Get a Handle on It!

I've started on a handled smoothing plane made out of ziricote...I've just got the handle roughed out, but I'm looking forward to working a bit more on it. I've said it before, but ziricote is a bizarre wood to work.

On a completely different topic I was thinking about how weird it is to have your work evaluated by people. For the past year or so I've had a coffee table on display at a cafe that I frequent pretty regularly, and it's kind of a strange experience to hide behind a coffee and hear people talk candidly about your work without them realizing you're person who made the thing they're talking about. Most of the time people seem to like my work, or even really like it, but I've definitely had a couple of bad reviews too. Selling craft is hard, real hard. It's definitely something I need to work on.

ABC's

So I've decided to try to learn some Japanese. To be honest, all of those "character" languages have kind of scared me as a roman alphabet user, but apparently the Japanese have sort of combined the best of both worlds. Although they do use some pictograms, where one character basically means an entire word, for the most part their language is syllabic with syllagrams for the limited number of syllables in their language. According to the book I'm reading there are about 110 basic sounds in Japanese, versus about 8000 in English, which also makes things a lot easier to wrap your head around.

The characters at the top of this post represent the basic vowel sounds, and also my attempt to start learning the hiragana character set. This is the equivalent of a little kid learning how to print, and is a humbling experience. It's on to the consonantish sounds tomorrow and trying to imprint the strokes into my brain.

Thanks for the show!

We had our show today, Three F's, and it was a great success. Thanks to everyone who came out and thanks to Nik and Adam for showing their work with me. An extra special thanks to the fine folks at Sablétine fine pastries for hosting us.