It is my idea for Ealdormere's Kingdom Arts and Sciences competition coming up this fall.
I call it "52 Weeks, 52 Projects", wherein I attempt to construct 52 projects with varying complexity in the course of a year.
Unfortunately, mainly due to mys having worked like crazy over up until Christmas, and being lazy for the last three weeks, I am now starting a full nine weeks late. That means I am actually going to have to do 52 projects in 43 weeks.
Oops.
For the fun of it, I am going to post my progress here.
Project 1:This one is a cheat, because I actually made it last spring (although I plan on making a better one to submit for the competition.
The project was to recreate a medieval hanging pendant lamp. What that means is an oil lamp that hangs from the ceiling by a set of chains. A few examples of them can be seen in the following pictures:
(The lamps are hanging in a row across the top of the picture.)
(Upper right hand corner over the ladies praying.)
(Hanging over the altar.)
The first thing that needed to be created was the glass bowl.
This PDF shows examples of actual period lamp bowls.
http://www.romanglassmakers.co.uk/pdffiles/lamps.pdfI decided it was too difficult to recreate a glass bowl like that myself, but I was able to find a reasonable substitute. As it turns out a margarita glass with its stem detached bears a striking similarity, albeit not exactly, to a hanging lamp bowl.
So the first thing I did was pick up a bunch of margarita glasses from the local Salvation army thrift store.
The next thing I needed to do was make a flat metal ring. I was working with cold metal, so it was going to be difficult.
The best way to make a metal ring is to wrap the metal around a mandrel, but the size of the ring was about 2 1/2 inches, so I simply did not have a mandrel to use.
What I ended up doing was filling an empty soup can with water and clamping a C-clamp to the side, then putting the whole thing into the freezer. When the water froze, the ice became a hard cylinder I could use as a mandrel, and the C-clamp was trapped in the ice so I was able to use it to clamp the metal down against the side of the can, and then use the clamp itself as a handle to turn the can and wrap the metal around it.
So I ended up with a metal ring.
I then attached three metal arms around the edge of the ring using rivets I made using nails.
Finally, I attached a plant hanger chain I bought from the dollar store. I know it is a bit of a cheat. I will have to make my own chains for future versions.
Anyway, this is what I ended up with:
It does indeed resemble the lamps in the old drawings, and it works quite well. Depending on what I have available, I can use either vegetable oil or bacon grease (Is there anything bacon can't do?) as the fuel.
I made the wick myself by buying cotton clothesline from the dollar store and boiling it in water with salt and borax. The wick float via a ring of cork.
Project 2:I carved a couple of wooden spoons out of crab apple wood.
This is another pre-project project, but with time wasting, I am not going to quibble, since I really need to catch up.
It is likely I will carve some other spoons to actually submit, now that I have had practice on the first two.
