I’m sat in a darkened room with a cool face cloth over my forehead trying to allow my blood pressure to go down. My lovely clients have just left. They’re wonderful, they’ve flapped their arms, caused consternation wherever they went and departed I hope, with a warm feeling that they’ve been part of a creative process.
I am now counting the cost. Not just to the job, but to the job after this job. I am between a rock and a Chinese hard place. I have a hard delivery to make at the end of January with all of this furniture going out to Dubai. That we can do. Maybe. Furniture going out to Dubai is fine. But the extra man power, person power, creative craftsman power is going to have to come from somewhere and right now I can only see it coming from the work on our Chinese exhibition in Shanghai. This is in late March 2015.
To add insult to injury an invoice for that exhibition has just landed on my desk this very Morning. The delivery date for shipping to China is unclear because the actual exhibition date has been pushed back. The actual size of our stand is unclear. We’re invoiced for one amount of space and we’re told another… PAH! Meanwhile I’m trying to get some time on the tools.
I have this lovely little project of trying to make a whole range of small marking and measuring tools. They can become exercises first for the basic one week course that we run here and same for the first weeks of our fifty week course. These are going to be little tools that can be used. Things like squares, straight edges, winding sticks, marking gauges. All made in mahogany and faced in maple. I’m making these myself because I have to write out a process list that our craftsmen can follow so that everybody is teaching the same way. So all the materials and all the tools and all the drawings are all pointing in the same direction. This is great, whenever I get a few minutes to do this all my care seems to fall away and the process of making takes over. I remember that I’m actually good with my hands and I do know a lot. And all of that can be put in to these projects. You can see some of the beginnings of these projects in the Talking Hands series here. Where we show you how we go about it.
