Nice old oak, but getting a bit loose in the joints.

Apart from this old, rickety chair, the two sistersRobin and Rowan also came in with a broken lamp stand and a table leg, that their parents had allowed them to take to the Repair Shop. They were so spirited and enthusiastic that I definitely wanted to give them something fun and useful back. I had just made the banjo (no 2) and started on Ocarina (no 23) so I was into instruments, and thought that the nicely turned lamp stand would make a nice wooden flute or horn if combined with the similarly turned oaken table leg, but alas, my skills as an instrument maker are pretty limited. I managed to put them together into something vaguely believable, but not a sound came out of them. Luckily for me the sisters had been provident enough to bring not just one, or two objects, but three, which gave me a final shot at surprising them. The chair blocked up a bit in my head for a while, as I couldn’t get a good (and useful, for two little girls) idea out of it, until I remembered that we would soon have Christmas.

Would probably need some extra runners to get up a bit more from the ground.

The shape was really there all along, inside the chair, just waiting for me to make the connection, then turning it inside out so to speak was easy enough. I don’t know how well it runs though. Maybe it turns out as hopeless in a snowy slope as my flute was as an instrument. That is one of the dangers of making sculptures that are expected to do anything more than just being looked at.

Perfectly bent wooden runners.

The problem that I can foresee with this sled design is that the mid-croos-beam, where the back used to be attached to the seat, will scrape against the ground in thick snow and impede speed (which on the other hand might be a good thing from a health and safety point of view). The obvious solution would be to glue two new bits of hardwood, scored on the top to allow for bending, under the runners to lift the whole sled an inch or so off the ground. Wish I had the time to do it then, but I finished this sculpture on the very last day, and didn’t find any suitable wood lying around.

And a disclaimer is never out of place.

Object no. 37