Hand carved pen / pencil grips ... ...

I've been messing around with bits of wood again :-)

This time I've been making pencil or in my case pen grips, you know the type of things that you put onto a pen or pencil to help you ... well grip it better.

I used to draw (or doodle if you prefer) when I was younger and I've recently taken it up again, basically I spend time drawing abstract pieces of artwork with fine line pens.

Stuff like this -

May not be every one's cup of tea.

Now as is the case with most things it seems that pens have changed over the years (why wouldn't they ?) and they are thinner than I remember, at least the ones I have chosen to use, or maybe it's my fingers that have got bigger ? either way gripping the pens is problematic at times, I have had operations on my hands which has dulled the senses in my finger tips some what, this doesn't help.

So a quick and simple solution was a grip, yes I could of bought some, but if you read this blog on a regular basis you'll know I try to make things before I part with cash ;-)

So here they are, I made more than one.

This is the first one I made, it's kind of rough, but functional.

This one I made to fit a different type of pen that I use,
I've left 3/4mm of wood to make the walls of the tube.

They are pretty simple as it goes, just a wooden tube, making them is easy, I could have turned them on my lathe, but I kind of like the hand finished feel they have, as you can see they aren't perfectly round, the top one I made in a few minutes a while back, when I started to have issues gripping the pens.

Now these two are quite plain, not much design wise, but I've gone for function rather than form, however I did start to wonder if I couldn't improve them by making them fit the way I feel comfortable holding the pens, more ergonomic so to speak.

So I came up with this one - 

I've been using this one and it's pretty good.

As you can see it's a little more decorative, but I've also tried to make it usable, it actually feels comfortably, perhaps more so than the other ones.

Here are some more pictures - 

These are the basic ones.

The more ergonomic one ;-)

This picture was just for the hell of it ;-)

After doing a little searching online I've found that there are many different types of pen / pencil grip, some are made from different types of plastic, some are rubber, there's material ones, some that are a thread or string wrapped round the pen or pencil. 

You can also just wrap a rubber band round to help with any grip issues (I had teachers in school that did this) we also used bought pencil grips when my son first started to write, he found they helped him hold the pencils he used in a comfortable way, some maybe you and the kids could have a go ? you might want to do the tool related parts, but there's no reason the kids couldn't decorate them in some way.

If you feel like making one yourself it's pretty easy, you can go as mad as you like with the design.

I use a piece of tree branch (I used eucalyptus for all three) but you could use a piece of dowel, this would cut down on time spent making it round.

Cut your chosen wood to about an inch and a half (about 4 / 5 cm) or what ever you feel suits your needs, make sure it's thick enough to hold the pen / pencil with out cracking, you'll want a good 3 / 4mm thickness (see above pictures)

If you use branches like I have you can either leave the bark on, or shave it off, you can do this with a sharp knife (a stanley knife or craft type knife) 

Once that's done you'll need to drill a hole all the way through, I have a load of drill bits, so finding one a touch smaller than the thickness of the pens was easy, but I would suggest using a slightly smaller bit, and if the fit is too tight then roll up a little sand paper and sand the inside of it until it's a snug fit, you don't want it sliding about while your trying to use the pen, if you do make the hole too big a little tape wrapped round the pen will sort it out.

After that it's up to you, you can give it a sand as it is, or carve some kind of design into it, or shape it to fit your fingers better. I used a lavender wax on the ones I made, it feeds the wood and adds a little extra grip to it.

And that's that, pretty simple when you think about it, a few tools and some old tree branch (if you have it) what could be simpler ?

One thing I've found is that depending on the wood you grip may shrink a little around the pen / pencil this is okay, but may make it difficult to remove, so apply a little water to the wood, and if you can get some water into the inside of the grip this helps more, leave it for a few minutes or so and then try and remove it, the water should soak into the wood and make it expand a little.

Thanks for reading.

Chinese paper yo yo's ... ...

