Handles fitted and now for attaching the feet

 So pleased to say here are the handles …

Ok so the handles were really ok to fit in the end.  However, the feet have been giving me problems.  I need to delve into the friendless world of carpentry to get those right.  Nothing makes me more annoyed than furniture you are scared to move because the legs are precarious.  I want hanger bolts M6 size and T- nuts M6 too.  

I have to go now because I had a really bad night where I think my parents gave me Covid.  I’ve been coughing for most of the night and feel like a zombie today, oh dear the effort of it all!  Also our road is regularly visited by a very large badger that raids our food waste bins the night before bin day.  I have met this outsized miniature hippo of a badger face to face, I don’t know who was more scared of who but let me tell you they are weird looking close up, to be sure.  His coat was very coarse and his head was the most odd shape, but saying all of that, his Mammalian gaze was just as engaging as a cat or dog.  I was pleased to see he was so big and fat and wondered how old he was.  I put him at about middle adulthood because his shoulders were immense.  No cat or dog walks around with shoulders like that!  Well of course I shrieked when I saw him and he jumped in surprise which made me smile afterwards, but I didn’t hang around because I felt uneasy at the thought of his dental profile and jaw strength, kind of thing.  I have a very very vivid imagination.  Not that it does me a lot of good, on a day to day basis, but at least I can make it serve me well for these artistic projects.

I came across an old sketchbook the other day where I had scribbled “I hate art”.  I remember doing that, because I could see what I was sketching and I remembered that my friend had almost head butted me in a car park, because she was getting divorced and I sketched various trees at her allotment.  I never saw her again and I forgot all about the trees, but I remember thinking that art had only really caused me pain and didn’t get me any money, made me lots of enemies and consumed large amounts of time that could have been spent studying to do medicine or accounts, my two other loves.  

I’m going to stop there because I’m starting to get weepy, which is so feminine and stupid.  

If I had  been born a man I would have had the strength of my convictions etc, instead I have been “born into the slavery of being a girl”.  

Anyway, there are two things that I have never felt or experienced in any way, one is being bored, the other is being lonely.  Which I am noticing now is extremely useful.

Faux patina update

 When they say ‘the material suggests’ it really means go with the flow…so I did.

Turns out this chest of drawers has a subtle theme and is about the memory of dreaming as a kid….more later.

So the drawer fronts were distressed with sandpaper and made to look vintage.  As I worked away I couldn’t help associating the look and feel of old maps with old worn atlases that we used to have in school and that’s when I decided the edges of the frame should look like old school desks.  So then I worked away at distressing the front of the drawers with felt tips, paint, a Stanley knife and latex paint to look like old school wooden rulers and desks.  I really like that association and it makes me remember dreaming in school of all the places I hoped to travel to in years to come.

Then when I came to do the legs, I decided to use a metallic paint that lends itself really well to pearlised patina.  I arrived at all these decisions basically because I had certain problems that I had to address, especially as the piece has to fit in my bedroom.  I didn’t want the little chest to come out too far forward in the sense that the colour was too saturated and bright.  

Then after all that gold paint around the top and the sides and the aged map, I realised the feet or legs had to somehow link up with the crystal handles and pop as it were.  

What do the feet remind you of?

Correct, merry-go-round horses at Fun Fairs!  I think that association is something I just couldn’t ignore and so I maxed that one out.

So now my big thing is varnishing the piece, fixing some edges down with stronger glue, then attaching the feet and handles.

Alas, the template I made for the drawer handle holes was far from perfect and I had some cold sweats with those.  I still need to work on that.  

I am breaking down each section to be worked into half hour slots.  I find this really helps me to make consistent progress and dispenses with indecisive paralysis, because all the thinking time is done away from the item.  If my template had been completely symmetrical then I would’ve finished by now.  I’ve marked up the top and bottom of the template now, so hopefully for the next set of drawers I won’t have all this bother.

Faux patina gold chest of drawers

 Ok so things have moved on.  Here is the finished surface.  It took four sessions to build up the complexity.   I used various tools and different light sources.  The more I worked on it, the more it looked like metal.  Halfway through I worried I would never pull it off, as they say, because it began to become muddy.  That’s when I realised I was working light to dark, dark to light, dull to shine, then shine to dull, then finally back to shine, if that makes any sense. I like the way the tissue paper texture no longer looks like paper but the undulations, crevices and fissures of a prehistoric intergalactic explosion, as in how all gold was originally formed.

Now a funny thing happened to me twice, if you eva….

I showed a guy a photo of the Celtic dog while we were having dinner with our families in the country and he didn’t believe it was embroidery??

Then two weeks later I go to the coast with my friend and show her the picture and she too cannot understand or believe it’s embroidery, at which point I started heartily laughing.

QED ppl !