Return to the Bookbinder' Workshop

 Looking back at my older posts, the first two components for this workshop project arrived on my work table for Christmas 2022. The other components (so far) arrived for my birthday last year around this time, I believe. However, I have been working all along on the items to go into the workshop, as they can be made with hand tools while the others need table saws and drill presses. MDF is the basic wood for miniature structures, as it forms the "carcass", as it's often called, for the finished project. There will be layering of decorative features on the outside eventually.

The building is based on typical Dutch village architecture in the Zaan River area, northeast of Amsterdam. These were wooden fishermen's houses, two stories with decorative false fronts, generally two rooms up and two rooms down, with a central staircase. Shops and businesses were housed in very similar structures, and were traditionally painted a vivid green colour, with white bargeboard (Victorian gingerbread) trim. You can check out an open-air museum that houses a number of these homes, along with a large collection of operating windmills, by looking up "Zaanse Schans Museum".

This building has one large room upstairs, and one downstairs. There will be a false back wall with windows and if I can fit it, a door, leading outside, with the actual back wall featuring a photo of a country scene along a river or perhaps an industrial backyard - it depends on what I can find! Along the left wall is a staircase with a half landing, leading to the upper floor. This floor is storage, office space and mail room space, with a table to sit and eat your lunch at. The front facade has one upper window in the peak, and a central door flanked by two windows. I may change that to one large window, however, with an offset door.

This is an overview of the equipment realised so far; shelving and work tables, of course, but also a block for hammering leather along with the heavy wooden maul, hand book presses, a press aide, sewing bench, bookbinder's guillotine, a small box with a padded leather top and a drawer that holds gold leaf sheets, and some small tools, brushes, glue pots, small hammer, etc. Still to come are a bookbinder's saddle and a large floor press.

And of course, endless tool-type items; knives, engraving rollers for decorative leather work, paper, glues, cardboard, and the usual sort of workshop clutter. Funny thing: I volunteer for museum accession work, and this past week a question came up regarding some tools found in a museum storage area that no one was able to identify. However, I recognised them as the engraving rollers from a bookbinder's workshop. A quick look at the original file listed the tools as.... engraving rollers for leather work on book covers! Research for minis can make you look very clever....

I'll feature the items in more detail starting this week. We're away for Canadian Thanksgiving, which is also a family birthday and a family wedding weekend, as well as our first chance to see the house and land my son and his wife (and puppies) moved on to in July. My son will be away, but we'll visit with our daughter-in-law and my husband's sister, the birthday girl. The wedding is a small affair, the widower of a cousin of whom we are all fond, to an old friend. We're all happy they found each other again!

Testing....

 This is a test to see if we can move photos, and it appears this one, at least, worked. It's not an item I made, as it is life-size, but one I'm hoping to make in scale for my bookbinder's workshop project, based on this photo and the measurements that were included with it. (This Real Life press is/was offered for sale, and I love the sturdy wooden gestalt of it much more than the instructions for the press that came with the project). It's my hope that I can now begin to showcase photos of some of the pieces I have made in scale for that project.

It's become a very frustrating multi-step job to do the photo thing; we've had to move all old photos off my old camera off the card into a file. Moving a photo at the moment involves the "gallery" setting as well as moving between various files, but we're hoping to simplify the process. If we can't, I'll hire a computer guru to come and work with me at home for a couple of hours. The new computer we got earlier this year lost my entire address book while the info was being transferred, and the newer program has just made every function that much more complicated, and I'm not happy with the whole experience. There was some sort of non-communication with older, less pixilated photos on the old photo card. I'm barely literate in computer stuff....

I wish I could just verbally dictate to my computer, along the lines of "just take that photo of the press and move it to the top of the new blog entry"  -- but I suspect that isn't far off with all the AI stuff currently.

That would be a whole another thing, as I am very much NOT impressed with AI sub-titling; we end up laughing ourselves silly sometimes about the errors a supposed marvelous "brain" makes!

Just About Ready to Give Up....

 Well, here we are half a year later, and I'm still not able to move photos into my blog page. The Carpenter-in-Chief is trying to find time to help me, but all we know at this point, after a visit to a camera store and then a computer geek outfit, is that my new camera will not interact with old photos taken on the older camera. This has something to do with the amount of pixels, I understand. The solution is to move all old photos to a memory stick, delete them from the camera card, and then the current camera card should, once again, be able to interface correctly with the new computer. 

Time is very difficult to come by, as the C-in-C is involved in a lot of volunteer work. When he does have time, other things like a vacation to visit family out west or a dying garden  (we're in a drought) understandably take precedence, along with his increasing volunteer work helping newcomers deal with government paperwork.

The bookbinder's workshop I began last Fall is still being worked on, with a lot of the furnishings and the tools, machinery etc. being well under way or done, but there is no time really to deal with the actual building carcass. I had hoped to have the building ready to accept all the furnishings in six weeks from now, but that is unlikely to happen. 

The wooden shoe workshop needs its lighting done before I can finish that project. Several smaller projects I started to fill in time are also waiting for help, as it's becoming increasingly difficult to source needed materials on the internet (we have no hobby shops here in town!).

In the meantime, our son and his wife moved from Alberta to Nova Scotia, and we have yet to go visit and see their new house. We did visit with our daughters in Alberta, as well as with my brother on Vancouver Island, and while I was out there my youngest daughter gave me a book nook project kit that I'm dying to start on. However, given the backlog of projects currently on my storage shelves, I can't in good conscience start something else before I finish some nearly finished projects....

