Cave Time

Well, work is crazy 
and I don't seem able to do my usual thing after a day at work, which is walking in the front door, making coffee and then hacking away at particle board with my angle grinder, but I've got ideas. In fact, I've got a whole lot of exciting projects up my sleeve and I'm happy to share the love good people. To be honest, I've done bugger all on the mirror since my last post, however, I thought I'd put a few more pics up for you to look at.

Top Of Mirror Frame

I didn't give much of an explanation of this in the last post so here goes.
So we've got this Hibiscus tree outside our bedroom window and I used this as the central theme for the mirror. The big flower in the middle is my rendition of the very lovely, the very beautiful Hibiscus. "So what about the curly corners?" I hear you asking. Well, when you live in New Zealand it's difficult NOT putting some sort of curly Koru design on something when you're trying to be arty-farty. The Koru represents the New Zealand fern, which is a bit curly when it's young and tender and you see versions of it on almost everything piece of NZ marketing. Yes! We're proud of our curly wee fern. Anyway....back to the mirror. I decided to draw a flower and curly green tendrils to add a bit more interest. I sketched these with a pencil first, then drew the outline with a marker pen. Then I coloured them with food dye! Food dye is amazing - really strong colours and doesn't come off - wear old clothes because it's very splashy and seems to get on everything. The little carved flower in the corner of the frame is part of the frame. I used a plunge router to rebate the face of it so it's lower than the frame itself.

I carved these little round flowers

Carved Flower

These flowers are about 40mm diameter and I made 2 of them. They were a bit fiddly to carve, but once I got the hang of it, it was fairly easy. Made from 9mm mdf and with an antique finish as described in my previous post. The design on the frame is hand-drawn using permanent markers.

Well, my coffee is finished so I think that's a heavenly sign for me to finish.
The next post will probably be about the cross bar, which is the final piece to finish before I assemble the whole thing. And lastly, I had a dream about Gandalf the other night and the Pittosporum (native NZ tree) branches drying in my garage. My next post might be about that...yes, I know...cryptic. So come back and see what I'm up to.

Adios good people