I invented a word - Selforamic

I haven't posted for over a year. Bad Crack. So here's what I have been doing for the past couple of months, summed up in 2 mins of video. Enjoy

A killer recipe

 

Porridge oats
An old shirt

Pine oil - The smell of the woods and the workshop.

A sewing machine

1. Mix porridge oats and a few drops of pine oil in a bowl.

2. Using the sewing machine make some foot shaped(ish) sock type things out of the material from the shirt, so they fit easily in your shoe.

3. Fill them up with the mix and sew ‘em shut

4. I also made some holes for a clip to hold them together

Doesn’t take a lot to kill off that dead wet dog smell. Now I am allowed to keep my climbing shoes inside the house!

Where ideas are created

I finally have some order to my garage. So much so, I have made myself a work bench from draws and wood I have collected - Not so junkie any more hey Tash??

Solid as a rock, it needs to be to take the beating it will get from the bending of and breaking of whatever is used in the next creation.

A few of the draws come with a story to tell. The oldies are selling up and trying to get rid of the many, many pieces of furniture they have collected over the years. They come from a desk my dad treated himself to when he passed his Business Masters degree when he had no grey hair. I would have taken the whole desk if it had fitted in the car! Well the draws are big and strong so it's turned out ideal for storing my many tools, although I can't move it now the draws are full. So it need some wheels, and a wood vice, but they will come in time I am sure.

Let the creations begin... watch this workspace.

A not so Deer trophy bust

On a trip through the overpriced trendy shops of East Dulwich I spotted this lovely trophy bust of a deer. Never ceasing to amaze me a price tag of £90 was unbelievable. I have always fancied a deer’s head mounted on the chimneybreast, though the wife to-be never warmed to the idea, I thought a cardboard improvisation was a happy compromise. Obviously I would never pay £90 for some cardboard shapes and, as most houses do, we had some cardboard boxes lying around, it seemed the perfect DIY project.

Well it turns out decent cardboard is hard to come by these days, especially big sheets of it, but what I do have a near endless supply of is foamboard. These are mainly leftovers from pitches and presentations which when finished with I could not bear to see it go to waste (as I am proving how useful they can be).

Loosely based on the cardboard one in the shop, I constructed a foamboard deer’s head, which in my opinion looks much better! The only other thing I did was paint the backboard with enamel paint and a crusty dry brush to get that wood grain effect.

Bin-B-Q

So a few years back I bought one of those little bucket BBQs, anyone who has used one of these to cook for more than one and a half people knows how crap there really are. But it does the job for when it's just the two of us.
Having recently move into a new house we have decided to have a house warming BBQ in early September, weather dependent. So we looked at getting a new BBQ for the garden that could accommodate for the masses, I was thinking one of those half barrel ones. Now, has anyone actually looked at the price of them? £70 for a good sized one, so to the workshop we go.
Me being the hoarder I am had an old pedal bin that had stopped responding, instantly I thought 'There's my BBQ'.

With a little help from an old BBQ and a broom handle we now have a suitable BBQ for the house warming, costing pretty much nothing! Well once upon a time the bin probably cost me £20 or so... But that's why it's good to keep old things, as I will always find a use for them!.... Natasha.
Check it out. Will post some action photos when it's up and running.

Playing with fire

Now we have all be told that playing with fire will get you burnt, but it still doesn’t stop us doing it! A few years back I was experimenting with long exposure photography on my friends farm when we discovered the amazing effects that could be produced by spinning a ball of flaming wire wool around. I decided to have another little go at it in the dungeon of my parents house and ended up producing some pretty amazing effects.

New handle for the hacker

Whilst visiting The Malvern hills over the bank holiday weekend I thought I would pop down to the flea market at the Three Counties Show Ground to see if I could bag myself a bargain.
Call it an impulse buy if you will, but I spotted a tool that looked like it could be of some use when I am out in the forest collecting wood, clearing bushes... as you do! £40 she wanted for it, 12" super sharp blade with a new handle on it, which I was told the new handle alone would cost me £20. With only a tenner in my pocket (that I wanted to spend) I kept on walking to see if I could find a cheaper one, prehaps one with out the new handle and super shape blade.
Surely enough I came across a bucket of them. All were blunt and in various battered states. Some had handles missing, split or big dents in the blade. I picked one with a good blade and a split handle "£10" he said, which was fine with me but I thought i would try my luck "It's gona cost me £20 to get a new handle on it, how about £8?"
So £8, an old wooden chair leg and a few hours whittling later
here it is:

New handle and sharpened blade