I'll soon have another birthday, and just hope I can hang around long enough to finish my projects (and that includes my other hobbies, like quilting, sewing and knitting).

I need to find the Fountain of Youth!

Still Around, Believe It or Not!

 A lot has happened since my last post - in October - and I'm still at it with  miniatures, although with all the mess I created while "cleaning up" not all that many minis have gotten done.

I'm still not able to get at my photos, but as I've now changed computer programmes, I hope to figure that out in the near future. I had been operating on Windows 12, but I'm now somewhat more modern!

Our mini get-togethers have changed to Tuesdays, and as I prescribed a thorough sort-out of all my far too many hobby projects, I've been taking various knitting, sewing and embroidering projects rather than mini ones to those.

Don't give up on me, I will now be able to at least blog again.

Oh Boy!

 My house looks like a disaster area, as my daughter has used her last day with us here to go through all the boxes that need to move to the other side of the country. In the process, we discovered that two large portfolios of art work were totally destroyed by mould; somehow, they got wet and then the fungus began to grow. It's kind of heart-breaking to see all those sketches, drawings and paintings end up in a bonfire.

We have NOT had time to go over the camera, so the Carpenter-in-Chief will try, once again, to help me figure out how to move photos to the blog. Our daughter's flight leaves at 5:45 tomorrow morning, which means having to be at the airport at 4:45, and it is at least a half hour's drive. I will be more than just slightly worn out tomorrow, and will have to make do with perhaps three hours of sleep, as we are having a visit with her mother-in-law this evening.

However, the good news is that our mini/craft afternoons will be resuming, and I will definitely stay awake for that. Both of my mini partners have moved from houses to apartments, so it has been a very long job to thin down decades of accumulation for them. Many minis have also had to go....

I've had a significant birthday, and have received the beginnings of a very large 1/12 scale pub, that was begun at least 25 years ago, so I had better get moving.

Thank you for continuing checking out the blog, one way or another I will start posting progress on a great many projects within a few days.

Still Here, Still Working....

 The previous owner of my newest camera arrives in a week, and will hopefully give me some help in how to move photos from the camera to the desktop and from there to the blog. I was, kind of, under the impression that improvements in electronic technology meant that operating these various computer-assisted items would become easier, but it appears that they just become more and more complex, difficult for those of us who are, ahem, older! I long for the day when all my devices will respond to my voice commands!

There is another carpet in the making, rather a complex design that I can only do for a little while each day, as my fingers cramp up. There have been a few non-urgent health issues, that have required in the last month three or more doctors' visits to deal with; among other things, I dealt with a bout of shingles on my, shall we say, "sitting surfaces", which made me rather short-tempered and not at all prepared to deal with complicated stuff. Lots of simple knitting, some puzzles, and a couple of nice days out have helped to deal with it all. The end of the road to recovery is just around the corner now, but I desperately need a week of decent sleep to be up to par again.

On my work table right now are two Christmas vignettes, one of which I hope will leave with my visitor, my younger daughter, as it is hers; we began it together, but with the distances between us now (6 or so hours by plane) it has languished, but I really would like it to be usable this coming Christmas. The other Christmas vignette is a Christmas market stall, mine unless one of my children or their partners would like it, that just needs a little tweaking and gluing to be done. I need space for the other vignettes I've been working on!

I hope to have everything up and running again in a week and a half or so. Thanks to all of you for sticking with me, it is much appreciated.

Please Bear With Me and My Camera(s)....

 This may be a bit of a messy post, as we're experiencing camera woes once again. The camera I was using has developed a mind of its own, and is flipping photos I want to import to the blog from horizontal to vertical;  no amount of editing is fixing the issue.

This little rug is now done; it was partially done, but I ran out of the background floss colour, which had no number or band on it, and finally broke down during my recent vacation and pulled out the entire previous background. I don't like pulling out! The colour scheme is interesting; it is from a very old (50 years or so) pamphlet I picked up second-hand some years ago. The size makes it useful for both 1.12 as a small rug, or in half scale as a full-size rug.

Now, this is the photo that absolutely WILL NOT behave! I have flipped it numerous times, and even cropped it to get rid of the stain on the surface to the left, but nothing works. It is from the book that I was given recently, and I did it first because I really like this blue and cream colour scheme. It is also a smaller rug - I worked it in 22 ct. instead of 18, as the pattern recommended - and will also suit both 1/12 and half scale.

This is where the mess really took off. The old camera was replaced by a new-to-me camera, that has more pixels. It came to me without a manual, and although we have managed to get it to show the thumb-nail photos on the old card, it will not allow me to take photos yet. It appears to take the photo, the flash goes, but then when I go to download it to the computer, there is no photo there. So, you'll just have to trust me when I say that I also finished a lovely Bokhara rug, in browns, reds and cream. When we figure out the new (old) camera, I'll post a photo.

In the works also are grapes; they are still too purple for my taste, which means discarding that batch of clay and starting over. I've "lost" my recipe for lovely red grapes I made a few years ago, and suspect that the instructions I tried to use this past week just gave the wrong quantities of clay to mix. I'll try again!

Baskets are also on my work table; I'm making a wooden basket with two bail handles, hopefully for the grapes when I make them. I'd also like to try making woven baskets out of card, as with a bit of patience and paint they can be made to look a lot like ash splint baskets.

Hopefully we can figure out what is going on with the cameras soon!