My summer has been pretty crazy with a big work conference that is finally over. My life is now my own again. Yay! I’ve been very behind in doing my monthly checking, but that’s ok. The good news is that I don’t have to go back to work for over a week. So I’m trying to do a bunch of projects around the house.

First up, I’ve never posted my video I made of the bookshelf that I made for a friend of mine’s birthday. It’s below.

That was a lot of fun to do and I want to do more woodworking. One thing though is that I broke my planer. It no longer will plane the really skinny pieces of lathe that I want to glue together. The thinnest I can plane a board is around 1″. I think this is because the belt broke and when I fixed it, I must have broken something else. I ended up buying a new planer. It’s a less expensive one, which is fine. I’m really just using it to clean up old, dirty wood. I have yet to set it up, so that will probably be one of my projects this week.

It’s harvest time in my garden. I’ve already gotten boatloads of tomatoes. I’ve given a bunch to my brother and just took a bag full to my Mom today. So I need to research how to make tomato sauce that I can freeze because there’s no way I could eat all of these before they go bad. Since the garden worked so well this year, I’ll probably make another little area next year. Think I’d like to try to grow lettuce and spinach.

If I’m going to make xmas gifts for people this year, I need to start. And while I like the idea of making bookshelves for people, I don’t want to give people a big piece of furniture. That seems a bit much. Anyway, I’m back to working with paper again. I’ve found some great youtube videos of how to make different types of books and bindings. That looks like fun, so I’ll see if I can come up with something cool.

Though, I would still like to make some stuff out of wood because I finally got my brand. I did have a little bit of time to do something fun last month and I designed a brand for myself. I then sent it to Shapeways to get made in stainless steel. It just arrived the other day. I’m quite happy with it.

brand

Now I need to put a handle on it so I can heat it up and put my brand on things. I bought a threaded rod and a tap and die set today. Hopefully, I can drill a hole and put threads in it. Another project for this week. But once that’s done, I should be able to brand just about anything.