Sunday, January 24, 2010

An appreciation for handmade things, pt. 2...

by Mike Worley

Strange things have come in of late. For one thing, I've received 2 suspicious e-mails from folks' hotmail accounts. Got a confirmation on one that it wasn't sent from the addressee, and that the link sent had some viral potentials. Beware of something like these if they come your way. Sorry for the digression.

I've also had some potential gigs float in. If they solidify, I'll reveal more. BID.

My dad, years ago, got a "bug" to do some hobby-ish type of things in his workshop. We had been out to Colorado to visit family friends on a vacation, and my dad's friend was a shop teacher. It was a lot like a retro episode of "Home Improvement" with the tool oogling, grunting and scratching, but my dad came back with the idea he was going to make hanging lamps shaped like bunches of grapes. He would look for driftwood for the "stems" and assemble chicken wire around light fixtures he bought at the hardware store. At hobby stores, he found round glass ampules and would fill them with colored resin with a wire stem taped up with green. Eventually he would have to break the glass to release the hardened "grapes," and then bind them individually to the chicken wire.

He only made four--one for our house, one for my grandmother, and his two of his sisters got one for their homes. He did them in red, purple, yellow, and green. We had an old hanging lamp in our living room, and it was well past "expiration date," so I wondered how he made them, to wit I was informed that my folks had my grandmother's from her passing. Now it is mine and hanging in my living room...

Still may see about trying to make some for myself.

I posted about this earlier and retrieved my camera from my folk's, having left it there over the Christmas holidays. As I had written earlier--my great grandmother had crocheted the individual afghan squares way back in the '60's, and my mother assembled them this year for gifts to my brother and I. Here's how it looks...


Be well!

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