory that was only about two square inches in size. Sheesh. It worked. But the ivory had a large crack in it. I was hoping it would hold, I'd even superglued the whole thing first. But it split. So... I was left with a piece that's about an inch by an inch and a half. Smaller than I wanted, but the more I looked at it, the more I see that it's perfect. The shape is perfect. A little bigger would have been nice, but this is okay.

I know, you have no idea what I'm talking about. Because I didn't take any pictures yet.

I'm expecting a knife in the mail any day. And when that gets here I'll drop everything and work on that anyway.