Monday, January 25, 2010

New Things

I think this year will be a year of new things for me. As if I need more hobbies or interests.

I've got a friend at work who is a taxidermist as well, and he recently gave me some tanned beaver tail skins to play around with. I had an order from a guy in Ohio for a beaver tail sheath, so that was my first project. I've never worked with beaver tail before, and it was quite tricky, but the sheath came out pretty sweet (if I do say so myself). The Wife noted that it looks sort of like snake skin. She's very right, except when you hold the actual beaver tail, there are very, very small hairs in between the plates. I don't know of any hairy snakes!

Here's the sheath.




The beaver tail skin was pretty thin, so I made the sheath out of tanned elk hide as well. So I guess you could say the beaver tail sheath is for the elk sheath, which is for the knife. But I think it came out great! The client wanted a belt clip, and sent one along with his knife for me to use. It worked out really well.

I'm looking forward to a lot of new things this year. I've been commissioned for my first stained glass piece for people I don't know. (I've had other commissions, but all from friends or family) I'm going to get back into blacksmithing and start producing my own blades. That should be a ton of fun. I'd even like to try my hand at selling my knives at knife or gun shows. We'll have to see if that happens this year or not.

And of course, every day with the kiddos is a whole new world of new things! The Boyo got a Unicorn story from a very sleepy Daddy last night. As I was telling it, I could tell I was dozing, and would wake up enough to hear myself telling about the Boyo and Mr. Unicorn heading up to space to collect the Lego moon. No idea where that came from. And at one point the Boyo elbowed me and woke me up asking "Then what happened, Daddy?"

Sweet Pea woke up singing this morning, as she often does. Makes me want to just sit outside her door for a while and enjoy the concert!!

Can't wait to see what these two will do next!

More Later

1 comment:

steph laughing said...

Hahahahahaha! I can just see that somnambulant storytelling moment! Julio had a similar experience telling Harrison his version of the Brementown musicians. He was relating the part where the animals stood on each others' backs to peek in a window, and he just kept adding animals (not from the story) to the pile, until Harrison sat up and said "hey - was it a GIANT's house?