Metal Art – Forge and Welder

In true Martha Stewart style, I’d like to show you is how to make a few SIMPLE  pieces of  Metal Art with a forge and a welder… It is not inconceivable that Martha would have access to a forge and a welder, and would have “people” who know how to use such things, though she doesn’t seem to have posted any stories about this kind of project.

For one brief day, I had access to a forge and welder. Actually, it was a whole shop of interesting tools, and several barns of raw materials to choose from. So I started off the morning by collecting enough metal pieces to make two “critters” and one piece of garden art.

Once I had my designs figured out, I laid out all the pieces on the shop floor. Then I was shown how to make the coal in the forge glow bright red. This heat was going to be used to bend metal. I showed my Spousal Unit which nails I wanted bent to make some legs. (This didn’t seem to be a job that I had the strength or finesse to do.)  That is about all we did with the forge, other than stand around it and warm ourselves up – it was a cold day.

The next step was the welding. Again, a handy man was there to help me – while I held the parts in place, he spot welded them. Once all was cool, I headed for the bead blasting machine to clean everything up. (I did the bead blasting all by myself!) And that was it for the mosquito and the crab paperweights. Sounds fast and easy, doesn’t it?

The last project that day was a piece of garden art. It was a bit more involved because it used larger scraps of metal – rakes for the wings, a big spring and a length of rebar for the backbone,  a hinge for the beak, some nails for a tail, and some bits that I don’t even know what they once were, for the rest of the body. Once all was welded, I decided it was a chicken. I named her Henrietta, and retired to the house to help make supper. That left my two gentlemen helpers to clean up the shop. It also left them alone with Henrietta. They decided to make “her” a “he”, and added the appropriate hardware.

I didn’t learn of Henrietta’s gender change until the next morning, when I was asked to stand next to the chicken for a photo. Everyone else was smiling – well laughing, actually. I didn’t get the joke at first – but realized that it had to be something to do with my garden art. It was then that I saw the added “nuts and a bolt”…

In Other Crafting News

Apparently Martha Stewart has put together a list of what should be in the Ultimate Craft Kit. It includes such items as a glue gun, paper trimmer and cutting mat. While I agree that these things should reside in every home that has packs of paper in all the colours of the rainbow, I know from reading “Martha Stewart Living” that Martha is capable of so much more than that.

Have you ever read that magazine? My daughters left me a pile to peruse when they moved out. I attacked them with a pair of Martha Stewart approved scissors, removed a few good ideas, then threw the remains into the recycle box. The most fascinating part of the magazines, I thought, was Martha’s monthly calendar.  If I was to be as efficient as Martha, my week might look like this:

– Monday – pick up all the pine cones in the “Four Acre Forest” for use in Christmas crafts; create pine cone centre pieces for 500 close friends.

– Tuesday – clean house, wash windows, organize closets, defrost freezer, do laundry.

– Wednesday – harvest garden,  mulch flower beds, rake the forest; make preserves.

– Thursday – repaint all rooms inside house.

– Friday – paint outside of house; buy groceries, and make dinner for 50 guests

In reality, by Friday I wouldn’t have finished Mondays task, assuming I’d ever think I should do those things…