Astrid's Photo Scavenger Hunt for the week ending - 17/12/2021

 

The word chosen by Astrid for this week is 'Homemade'.  Strange as it sounds from someone who has always done some craft or other, I have very little things around that I have made;  a few odd knitted hats (very odd!!) and a couple of scarves is really all I have and an uninteresting crochet blanket. I don't photograph the results of my baking, not that I do much just for the two of us so that idea did not help.  So I have decided to go on a different tack.  Home made objects made by our children over the years......children, they are both grown up and married as you well know!!  

I was scratching my head wondering where to go with this when I remembered I have my father's old tobacco jar, hand carved in Central Africa, Malawi perhaps, in the 1940's.  My mother always kept a few things her grandchildren had given her in it and it now sits on our bookcase.  I dug around and found these..... a gingham apron little Katie had made for the doll she had made for her grandmother which, till her death in 2009, she always kept on a chair in her bedroom.  There was piece of 'embroidery' that neither she nor her brother remember doing (or admitting to have done) at junior school and a woven square done by young D at junior school in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. The pottery bowls were made by Katie as part of a set of three, all fitting one  inside the other and made by her at school.  The middle one was unfortunately broken many years ago.  I love the colours and I keep odd bits inside the bigger one.  I don't often open the tobacco jar but when I do it brings back happy memories as it still smells of my Dad's tobacco, even after 40 years. 

Katie as you know now produces the most amazing work, in various mediums.  She has made us so many things over the years but being Christmas I have photographed a group of special things she has made for us and which always come out at this time of the year.  The hare is needle felted, the little felt pincushion Christmas pudding we have had for many years and the lovely Tomte more recently arrived one Christmas as did the painted robin. 

Our son trained to do sand casting at his uncles' large foundry and together with B set up a foundry at home in South Africa where they made the most beautiful brass ornaments.  He has most of the remaining brass ornaments at his home in Scotland but we do have these lovely horses and the owl.  They are so heavy as they are solid, not hollow as brass ornaments often are. 

Just to show how 'home made' these brass animals are, we have quite by chance found these old photographs today.  I had been looking for them for a while and while moving a chair I knocked over a pile of books and there was this album I had not seen for ages.  B has selected a group to show how he and our son D made these objects.  Health and Safety people would have been horrified.  In their defence these pictures were taken in 1992, in the hottest part of South Africa where daytime temperatures were often anything between 35 and 40 degrees and in a country where the Health and Safety Executive did not exist!!  

Here  D is getting the furnace hot enough.  Old brass taps and fittings were used to melt down in the crucible.  

  

Now the crucible is being lifted using special shaped tongs, 

carried into the nearby workshop and carefully poured into the prepared moulds.  Katie  and G were visiting us in SA at the time and that is her helping hold back the dross. Note she is wearing boots and David's  leather apron and proper gloves.  She, coming from the UK, was far more safety conscious. 

After a while the brass had cooled enough for the mould to be opened and for the brass cat to be tipped out.

The cat on the left is ready for cleaning up and polishing and the one on the right is the aluminium pattern used to make the hollow in the compressed sand. 

Finally the rough brass is cleaned up with an angle grinder then finished with grinding pads.  It is hard, noisy work. 

Well that is it for this week.  Now I'm off to see what lovely, normal homemade objects others have posted about.