That's right folks it's my turn :-)

My wife has been writing various blog posts about our Chinese new years crafts, you can check them out here (opens in new window) the kids have been enjoying it loads, especially running around with their goldfish kites, which I have to say are weathering quite well, despite the vigorous usage.

So to compliment my wife's posts we have made some Chinese paper yoyo's.

Here they are -

Pink ones.

Spotty ones.

And orange, this was a prototype.

These are really easy to make and quick, you can make a couple in 10 minutes, and all you need is some dowel, or thin sticks (straighter the better) some paper, you can use wrapping paper,wall paper, or you can stick some strips of a4 together if you don't have rolls of paper lying about.

First get some supplies - 

This is about all you need.

To make the yoyo you will need a strip of paper about 20cm wide and a meter long, any colourful paper will do, if you don't have any long pieces folder a couple of sheets of a4 paper will do, fold them in half and then cut them into 2 strips, and stick them together in a line with sticky tape (this is how I made the orange yoyo)

The sticks were out of the garden cupboard, just little garden canes really, but anything stick like would do, some lengths of garden cane about half a meter long would be ideal.

Time to commence construction -

Sticky tape is quick and works well.

Take some sticky tape and place 2 or 3 strips onto the paper so the sticky side is pointing up, this is for attaching your stick of choice. Once that's done take you stick and place it onto the tape and roll it up, the tape should stick to it and start to roll with the stick.

Some extra tape here will help it stay together.

Keep rolling until the end of the paper.

You need to keep rolling the paper as tightly as you can, once you reach the end of the paper hold it for about a minute, or slightly longer to make sure the curl stays in the paper.

Holding... ... has it been a minute yet ?

You could just place a book on it to hold it down.

If the end starts to un-ravel you can always roll the end the other way to help keep it together.

Like so - 

Use another stick to help roll the paper.

And you should end up with something that looks like the first lot of pictures. The way they work is quite simple, the paper works kind of like a spring as you flick it about.

When they are extended they should look like this - 

See spring like :-)

This one had already been played with.

They should spring back by themselves, you might need to roll them up tightly now and then to keep them nice and springy.

If you don't have any coloured paper you could always decorate some plain white a4 before making it into strips, get the kids to draw Chinese related things on the paper ? like dragons maybe.

Thanks for reading.

And so it begins ... ... gardening that is

Well it's more or less the end of January, so it's time to get ready for the years gardening and other garden related jobs.
I find this time of year a sort of limbo, there's loads to do, but the weather isn't yet right for a lot of things, mainly planting related.
Although it's been sunny here for the last few days it's by no means spring like, I'm willing to be that if I plant a load of things outside then the frost will come, and no doubt snow and everything in between.

The garden looks a bit sad at the moment -

poor garden looking a little sorry for itself.

So there it is, our back garden, well some of it anyway, I had the macro lens on the camera and didn't get most of the garden in, but you can see that it all looks a little sad, all our trees and fruit bushes are bare, the flower beds and vegetable beds are bare, I have been feeding the soil and digging it over in preparation for spring, or at least warmer weather and then I can get the cloches out and start planting.

There are still plenty of jobs to be done, pruning of things, tidying up of leaves, we end up with loads of sycamore leaves all over the place, you can't see the tree, but it's just behind the shed, and about 50 feet high, the leave make a nice feed for the soil, if you don't mind black bags of leaves hanging around while you wait for them to rot down, any branches and twigs we can't use for making things get shredded and used as mulch.

I do have a green house and a cold frame, but it's still a little cold to be risking plants outside, so I've decided to start some things off in the house, the back room (utility room) to be precise it's not very warm in there, but it's warmer than outside.

I've been putting my pot maker to good use - 

This is the second tray of seeds.

I've started potting up various seeds, things like herbs which we don't have due to loosing some plants, and other stuff like tomatoes, yes I know it's early for tomatoes but I think I'll get away with it. Having the pot maker is quite handy as it happens, it's easy enough to make the pots, and it recycles some of the news papers we have, I've managed to get about 24 pots to a tray, which is good, and all I need to do once they are ready for planting into the ground is dig a small hole and put them in, no need to disturb roots and such like, and no piles of small empty pots all over the place.

