Spindles #2: Honing Oil Right in the FACE!

I really like my local hardware store… Stoneway Hardware. First, the people who work there are VERY nice. One happened to go to school with my husband about 12 years ago. Another girl is super sweet. And the owner took a few minutes to personally visit with me when I mentioned at the checkout that they were going to be seeing a lot of my business in the future.

I picked up a wide selection of regular ol’ sandpaper, honing oil, Howard Feed-N-Wax (Beeswax and Orange Oil), steel wool in 3 varieties, two gauges of 50ft of wire for burning lines into wood… and a dust pan. I got it all for under $40.

In this economy, that seems like a fair deal to me.

Anyhoo… I came back home and procrastinated all afternoon… then decided I should clean up the Spider Farm (garage). I douched all the dust and left overs from the new door being put it, organized some junk, tossed some things… it became much more livable.

I wasn’t going to work on the lathe tonight, but with everything all nice and tidy… I just HAD to make a new mess. HAH.

Earlier in the day, I watched a bunch of videos about the correct use of the skew and how to make clean finishing cuts. Also, I watched even MORE videos about using a honing stone to make a razor sharp skew edge. (Which is where the fun starts.)

I open up the honing oil packaging and pop the top open on the honing oil. Turn it over… nothing happens. There was some kind of stopper in there… so I unscrewed the top of the bottle and started to do battle with a red plastic seal that did NOT want to come off. I tried a screw driver and the plastic was so soft it just tore…

Fine… I’ll gently use my teeth. I get the the rim of the plastic between my upper and bottom teeth and give a little tug.

Sadly for me, I was also squeezing the middle of the bottle… so when the seal broke it squirted 1/4th of the oil in the bottle straight into my face. Luckily my mouth was closed. However…. I did have to figure out how I was going to get into the house to wash my face off without wiping the oil into my skin or dripping in the entry.

Man… what a day.

Everything after that went awesome. I did achieve razor sharp skew edge… and I turned out another beautiful spindle and had much less time with sand paper…. because my cuts were more exact and I am learning to trust the lathe and my tools.

-- Lisa Chan, custom cafts and yarn accessories, http://www.grippingyarn.com