New Tools for the New Year

Father Christmas was quite generous this year, bringing me a selection of carving tools.

All of them are from Morakniv of Sweden. Shown in the picture is a no.164 hook knife, 106 sloyd knife, 120 wood carving knife and 220 drawknife/splitter.

All except the hook knife have arrived with a good edge on them so I might be able to get away with just giving them a strop before their first use.

Mora 164s tend to arrive quite blunt as a rule so I’ve had to put in a bit of work to get it up to a usable sharpness. It’s not quite there yet but it’s sharper than it was. Hopefully I’ll be able to get it up and running soon so I can carve some spoons and bowls. Although I could really do with some nice green wood to make the most of it.

The method I used for sharpening the 164 is one I saw on youtube. Watch the video if you’re interested in the process because the uploader can explain it a lot better than I can.

This Year’s Gifts Part 1

One of the main reasons I started getting into crafts was to make gifts for other people. Over the last year or two I’ve made a few things as gifts for members of my family. A couple of candles, a few brooches, nothing particularly adventurous.

This year I’ve had a couple of requests from my mum and my nanna to make some candles. My mum wanted a nice teacup candle for my great-aunt and my nanna wanted a simple container candle for a friend of hers.

This is what I started off with, two empty containers. Can’t say I’m a big fan of the bucket thing my nanna picked but it doesn’t matter what I think about it.

The candle for my nanna was simple enough. I just made a plain candle with blended container wax, a bit of colour and faux-Jasmine fragrance.

For the teacup I decided to do something a little different. I’ve had this idea for a while now but never got round to trying it out. I thought I should try embedding a shape within the top surface of the candle. I’m not the first person to do this obviously but it’s not something you see very often. Most candles I’ve seen with embedded shapes have them on the sides but obviously that’s not really an option when using an opaque container.

First thing I did was get my chosen shape ready which in this case was a heart. I used some of the same wax from the other container I made and poured it into a biscuit cutter sealed at the bottom with blu-tac.

The tricky part was then marking out where the wick was going to pass through the heart. When the wax was setting I stuck a skewer through the soft wax and left it in there while it set. When it had cooled I removed the skewer and started getting the cup ready for assembling the candle.

After fixing the wick in place with a glue dot I melted a batch of plain wax and put a little in the bottom of the cup and let it start to cool. After it had skinned over I threaded the heart over the wick, pressed the heart into the gooey wax then topped up the cup with the plain wax to the level of the heart.

After it had cooled and been tidied up a bit, this is the finished product.

I’m really quite pleased with how it turned out but I’m not 100% sure I got the right amount of scent in there. Although there wasn’t an especially overwhelming cold throw it still might end up being a bit strong. I have a feeling it’s probably going to be used for decoration rather than being lit so a pleasant cold throw is probably sufficient.

 

 

 

Brooch Sale

One of the things I’ve been doing recently is make small brooches, particularly acorn and leaf-shaped ones. I accumulated a good-sized batch of them and wanted to get rid because why on earth would a guy like me need 10 brooches?

Now as I said in my introduction post, I’m very much a beginner so they’re all a bit crude and scrappy and I was just planning to give them away. But when I asked around about who would be interested in taking them off my hands I got jumped on by a couple of people asking why I wasn’t selling them.

This is just a hobby for me. I don’t have the skill, time or inclination to make anything more of it so making money off them wasn’t really a thought I’d entertained. Anyway for the sake of a bit of peace I decided to compromise and lay them out on a table at work with an honesty box so people could donate something for materials if they wanted to. But I made it clear that nobody should feel bad about taking them for free. Having people actually take them off my hands was much more important to me than getting anything in return.

When I came back at the end of the day all the brooches were gone and I was quite surprised to find quite a bit of money in the tin. It looked like almost everyone had paid something for what they took. Not a huge amount per brooch but certainly a lot more than I’d valued them at.

I still don’t think they were really worth selling but I’m glad for everyone’s generosity and I’ve put the money aside specifically to put back into buying materials in the future. I’m going to keep churning out these acorns and leaves and maybe one day I’ll make some that I think are good enough to sell, but for now I’ll stick to just taking whatever people will give for them, even if that is nothing.

First Post!

Hi, I’m Phil and this is my new craft blog.

Yeah it has a funny name but I’ve been scouring the deepest innards of my brain for weeks trying to think of one and all the while I was thinking of bad puns the word ‘kolibri’ was stuck in my head so I figured I’d go for it.

Kolibri is a word meaning Hummingbird in quite a few languages so I think it’s a fairly appropriate name being something of a bird fan myself. I’ll try and make a nice Hummingbird logo soon to improve the look of the blog.

Anyway so here it is, my craft blog. I mostly make candles and carve small wooden items such as brooches but I also do a lot of mosaic making at work so maybe we’ll see some of that on here too should I decide to start doing some of it at home.

I’m not an expert at any of the crafts I do, I consider myself a beginner really. Part of the reason I’ve made this blog is to chart my own progress as I try to learn my chosen crafts. Expect to see entries about things I’ve made and things other people have made that I find interesting.

This isn’t going to be a how-to blog or anything like that, I think there is quite enough of that online as it is. This isn’t to say that I won’t be sharing any tips or showing how I’ve made things. There just won’t be much in the way of in-depth tutorial pieces.

Anyway I have my first few pieces of content written so I’ll be drip feeding those for the next week or so and then updates will be as and when I have something worth sharing.