I even made a pot filling device, less messy than trying to fill the pots with a trowel or by hand, I give you the " Pot filler 500 " by techno-mole industries.

Okay so it's a milk carton with a hole in it ;-)

It's much easier using this, and less messy it works well with our home made compost, yes even our compost will be our own this year, no shop bought stuff, and by the looks of the compost bins we will have more next year, so I can really give the soil a good feed, not that it's bad, we seem to have pretty good soil here.

I will have to update you on the progress of the seeds, hopefully by the time they get their second leaves the weather will allow me to use the cold frame, we shall see.

Not much else going on as yet, most of it's planning on what's going to go where as we have moved the beds about.

 There are still some jobs to be done, the biggest of which is the pond, you can't really see it in the picture, but it's there, and it's about 6 feet square and 4 feet deep at the deepest point, we intend to get rid of our fish (no we aren't going to eat them, what does koi taste like anyway ?) once we have re-homed the fish the pond will be made smaller, with no fish so some of the wildlife has a better chance, our fish really love eating frog spawn, once we have done that we will hopefully be investing in some chickens, not many, but enough to get a good supply of eggs from (providing we do well looking after them) the kids are looking forward to having chickens, and it's an opportunity for them to learn as well, can't be bad.

Thanks for reading.

Homemade lathe tools ... ...

I actually made these tools in the run up to christmas, but I never got round to writing a post about them, christmas being it's usual hectic self.

So here it is ;-)

I've had my lathe for about a year now, I haven't used it as much as I might like, but I'm looking to change that this year. I started with a basic set of lathe chisels, which I bought at the same time (not much point having a lathe with no chisels) they aren't anything special, but they are enough to produce things, like small pots, bowls and other things, so in order to extend the range of what I can make I also purchased a new chuck ( a small screw chuck) and I have made a couple of collet chucks as well, but I found recently that I could do with a new chisel or two for making various things.

Now I could have bought something that would do the job perfectly well, but I decided to make some tools, figuring this would give a me a better understanding of lathe tools in general, and also allow me to make a tool specifically for set purposes.

This is what I ended up with -

They are Oland tools.

They will allow me to make a greater range of bowls and such like, and for less than the price of say a new bowl gouge, and from what I have read while researching they are more versatile tools.

I made them from various things I had lying around, I made two in the same way, but from different tubing to test which one works the best, the third tool is along the same lines, but meant for smaller stuff, and believe it or not the cutting bits will be made from masonry nails (yes masonry nails) which I will have to make into the required shape, and then sharpen, this isn't as difficult as it sounds.

Here is a picture of the respective cutting bits -

The top one is  a nail, yet to be shaped, the others are hss lathe bits.

Like the caption says the top one is a nail and I will have to mess around with it to make it usable for turning. The other 2 bits are high speed steel blanks for metal lathes, these need to be shaped a little to get the right sort of edge on them, but being high speed steel they are very hard and will keep a good sharp edge.

You may have noticed the slight notch out of one of the bits (the middle one) I ground it into the bit to help with holding it in one of the bars as the grub screws aren't as tight as I would like, I may have to make new ones.

I got the two steel bits from ebay for a grand total of 4 quid (plus 1.50 postage) not bad really, considering  a lathe chisel can be very expensive, all three together probably cost me about 15 quid in all, plus the time to make them, a good bowl gouge can cost 30 quid or more for one, I got three for half the price ;-)

To fix the bits into the holders I've drilled and threaded hole, which I then use homemade grub screws in to fix the bits.

Grubs screws - 

You can see I have already had to make a new screw and thread.

The screws are made from a length of threaded bar, which I cut a groove in so as I could use a screw driver to do them up, I then tapped out the holes I drilled in the holders. The cutting bits slide into the tubes and are a good fit, so I can get a pretty tight fixing.

