Leaded some more pieces last night and today. Dunno how many. I could count but I'm too cranky to bother. Here, you count:



Why cranky, you ask?

It turns out that when that piece got fumbled and broken the other night, it hit and broke another piece on the way down. I didn't notice it til this afternoon. The piece that hit the floor isn't too difficult of a cut, so no big deal... the piece that stayed on the worktable waiting for me to notice it is going to be much more of a pain in the ass.

If you squint real close at the above photo, maybe you can see which pieces were broken. Both of them are just to the right of the blue flower pieces that I've got leaded; both of them have their numbers circled on the building pattern.

The piece that hit the floor is piece number 31, partially obscured by my mallet; it's just a wedge shape with one curved end, otherwise all straight lines. The piece that broke on the worktable is piece number 16, immediately adjacent to that big blue petal there. It's sort of like a crescent moon, stretched out to a long dagger point on the bottom end. Very curvy piece, and worse, it's got a huge inside (or concave) curve. These are the hardest lines to cut; you've got to take the curve out in a bunch of skinny, careful curving strips, one at a time, in order to make it work.

On top of the difficulty of the cut, I'm going to have to take out a couple of the pieces I've already assembled in order to trace that piece from the building pattern. And any time you have to redo a cut without the original paper pattern piece, there is some risk of not ending up with precisely the same shape you got when you cut up your original pattern, depending on how closely you followed its lines. I know that when I was cutting my pattern, I wasn't 100% on the lines, but I thought it wouldn't matter too much, because with the pattern scissors that automatically remove 1/16" edges to allow for the lead cames, everything would fit together anyway. Now I know that that assumption only works for as long as you've got all your original paper pattern pieces. Mine, alas, are all landfill now.

I will be much more careful to follow my pattern lines on my next project... but that doesn't help me today.

All this is why I'm putting down the lead clippers and stepping away from the worktable. It's a sunny, warm day---the first we've had in D.C. since summer suddenly became winter a few weeks ago---maybe if I go outside and play, I will feel better.

Or maybe it's just a way to put off tracing and recutting those damn petals. I don't even know if I have enough scrap Dark Violet and Cobalt Blue to redo them. I could go back downstairs now and look, I guess. But I won't.

Posted by Michelle on October 26, 2002 03:38 PM