Aiming for Amana

With my final teaching for the year now completed (more about that in a coming post) and the yardwork slowly tapering off, I am very much looking forward to returning to the shop pretty much full-time in the near future.

One of the targeted activities is prepping for Handworks in Amana, Iowa, over the Labor Day weekend.  If you have any interest in handtool woodworking, you would find it sorta like a cross between Woodstock and a San Fransisco open air drug market, but for tools.

Weighing and packaging 2-lb bags of #1 Lemon shellac flour. Ask me the story about this some time.

A tub o’ “gold dust.”

Yesterday while putting away my supplies and workpieces from the Introduction to Historic Woodworking workshop I soon pivoted to packaging up a quantity of my #1 Lemon Shellac flour for resale there.  I’d had a bag on the bench to get some packaged for the workshop, and it was easier just to repackage the rest rather than haul it back downstairs.  I will ask Mrs. Barn to do her thing with melting and casting the beeswax bars, I’ll make another several batches of shellac wax and my Blend 31 bars, my polissoir-maker is working diligently to get me enough inventory for Amana…