Kanna

My first kanna arrived today all the way from Japan:

I don't know what this says:

...but the dai is a nice quarter sawn piece of oak...

...this says the same thing as the box, which I'm guessing is "katsusaburo", the name of the plane..

...overall a neat thing, but due to some humidity issues (or lack thereof) I'm still waiting to get to use it. You see the blade is stuck and I can't get it out to make the modifications needed to the dai that are required for a new kanna. I think that traveling from humid Japan to the dry Canadian winter of Ontario has caused the block to dry out and shrink quite a bit and lock the blade in place.

Engineers.......

Last week I got the chance to give a lecture to a class I'm TAing at the University of Waterloo. The course is based around social design factors and is meant to be a course that helps expand the engineering students' perspective about the design process. Here's a link to my slides:

Craft, Design, and the Engineer

A little Nakashima, a little Lago, and some Sam Maloof for good measure...getting the opportunity to talk about these things was nice because it gave me a chance to think about how the design of something as simple as a chair can be really quite a complex thing. Some of the students really seemed to appreciate what I was talking about...that was really rewarding.

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.

KW-WCC

So I'm sharpening in my kitchen these days, not the greatest set up, but it gets the job done. I'm sharpening because I'm now back to working, this time out of the KW-WCC. The KW Woodworking and Craft Centre is quite the place, a whole bunch of great equipment and a whole bunch of old guys whose wives want them out of the house. If you need a place to work in Waterloo I'd definitely recommend it.

A New Show - Three F's

There's a new show coming up featuring the work of me and a couple of my friends. There will be great photographs, fantastic fashion, and some nice furniture. It will all weave together with the themes of wood and destruction.

Reception and show are from 2-5pm, Sunday February 7th, at Sabletine Fine Pastries, 203 King St. S., Waterloo ON.

Come out, bring your friends, and come see some great local art and craft!