Carving a bedbug from alabaster

This is a talisman for someone who has recently endured a nasty bedbug infestation. Their solution to move house was probably more effective than any warding off of evil with talismans or other such mumbo-jumbo, but it was obviously a good excuse to get carving and I struggled to find a bedbug talisman in the Christmas shops...

I toyed with using the dremel on this, but way too much dust, so did it by hand with a saw, chisel, rasps, a knife a few micro-files.  Took about an hour and half...



It starts with a lump of rock, very soft rock - alabaster - foraged off a beach at Blue Anchor in Somerset a few years ago.


I had a look at some frankly disturbing pictures found using a google images search for "bedbug scanning electron"



I always need to do a few drawings to fix the shapes in the mind. (They don't need to be good ones, as you can tell)


Then used a hacksaw to cut off larger protuberances to start to get the outline shape in 3 dimensions..


Then grate it down roughly to size with a monstrous rasp my father gave me (it's about18" long)


With the rasp I formed a carving blank, that was roughly the intended outline of a bedbug...


I drew out the details of the legs, then carved these with an old woodcarving chisl. Don't use a working chisel for this unless you like sharpening chisels a lot...


Obviously, oy can't use a vice as the rock would crack, so I held it in my hand. Also obvious was a chisel puncture wound. It's not real carving if you don't draw blood. At least it wasn't the rasp...


Some fine files (in hand) and steel clay modelling tools (on right) are very handy to scratch out the patterm of legs and biting mouthparts


Loads of fiddling later, I used fine grit carborundum paper (240 grit wet and dry paper basically) to smooth and polish. If have lots of time, you can progressively use finer grades, or emery paste to get a super fine finish. You can even use bathroom scouring cream cleaner. Quite good for fine polishing


Here's the dorsal surface (ie. the bedbug carapace)


And wet it to see the detail. To get  this effect, you can use spray lacquer. And that's it...

Making chilli Scotch Eggs

Scotch eggs - they're awesome, aren't they? Especially with chipotle chilli and chorizo in the mix - yum!


Here's the kit.

• Decent quality sausages (80%+ meat or grind your own pork shoulder or belly pork)
• Celery seeds, rock salt, black pepper
• Eggs
• Chorizo and chipotle

Boil up some eggs, but not too hard. 5 minutes is plenty. They cook more later, so the aim is the softest set egg you can get out of a shell unruptured - much less than 4 minutes and it is liable to break on shelling!


Squeeze the meat from the sausage skins...


Mashed finely chopped chorizo in with the sausage meat and wrap round the eggs


Roll into a ball...


Coat in beaten egg...


Roll in fresh bread crumbs (that is, fresh bread in a blender, not old manky dry crumbs)


Keep rolling...



Until nicely coated...


Put on an oven tray...


Season with salt, pepper, chipotle and ground celery seed



and BAKE!

needs about 30 minutes, turning as required to cook evenly

Making a hook-handled walking stick

Here is a very useful and easy on the hand walking stick. Made from a birch cutting found in a forest plantation.
It's smooth and remarkably rigid.

This is how it was found...


Close up (with pug paw)...


The branch was cut short for a handle...


Then some penknife whittling...






Later, back at the shed - some planing and filing





Until a well-smooth handle energed...

Making a universal camera mount from a set of locking grips

Mole Grips are pretty awesome. They will attach to almost anything, have simple adjustment and quick-release via a simple lever. If you add a camera clip, then you have an adjustable universal camera mount - sweet!


Here they're clamped onto bike handlebars - handy.

To attach the clip, a hole was drilled into a pair of cheap grips.

A corresponding hole was also drilled in a Go Pro mounting bracket and a self-tapping screw threaded through into a section of nylon cylinder, acting as a locking nut (below)



Crude, but effective. This mount allows you to clamp onto almost anything.

Carving a thumbstick on the beach using ad-hoc tools

Whilst enjoying a recent scrabble across the beach in Somerset, I made this walking stick to help me traverse a clay-infested stone-riddled stream in a marshland/beach periphery.

It was carved from a dead shrub stump cast up as driftwood on the beach. The head of it is the knot-end where a branch met the base of the stump.

The stick was cut off using the trusty swiss army knife, then a smoothed-off head carved so that one side was rounded to fit comfortably in the palm, and with a thumb rest on the opposing side.

Excuse the picture, the ambient light confused my panorama view. Also it really doesn't look that phallic in real life!

Here, the stump-end is being carved to shape. To some extent the natural curves of the knot were followed.


The shaft was stripped of bark and smoothed with the knife blade, but there's only so much you can do with a blade. Eventually you need to smooth the blade cuts and odd grain lumps down. Happily, this was easy as the whole beach was covered in rough stones of several grades of roughness and all sorts of shapes to fit the concave thumbrest face.

This stone was used as a "workbench to rest the stick on, and give stability while applying pressure...

Here's a stone being used by hand.



And here, you can see the rock workbench