![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Oct. 11th, 2011 05:23 pmHello. I went to Connotations this weekend, but now I am back. It was lovely, even if the hotel did put us in their ghetto, aka Riverside Block. It sounds lovely, but it kind of isn't. And mostly you have to get through a maze of corridors to get to it, and then back again. But it was lovely. I saw people, and also the first episodes of Once A Thief and My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, which were both good. I even co-modded a panel, and tried to give people the benefit of my extensive, grinding experience with them. And...there were other panels, but I'd have to look at the con schedule to remember them. Fandom fails, rare pairings, and fandom reboots, I think. But yeah. The people were lovely, the people I was staying with were lovely, I completely accidentally picked up the one book I was missing from the Night Watch series in the book mooch, and we played the new version of Slashtrap, which always completes the weekend. It was very good.
And then today I went to my first session of a jewellery making course in Leeds. It was the second week of the course, so I had to catch up, but it's really practical, so that wasn't hard - basically the tutor tends to show you some thing and techniques at the beginning, you buy some metal to work with, and then go off and practice it, so while the other people were practising the new techniques, the tutor showed me the ones from last week. It's very hands-on - the first thing you have to do to get a piece of metal (copper in this case) soft enough to do things with it is to anneal it, which basically means standing it up on some stone blocks, and then heating it with a mini-blowtorch until it goes cherry red. By which I mean, that's the colour it is, not like until it is literally red hot and glowing. But you still have to grab it with tweezers and put it in a little trough of water to make it cold enough to touch. But yeah, it was good. I learned how to cut copper, how to anneal it, how to print patterns on it with a print roller (I think), how to hammer and press patterns into it, how to use a domer to make it round, how to drill it, and how to saw it. Next week we're learning soldering, and the basic idea at this point is just to practise the techniques, experiment with them and see what happens, and then eventually start making actual pieces using them. It is good though, it's kind of amazing what you can do with the right tools. How much I'd be able to do when I didn't have a mini-blowtorch to hand is still questionable though. Perhaps they're freely available in the right craft stores.
And yeah. That's it really. I'm tired, and what I mostly want to do is play Oblivion. I think I might be shipping my character with another character, or at least have a crush on the other character myself. And I've levelled up a bit, which I think means that the game is trying to make things harder on me, but also means that I'm getting slightly harder, better quests. So hurrah. But my nephew's here, and dinner's in a few hours, so I'm probably best leaving that until I can actually do it and focus on it. Oh well.
And then today I went to my first session of a jewellery making course in Leeds. It was the second week of the course, so I had to catch up, but it's really practical, so that wasn't hard - basically the tutor tends to show you some thing and techniques at the beginning, you buy some metal to work with, and then go off and practice it, so while the other people were practising the new techniques, the tutor showed me the ones from last week. It's very hands-on - the first thing you have to do to get a piece of metal (copper in this case) soft enough to do things with it is to anneal it, which basically means standing it up on some stone blocks, and then heating it with a mini-blowtorch until it goes cherry red. By which I mean, that's the colour it is, not like until it is literally red hot and glowing. But you still have to grab it with tweezers and put it in a little trough of water to make it cold enough to touch. But yeah, it was good. I learned how to cut copper, how to anneal it, how to print patterns on it with a print roller (I think), how to hammer and press patterns into it, how to use a domer to make it round, how to drill it, and how to saw it. Next week we're learning soldering, and the basic idea at this point is just to practise the techniques, experiment with them and see what happens, and then eventually start making actual pieces using them. It is good though, it's kind of amazing what you can do with the right tools. How much I'd be able to do when I didn't have a mini-blowtorch to hand is still questionable though. Perhaps they're freely available in the right craft stores.
And yeah. That's it really. I'm tired, and what I mostly want to do is play Oblivion. I think I might be shipping my character with another character, or at least have a crush on the other character myself. And I've levelled up a bit, which I think means that the game is trying to make things harder on me, but also means that I'm getting slightly harder, better quests. So hurrah. But my nephew's here, and dinner's in a few hours, so I'm probably best leaving that until I can actually do it and focus on it. Oh well.
