Pretty Pretty Bang Bang

After a long Tuesday afternoon of cutting out the top of my table for class by hand, Kevin suggested I use a plasma cutter to roughly cut out the legs, then grind off the excess. It has been about a year since I took my welding class and used the plasma cutter, but I remember how much I loved it. There’s just something exciting about using an electrical charge, gas and compressed air to cut through a thick sheet of steel. Oh, the power! Anyway, the cutter I used at OTC last year had a thicker tip so I was really excited to use a smaller tip a be able to cut more precisely this time. The results were a bit messy and I have some clean up to do, but I cut out four legs in far less time than it took me to cut the table top. Next up: grinding off the excess and shaping the legs. I think I’ll do that next week as I have a planter to make and it should be easy to assemble and solder that at home.

I’m beginning to like my table model and would love to make it life-size someday. I just don’t even want to think how heavy the thing would be! I’ve designed it to be 7 ft. x 4 ft solid steel. Guess I’d have to reinforce the floors.

It’s been a week of weather weirdness and it’s only Wednesday! Monday was warm, around 60, but the wind was terrible. Still, I wasn’t complaining because at least it wasn’t in the single digits. Yesterday dawned sunny and 55 but the wind was still gusty. Around 9 a.m. it was 61. I was supposed to go over to school at 1 p.m. and I’d heard the temperature was going to drop but I wasn’t prepared for the shock when I ventured outside. Temps had dropped about 20 degrees and the wind was making everything bitter cold. I trudged over to school and was halfway through my studio monitoring when I noticed it was snowing. Not hard enough to accumulate, but it was blowing around and it had gotten even colder. Around 4 p.m. I went to the grocery store (along with half the population, apparently) and it was getting more and more miserable as the day turned into evening. Today it’s sunny, but very cold (30 degrees as I type this). It won’t warm up much and tomorrow is looking very gloomy with a prediction of 5-8″ of snow. Ick!

It’s weird because I used to love winter. I still love the clothes, mainly my boots, but the season has lost its luster. January and February are just cold, grey and depressing. While I don’t look forward to the long, hot days of summer, I’ll take a 60 degree day over this cold crap. Hope you’re warm today. I’ll be camping out in front of the space heater!

Ever have one of those weeks where nothing seems to go right and you get more and more grumpy as the week progresses? Well, that was my last week in a nutshell. But I’m looking at this week as a fresh start, a do-over if you will. Even though my workout wasn’t great, I still got up and did it. Even though I’m still agonizing over my table design, I have a scale model made and several drawings for class today. And even though it’s cloudy and windy, we’re going to be in the 60s.

So I think this week will be better. Hope yours is too.

I’m not one to play video games. I didn’t do it much in the 80s and never got into them later in life. Until now. Last weekend Steve and I bought Rock Band for our Sony X-Box (well, Steve’s X-Box) after playing it at Matt and Sarah’s house a couple of weeks ago. Little did my mom know, when she was paying for my voice lessons back in the 80s, that I would be using my skills to score 98% singing “I Think I’m Paranoid” by Garbage. Yep, I’m sure she’s proud. The game has you form a rock band, ours is called The NeverNudes, create your persona (I’m Lindsay and Steve is Tobias), then play or sing and score points to win money and gigs. If you don’t play well, you get booed off the stage, but if another player is doing well they can save the band. Right now we have instruments for three players - drums, bass/guitar, vocals - but we can add another to form a complete band. Except The NeverNudes have room for only one more player (Maeby). If you don’t understand the meaning of our band’s name or our personas then you’ve obviously never watched Arrested Development.

It’s a fun game, but actually challenging. The drums are the hardest instrument and I can only play them on the slow songs. The bass is pretty easy and vocals are a snap for me, but I have yet to try guitar. All in all, the most fun game I’ve played in a long time. Now I just have to “earn” the rights to play more songs. Guess I know what we’ll be doing this weekend!

