(the dog likes to think she’s helping).

She is!

*spaniel shown for scale.

There was the use of hammers, red hot metal an anvil and a qualified blacksmith when I assisted in the manufacture of this.

Of all the amazing gifts the absolutely lovely MrsAmbrose has given me, the forging day ranks in the top three. It was just such a wonderful day, making metal change into the shapes you wanted. I made a few hooks and a little hanging rail. Magic.

I’ve just strung this up for the first time. I need to leave it for a week, or so to settle down before I set it up and see if I can make it play nicely.

August 2023

Now

That’s fantastic

That is lovely @tillydog

@tillydog That’s some real talent, kudos.

That is stunning Tillydog 🙂👏

Okay, maybe this isn’t quite up there with Jim’s birds or Tillys guitar but I give you:

Stealth Attack Giraffe

man that guitar is breathtaking. lovely thing

New wheels.

What rims and spokes @Daffy?

Nextie Ultralight 35mm deep and 25mm (int) wide and standard Sapim CX-Ray J-bends.

That guitar is truly a masterpiece, a thing of beauty and a joy to behold! 🥰👏🏻👌🏻🫶🏻

I have neither the ability, skill or facilities to even think about making something like that, and the increasing level of arthritis in both my hands is starting to make even small jobs harder to do.

I did put a design on a tee shirt yesterday, though; I’ve got two King Crimson tee shirts with the cover designs from two of their three 80’s albums, ‘Discipline’ and ‘Beat’, the red and blue ones in the pic, but ‘Three Of A Perfect Pair’ is only available with the name of the band and album printed across the top, so as it’s a fairly simple image, I thought I’d have a go at doing my own.
I found a good quality image, cropped it and printed it to about the size of the others, spray mounted it onto one side of a Cornflakes box and very carefully cut it out as a stencil. After lots of digging on the interwebz, I found one bottle of blue acrylic fabric paint at Hobby Craft in Bristol, put some into one of those little plastic pump spray bottles and watered it down a bit. I lightly sprayed adhesive on the back of the stencil and got it all lined up and flat, on top of an old wooden drawing board with everything else masked, and sprayed it carefully a couple of times, to avoid it puddling.

For such a half-assed setup and for a first attempt, I’m really pretty chuffed with how well it’s worked out! I’ll be wearing it to the pub tomorrow evening. 😁

^Looks smart.

Thank you all for the kind comments about the guitar. I’m pretty chuffed with it myself.

increasing level of arthritis in both my hands is starting to make even small jobs harder to do.

I sympathise with you. My eyesight is showing signs of age which I find tremendously frustrating. I’m trying to get this sort of thing out of my system while I still can.

I absolutely love this thread, as on one hand (and one page!) you have custom handmade guitars, and then stealth giraffes also. And both are absolutely mint!

This week I have made* the Earth so on Sunday I trested

*Okay, it was a kit but still quite fun to put together. The globe rotates when you turn one set of gears, the viewing lens moves up and down so you can see the detail of a specific area and the is an LED loop inside so it illuminates if you want.