My First Painting - super fun

Back in 2019, one weekend my daughter was going to be off at the grandparents getting spoiled.  My wife and I had a long weekend to ourselves.  I found a place that does those wine and painting events and scheduled a nice date night that started with dinner.  My wife is an artist by day and hobby so she was super excited for this date.  I was looking forward to it but was a bit apprehensive as I have never painted.  It always looked hard (same way I feel about musical instruments).

It was a ton of fun.  The instructor takes you through the how to process and they and assistants area around to help. At the end of a couple of hours we had trees.  Of course we were nerdy and have branches that span across both paintings connecting them.  I carved our initials on one the tree and my wife did likewise.

If your wife suggests it, I say go for it or surprise her.  It will be a fun night.  What I liked about it was I got that same buzz and thrill as when I made my first Paul Sellers wall clock.  I was very new to woodworking and when I finished the clock I was super thrilled because it looked pretty good.  Also while doing it, at points you could feel the creative juices flowing (another thing I like about woodworking).  It's hard to get that buzz and it only took two hours of work.  I know that much like woodworking, painting is an art and that one can get better and better.  I will stick with woodworking but I will definitely take my wife on another date there.  It was too fun not to.

Very Happy to be a Hobby Woodworker

NOTE:  Sorry for all the writing.  It's something I wanted to document (so hopefully some day my daughter can read it).  There are pictures of my little slice of heaven below if you want to skip to that.

In my early 40s, I have a watershed moment.  My daughter was about 9 months old an in daycare.  As most parents with young children can attest to, my daughter and my wife and I caught all kinds of colds for the first year or so while she was in day care.  There was one cold that after two or three weeks was handing on and on separate weeks I had taken some sick days to rest.  This was very unusual.  Typically if I take a sick day and rest up over the following weekend the cold subsides. This one wasn't, as such I called my doctor. I had been using the same doctor for 15 years and really liked her.  I considered to be my age when in actuality she was 15 years older.

When I called to make an appointment, I was informed that she had died from breast cancer.  I was stunned and without words.  Here was someone my age who had passed away.  We all know this happens but this one hit home.  There had been many things I had been putting off doing.  I was living in a condo and wanted to be in a house.  By having a house, I could woodwork.  Yes, I know it's possible in a small space but at the time I wasn't thinking of hand tools.  Also, my doctor dying made me think of the other things I had wanted to explore.  I was thinking that in my last 10 or 15 years of a working career I might want to be a woodworker or teach college chemistry.

Again, the impact of the death stuck with me to the pint that within six months we had sold the condo, I was teaching one night a week at a local college.  After a year or two in the home I had remodeled the garage and bought my woodworking tools to start my woodworking journey.

I learned a few things: 

 I still liked my career but I had to move to a small start up to appreciate that.  I had loved the big company I was at and am very grateful for my experience there.  In order to feel revitalized, I needed to be at a small startup when I could leverage all that I knew how to do to help a small band of folks push the frontiers of medicine.

I liked teach college chem a lot -the one night a week I teach at my almamater is very fun and I have great faith in the upcoming generation.  I didn't want to jump into it full time.  When I "retire" my dream is to teach two (possibly three) days a week.  It's so much fun. Plus since I don't depend on the money, I don't worry about getting laid off or if I don't dot the i's and cross all the t's.  I really do focus on trying to do the best job at teaching the students.  I don't care about all of the other stuff.

And for woodworking, I gave serious thought to doing it full time.  I have decided I will keep it as a hobby.  I enjoy working my hands and the pride in making things.  I have decided that I don't want it to do it for a living.  What I like about doing it as a hobby is that I really do get to pick and chose to do what I want.  I can take as long as I want and not have to worry about pay.  If I screw up and have made a piece of hardwood firewood, I don't worry about it eating into my profits.  I typically do a morning session, long lunch, then an afternoon session.  Three to five hours in the shop on one or both weekend days makes me a happy camper.

If you have been patient enough to read all of this, below are some recent pics (Jun 2020) of my workshop.  It is really just a wall or two inside the garage.  I can work with the cars being in  but I like to pull them out.  In a future post I will talk more about what I like and would do differently (ac, off a cement slab).

Life is good.  I still think about my poor doctor.  I feel sad she died young but I have taken that event to make changes in my life that I think she would be please with.  Now if I can just loose the weight she would be even happier as she looks down on me.

Figure 1.  The main workbench.

Figure 2 To my right side some tools I use less frequently.

Figure 3 The junk bench.  At some point I need to clean up this area and build a proper bench for the space.

Figure 4.  Two and half shelves I have to store my wood.

Maybe get a little blister on your finger ..... Seller's wall clock continues

I was able to spend a good amount of the time in the garage woodworking this past weekend.  I was able to move on to do the final few steps of wood working.  I cut out the panel and then marked the lines for making a raised panel as well as the location of the clock.  I figured it was better to mark off the clock location now while everything was full sized stock.  This was me trying to apply a lesson from earlier in the clock making.  I had put in the beads before making off the final length and I had some issues scribing my lines when not all was square.  I'm sure it will be something I outgrow.  Till then, I figure it can't hurt to try and mark with full dimensional material when possible.

As for making the raised panel with my hand plane.  It wasn't too bad.  I didn't get crisp clean diagonals (most easy to see in the last photo) where the two directions meet.  Given it's my first time doing this, I was happy.  Also, since I needed to narrow the width on both sides to fit the grooved, rails and stiles, I decided to put a raised panel on each side.  It gave me more practice.

It was a bit harder than I thought it would be to get the panel edges thin enough to fit into the grooves but I was patient.  I apparently made the panel to wide and tall.  I more or less got the width adjusted by planning the same number of strokes on each side so it stay centered.  It was also too tall by about a quarter of an inch.  I will have to measure more carefully (though I thought I had).  I was getting tired at that point so I stopped and will finish getting it to fit at a later day.  When I'm tired I'm more likely to do something wrong.

Prior to discovering the panel fit issue, I cut out the hole for the clock face using my coping saw.  It wasn't that hard to do but getting the coping saw blade reinstalled when I put it through the panel was a bit difficult.  The kind of thing where you need three hands a pet monkey to help you out.  Again, deep breath, be patient and all works out.  After cutting the hole out, I took a rasp to clean the hole so it looks clean and tidy.  Not that anyone would see it.  Just my peace of mind.  Something I was proud of - I didn't have a compass to draw a circle so I needed to buy one.  I went online to see if there was any info on what works well and what doesn't.  If you were to believe the internet, a $100ish Starett compass is what is needed.  I didn't want to spend that much.  At WoodCraft, I bought a $7 compass and it worked just fine for me.  Again, being a newbie, I know some tools are junk and some aren't.  Glad I tried the inexpensive option first.  I also make it a point to tell the wife how I "saved" money but not buying the most expensive option first.  Maybe if I made lots of holes all day and needed tight tolerances, there would be a more suitable tool.  For my needs, I think I am done with getting a compass.

All in all a good day.  A day working in the shop beats a day on the couch.  The next day, my index finger was hurting and I couldn't figure out why.  I had used the plane so much I had a blister forming.  It brought a smile to my face.