Well, we bit the bullet and bought a new car. Not just any new car, the Honda Fit, a hatchback Civic, I guess. It was a tough decision because it meant trading in the car Steve and I bought less than 6 months after we were married - our trusty Honda Civic. This little gem has given us absolutely no trouble in the almost 12 years we’ve had it. It had only 109,000 miles on it and was still in great shape cosmetically, but reality told us we were living on borrowed time. Steve has been doing more traveling for work and needed a reliable car for the trips.

Wednesday evening Steve poked his head in my studio and asked me if I had a minute. I knew by the sound of his voice and the look on his face he’d brought home a car. We drove it around and I knew, if we could afford it, the car was going to be ours. After some number crunching and a reality check (did we really need this?) we bought it and it’s been fun toodling around town in it.

So, I give you the new TASK (that stands for Tammy and Steve Kirks) mobile:

Monday I received my first assignment and, let me tell you, I wasn’t thrilled. Rather than make jewelry (I love to work with tiny things) we were asked to create a scale model of a table. This model is to be no smaller than 1/10 the intended finished size and must keep everything in perspective. At first I thought, “um, I don’t think so,” then I figured I’d do it because I’m an overachiever who refuses to back down from an assignment. Plus, Kevin told us he would be teaching us scale drawing (which I’ve never done), photographing said table and entering shows. The idea is that the best tables will be submitted to Lark Books for their 500 series. Today we’re supposed to have 10 drawings of table ideas. I’ve been working on some and the best idea I have so far is a dining room table with a grow-you-own centerpiece. It will have a removable rectangle in the center that sits flush with the surface and you can plant your own flowers, decorative grass or plant. Hokey? Maybe. We’ll see what happens in class today. I still have time to come up with something else semi-exciting.

Today is the first day of school and I admit I’m not mentally ready for it. Still, I need it desperately. I need the schedule, the assignments and the challenge to my creativity. I’ve been coasting along since last spring and need a metalsmith kick in the pants.

This semester I’ll be exploring blacksmithing, but only enough to learn to make some tools. I told my instructor, Kevin, that I didn’t want to spend all my time in front of the forge. Since he’s a whiz at mechanisms, we agreed that he’d teach me how to make all my pieces move. This will require some math skills, which we all know I do not posses. This is either going to be a very exciting time or the longest semester of my life!

It seems like only yesterday but at the same time, it seems like a distant memory. It was one year ago this weekend that we had a massive ice storm that paralyzed the city for over two weeks and gave us all a new appreciation for electricity and heat. That Friday, the storm had been predicted as sleet and ice, but I don’t remember anything about accumulation. I do remember tearing up our bathroom floor with the help of friend, Kevin French, in anticipation of getting the floor tiled during the weekend. Steve called from Lowe’s to inform us that it was sleeting and getting really nasty. At this point, Kevin and I had the entire floor up (well, Kevin did most of it) and were waiting for Steve to come home with the subfloor and backerboard. At one point, we got Kevin’s wife, Valerie, and all went to dinner. The plan was to finish the subfloor that night and get the tiling started on Saturday. Then the electricity went off at 8:40 p.m. and didn’t return for nine days. We were among the lucky ones. A friend had left us the keys to his empty home, which never lost power, and we bunked there during the outage. The temperature in our house fell to 29 degrees during that time and we lost all the food out of our freezer and refrigerator due to poor planning (we could have taken it to the other house, but never got around to it), but we were warm and safe.

The power returned but we were still faced with a destroyed bathroom, a messy house, an empty ‘fridge, a yard to clean and another house to clean where we’d stayed. It was weeks before we felt normal.

This year, January gave us a massive storm filled with tornadoes but power was only out for 4 hours. But that was one night and we survived. All this drama gives us a perspective on what’s important. We have our family and friends who stayed safe during both events and that’s really all that matters.

Valerie sent me this yesterday and it made me laugh until I cried. A perfect way to start the weekend.

This just in…it’s going to be a colorful spring in the fashion world. I recently learned that Swedish retail giant, H & M, is pairing with my favorite Finnish textile company, Marimekko to produce a spring line which is guaranteed to be colorful, funky and cool. The line debuts in April so I need to make plans to visit the nearest store which is in St. Louis. See you there!