I had some steel tubing in the shed which is what the bottom one in the picture (above) is made from, the top one in the picture is a piece of metal electrical conduit I had spare, both seem to work well. I still might grind the ends down a little more, as you can see I've already ground them a little to round them off.

The holder for the smaller bits (the ones I will make from masonry nails) is a piece of solid square bar, I had to first drill into the centre of the bar to make a hole to take the nails, then another hole was drilled at a right angle to the first hole so as I could use a grub screw to hold the nail in place.

Here is a picture - 

It still needs a little work.

You can see it's more or less the same as the other two tools, I still have to grind the end down some what to make it smaller and thus easier to get inside smaller bowls and vases and the like, but it'll only take a couple of minutes on my bench grinder, making the nails into a workable tool may take longer. You can make out the grub screw, which fits almost flush with the surrounding metal, but I will no doubt need to modify it a little once I've ground the end of the bar down more.

And that's pretty much it really, I have yet to test them out, but I'm confident they will perform well (fingers crossed)

In the end I decided not to turn wooden handles for each of the bars, so instead I used natural string, which I wound tightly around the ends of the tools to make a nice handle, then I used mod podge to seal it all, this also helps to make sure the string doesn't unwind.

The handle - 

As handles go it's pretty good.

Here are all three again so you can see I used the same method for all of them.

Almost reading for a trial run turning something.

These are the first tools I've made from scratch for a specific job, I've modified plenty before to better suit a job.

I am quite proud of them to be honest, although I'll no doubt do a lot of swearing if they don't work ;-)

Here are some of the things I've made so far using my other chisels - 

A plant pot maker - 

I wrote a post about it ;-)

This was made from part of an old fence post, I try to recycle what I can, I recently acquired a 60 year old pear tree, which some one offered on freecycle, I had to cut it down as it had been hacked about to make room for a shed, if I hadn't taken it, it was destined for the bonfire, now it's in my shed waiting to be turned into interesting things, so in a way it will live on, still a shame it had to be cut down.

Here are a couple of things I made last year, a pot made from eucalyptus from our garden and a kids rolling pin for using with play dough.

My daughter loves the rolling pin.

Thanks for reading.

Mini sack for wine bottles ... ...

I have finally completed a present for a family member, you'd think it would have been quick to sort out a bottle of wine, but not in this house.
Apart from spending the best part of 6 months actually brewing the wine (which is blackberry) I have made a metal label to hang round it (yes I wrote a post about it) I also spent some time designing a paper labels for the front and back of the bottle, and lastly I have made a mini sack for it.

I used an off cut of red velvet left over from the christmas stockings my wife has made for our kids (here's the blog post she wrote about them ---> velvet christmas sacks (opens in new window)

Here's the finished article -

A mini santa sack :-)

It was easy to make, even for me with my limited sewing machine skills, I had a rectangle of fabric, which I made into a little bag by sewing up the sides, I also made a tube ? (not up on sewing terminology) for the ribbon to run through.

And that's about it, took me a while to do, but I was taking it easy so as not to mess it up, I did add some little star shaped sequins for a little decoration (sewed them on by hand)

It's a nice thing (I would say that, I made it) but it will serve as a reminder, like the metal label and it can be reused for something else, maybe a small stocking for next year ? or some other use, either way it will be around for a while, long after the wine has been drunk and the bottle recycled.

Yes but it's a lot of effort for a bottle of wine, why not just shove it in a box ? well yes I could have, but making a little extra effort will make it more special, it is after all a bottle of wine to be drunk, but that doesn't mean it doesn't deserve a little effort.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you have a great christmas, and all the best for 2011.

Spinning star tree decoration ... ... (rough draft)

I just thought I'd write a quick post to carry on from the one I did about the spinning tree decoration.
This is more or less the same thing, only it's a star and instead of slicing it up I've cut out smaller star shapes, which spin within each other.

Here's a picture (it's a prototype)

Cardboard wasn't the best material to spray with paint.

