Some new projects, while recuperating

It's been longer than I'd like since last posting here, due to a one-two punch combo: spending a week in California visiting my family over Memorial Day, and then just as I was settling back into a routine upon my return I came down with something that knocked me out for a week. I'm over it now, thankfully; while it wasn't particularly virulent it was tenacious, and just kept hanging on several days after I expected it to clear up.

Although I wasn't feeling particularly creative while ill, I found such creativity as I had focused on some hobbies I hadn't done much with in a while. I turned my hand to wood-burning again, for really only the second time since I tried it soon after moving back to Hawaii while my things were in transit. I had a piece of wood that I'd picked up last year and never done anything with, so I was able to use it for something that'd been on my mind for a while, ever since Gemini Observatory got a new logo last year. The new logo uses just a few shades of orange/brown, making it fairly simple to mimic with wood-burning. At least, that's what I thought, and it did sort-of work out that way in the end, it just took some trial-and-error to figure out which of the various interchangeable tips that came with my wood-burning set could produce what level of darkening. Anyway, here's the finished result:

The logo is intended to represent the two telescopes of Gemini (north and south), hence the negative space line down the middle (and not, as some joked, representing a serious structural flaw in the telescopes!). There's basically just three different levels of orange in the original logo, so the stars should all be the same lightest shade as seen in the telescopes, but such are the pitfalls of experimenting on your canvas. I did learn some interesting stuff about wood-burning from this project, though, so it was a good learning experience. Principally, the fact that it's difficult to get a solid gradient; you can approximate it with a hatched pattern (and I think I did a decent job of that), but there can be differences in the wood grain itself which make it burn faster or slower at different point. (There's a wavy dark mostly-horizontal line in the medium-dark section of the dome on the right, just below the windows, where a line in the wood burned so fast that it got dark no matter how quickly I moved the tip over it.)

Anyway, it was a fun little project, and I'd like to get better at wood-burning, maybe combine it with painting or something in the future. That's something I haven't really gotten back to other than a few abortive attempts at pictures, but instead, this week I found motivation to get back into crochet; and not only that, but to finish a project started and abandoned all the way back in 2017, when I moved to Australia:

Yes, I had a crochet lei in progress that I ended up leaving behind with the rest of my crochet equipment and some other things with some friends while I was away. What I hadn't anticipated was missing crochet enough to pick up some more hooks and yarn in Australia, leading to something of a duplication of effort; but this is the first time I've gone back and looked at what I left behind here. I found this in-progress lei, and since it was already started it was easy to get back into the swing of things and finish it. The center “backbone” (as it were) was done, and maybe 15% of the flowers; I wasn't able to successfully reverse-engineer the stitch sequence I was using back then, but I found one close enough to mimic it. (Though you might be able to work out the original section in the photo above if you squint.)

It's been good to get back to doing something with my hands, and it'll be nice to have something to do in meetings again. We'll see where things go. I was recently given a big collection of knitting needles as well, and I wouldn't mind trying my hand at more knitting in the future. And now that I'm back to mostly-healthy I might have some other projects to share soon – I had a great time flying drones with my brothers in California and have some footage that's begging for editing. But for now, I need to get some sleep, so I'll leave it here. A hui hou!

Fake edit: I realize, looking back at my posts from around the end of 2021, that I don't think I ever mentioned my first foray into wood-burning. A friend at Swinburne had suggested I might find it interesting, so after I first moved into my current place in November 2021 (and while the majority of my hobby materials were in transit) I picked up a little wood-burning kit at Wal-mart for something like $12. It's essentially a soldering iron and some interchangeable tips, nothing too fancy, but I find there's a surprising amount of nuance that can be achieved. Anyway, I picked up a cheap piece of wood along with it and started doodling, ending up with the scene below:

This one, I think, shows the strengths of wood-burning off better; it's very good at creating a sense of natural depth and subtle nuance, rather than my attempts at solid gradients above. I didn't have much of a plan when starting this piece (and it probably shows), intending it mostly as a scratch pad for experimentation, but everything I put down kept working so well that it ended up being a picture with very little I wasn't at least satisfied with. Anyway, that's the extent of my wood-burning experience to date, but as mentioned I'd like to practice more with it in future. For my second project, the one above, I experimented with scratching the outlines of the areas into the wood first, allowing me to invisibly sketch a picture to fill later; that worked pretty well, I think, so I'll be interested to see where that might lead.