After running around like a mad thing all week with a list of jobs that grows faster than I can get them done it’s almost pleasant to be spending the day demonstrating polelathe turning at the museum. I say almost, as it takes a good couple of hours to get the shelter and stand up and together before I can even start work. But sunny weather and an interesting collection of visitors mean that I’m struggling to make turnery fast enough – which is a good thing I guess!
The usual crop of assorted treen and household items here a spurtle, pair of spalted door wedges, rolling pin and a pair of wooden pins for a garden line, one marked up to double as a dibber – though I might be in danger of doing myself out of dibber sales here – or am I just doubling them up? We’ll see.
I press ganged one visitor with a very large camera into taking a photo of me with my camera as well – makes a change from the usual photos of an empty lathe. So be warned, don’t visit me with a prominently displayed obviously large and expensive lens, I might asume that you know what you are doing on the photography front.
The rolling pins were flying off the stand, being ordered before I could get them off the lathe. Sometimes it just happens that way. I think it also helped that I was making extra long pins and the sycamore, having suffered from my regime of benign neglect, has just started to develop interesting grain with white, brown and a pale tinge of green in places.
Rolling pins, especially extra long ones, are not the easiest items to make and achieving a good level finish does need some careful attention – sometimes it just won’t work, and it’s all too easy to put in a dig at the very last moment. But the length and character of the wood make for a product you can’t easily find in the shops – and they prove to be very popular.