Okay so it's not neat and tidy, but it'll do as a model to see if the idea works well, and also to work out the best way to make it. In this case something harder than cardboard will be better, especially if you intend to spray it silver or gold for example.

The problem was that the cardboard soaked up the paint and became very floppy, it's okay now it's dried but for a moment I thought it might fall apart.

Next time I'll use wood (maybe thin plywood) ;-)

It's easy to make, basically you find a shape, I used a star seeing as it's nearly christmas, but a circle or other shape would work just as well. You can see that it's a star within a star within a star, they all turn independently. 

You cut out the shape from your chosen material, then you draw a smaller shape inside it, and then another until you get to the middle, I left a fairly large shape in the middle, if I'd have used wood I could have gone smaller.

Now you want to remove some of the sections you've drawn so that there's a gap between each shape, like the picture below (which you can copy if you want to use a star, just print it out and use it as a template) I've marked parts in red, these are the parts you want to remove, you should be left with 3 sections.

Star template - 

You may want to make it smaller, or larger. Note the red sections.

You should get the idea from the template, once you've removed the red sections you can then assemble the decoration, I used a needle and thread to join the pieces, with beads separating each part so that they can spin without catching each other.

If you use wood you will need to use a drill bit to make the holes for the thread or wire if you prefer and what you should end up with is something like the first pictures (only some what neater) I will update this post with pictures of a wooden one if I get round to making it before christmas day ;-) if not have fun making your own ones, you can get the kids to decorate them with glitter and what ever else you feel like, have fun.

Thanks for reading.

Spinning christmas tree ornament ... ...

Just a short post on another of our christmas creations, at this rate we will have more or less refitted the tree in handmade decorations.

Here it is.

My wife had mentioned making tree decorations like the one above out of some foam sheet we have, but after looking at the thickness of the foam we decided it wouldn't work very well.

So this afternoon I set about making one out of wood.

They are simple enough to make, you need a few tools though, mainly a saw of some kind (a small hacksaw, or coping saw will do) and a thin drill bit and drill (a 2mm drill bit) all you have to do is mark out your shape on some wood (I used a scrap piece of 10mm tongue and grove) I've chosen a tree shape, but you could do a snowman, or a circular decoration, you could also use a star shape and instead of slicing it like I have you could cut a series of stars out of the main one, so that they all spin inside each other (I'll most likely write a post about it at some point)

Once you have marked your shape out you need to divide it into equal sections, I made my sections about 10mm (1cm) thick, then mark the centre of your shape, this makes it easier to align the holes you will drill through each section.

A closer up picture - 

It's not really wonky, it's the camera angle ;-)

Use the saw to slice up your shape, try and keep the pieces in the order your saw them (although with a simple shape it's easy to figure out where the bits go) then take each piece and drill a hole in the middle (use the centre line you made as a guide) do this for all the parts, if you use wood you may want to give each part a sand after you've cut and drilled them for a smoother look.

Then the fun bit, you can use thin gauge wire,string,wool or cotton thread for this part, you'll need some small beads or something to put between each section as well.

I used a larger bead at the bottom of the tree, but one the same size as the others would do, you could also use a small bell for extra jingle. Thread your chosen material through each part, you can use the first bead/bell to tie the string or wire to, so it doesn't all slide off.

After each section add a bead, then another section, then a bead and so on, until you get to the top, at this point you can either use the last section, or use a large bead, or bell or maybe if you have some star shaped beads you could use them, that's the beauty of crafts, you can do what ever you feel like, it's about imagination. Then just leave a loop to hang it on the tree with.

Here it is again, in case you missed it at the start of the post ;-)

It doesn't take long to do, and you can get the kids involved, although you may want to do the sawing or cutting, then you can decorate them however you want, I've used some silver spray and a little glitter spray, you can use glue and glitter or anything else you have.

You don't need to use wood either, some thick cardboard would work just as well, and if you don't have a saw this may be a better option, it should work in the same way.

And there you have it, a spinning christmas tree decoration.

Thanks for reading.