The Long and Winding Road

To commemorate and participate in the renewed Beatle-mania that Itunes resurrected this past week, Tim and I took the long and winding road from London to NOTL. We were in London to celebrate Tim's birthday, he turned the big 2-8 on Friday. After a fun whirlwind trip and repacking the car with all of Tim's gifts, it looked as though we'd been on a two week holiday. But we hadn't. So we thought we'd do the long and leisurely Sunday ride home taking all the old highways instead of the boring and often ridiculously scary 400 series.

We took Highway 3 because I love going through Tillsonburg, ON with all of it's grand tobacco-money houses. It's also just a pretty drive with all those outdated tobacco drying sheds that dot the landscape (an example of an evolved relic cultural landscape - for all my Willowbankers out there). 

I have to admit that I had an ulterior motive for going the back way this week, as I've been wanting to go to Ruthven House in Cayuga, ON. It keeps coming up in all of our classes as one of the only other Classical Revival homes built in Ontario. Not surprisingly it was designed by the same architect as Willowbank, John Latshaw. John Latshaw was from Pennsylvania, and brought the American influences of the Greek Revival style to Canada. (There are a few of his buildings [institutional] in the Niagara region, but the only homes of this style are Ruthven and Willowbank.)

On our way to Ruthven, we made an exciting detour. Just as we were coming into Balmoral, ON (Tim's favourite, I'll let you guess why) we saw a sign for a Historic Place named Cottonwood. So we turned around, because of course I didn't decide I wanted to go until we had already passed the intersection, and made our way down Haldimand County Road 53 towards Selkirk, ON. And we came upon the beautifully restored Cottonwood mansion. It is an Italianate-style home built by a local entrepeneur between 1865-1870.

This is what we came upon on the lonely country road:

Isn't it just adorable? Just.

If you go to their website, they tell you all about it and there is a great picture taken before the restoration. It was in quite the state of disrepair. But they've done a lovely job restoring it. It was getting late in the day and we hadn't yet gotten to Cayuga, so we didn't go in but we looked in the windows (if you look closely you can see Tim on left side of the porch peering in, while Ulli is distracted by "field things.")

After that we jogged back up to highway 3 and over to Cayuga, where we thought we were lost but finally came upon Ruthven park, with this cute little welcome building off the road.

Super cute. I'd be happy with just this little guy.

Then we came up through the picturesque landscape and the beautiful Ruthven, situated on the Grand River. Talk about blown away. It is absolutely gorgeous, and it's setting is fabulous.

Now this is what I'm referring to when I go on and on about proportional columns! Look at that lovely pediment and the triglyphs of the entablature and those awesome Doric columns. Also note the fantastic stone-work. The guy who built this place had a whole lotta money to spend on beautifully cut stone.  My only thought is about the square columns on the outside. They look nice, but might be replacements?

Of course, Tim's favourite part was not the grand home on the Grand, but the carriage house. He's always admiring that next step in just-too-much-ery - multiple outbuildings. And Ruthven did not disappoint. There were outbuildings galore.

The incredibly delightful English-y carriage house (of course Tim loved it!).

So that was our trip home. Pretty cool huh. Tim has proposed that we should go to heritage homes every time we make a trip.

Apparently my evil master plan has taken root. Muahaha.

F-Stops and Apertures

Thursday and Friday of this week were spent with Cosmo Condina, if you click on his name you can see some of the amazing images he has made. He was great at teaching us all of the ins and outs of photography. At first I couldn't wrap my head around f-stops and apertures and all that, but we played around with taking some photos the first day and it was really fun to start to put everything together and begin to "make" our own images. 

A photo I took in the Bright Salon at Willowbank. I love that deconstructed effect that we can capture in almost every photo. We are lucky enough to be in a building that is an absolutely gorgeous and interesting place to photograph. 

A shot from the main hallway at Willowbank. Again we get that layering affect that I love.

One more photo I "made" that I actually like. It's also in the main hallway, and shows that lovely primitive painting that was used to decorate the walls. I love all of these details that give you glimpses into what Willowbank would have looked like during its various stages of inhabitation. 

It was most awesome to finally figure out how to actually use our D-SLR in a way where I was using it as a tool that I have some sort of control over, and not just as a point and shoot camera. I now know what to do in all of those fancy menus and what will give me the best image to play with. Cosmo suggested that we take everything in a RAW format, so we have the most pixels work with when we shop the photos. He also had many great suggestions on how to portray a traditional home vs. a modern one (as one might imagine, you shouldn't get to crazy with your compositions when photographing a traditional home, but the contemporary buildings you can get crazy with.) By the end of the second day, I was feeling confident in my photography abilities. Unfortunately we were to take pictures outside and it was raining. So now I'll have to start just getting out there on my own and clicking away.

Back in the barn...Movember?

So this week we had another session with Paul Jacobson and we now know why we've been doing all this sawing (by hand, in case you don't recall my kvetching). We are making small panels so that we can practice our joinery. Eventually we are going to make a door. I think we should make many little doors and attach them to the trees like a fun installation art project. No one else seems to be on board with this. Apparently I am crazy.
This week we worked on simple lap joints and got to go even further in the planing process. We used scrub planes and smoothers to dress the pieces of wood. Then we got to par out the joints by hand, using chisels. After quickly ruining my practice piece by jamming the chisel too far, I began to cheat by cutting a second buffer cut. A trend that soon caught on. It was a fun day. I was really excited that my sawing skills were minimally needed.

Ashleigh getting her plane on. Kristina is supervising. Look at those lovely curls!

Here's Doug's first lap joint. Notice where he effed it up and put in a second cut. An earlier and unintentional form of the buffer cut. 

What how'd this get in here??? J/K... it's Doug's moustache for Movember... apparently he didn't realize that he was participating in growing a moustache for prostate awareness month. He said it was just for a Halloween costume. I don't believe him. He totally wants to do it for a cause. And it's funny.

All sawed out, but plane-ly in love

I know it has been a while, yet again, since I posted. But I keep forgetting my camera at home, what I really need is a little point and shoot that can fit in my pocket, its a serious pain to bring the whole DSLR and its accoutrements everyday, especially when I'm walking. And I don't want to give the low down without pictures, where would be the fun. A lot of the past couple of weeks have been in class anyhow, but we are now having a weekly class in the rudiments of woodworking.
Last week we had a whole day on sawing by hand. We spent the whole day figuring out if we had a sawing bias, which until lunch, I did not have, my cuts were seriously square but after food, I apparently developed a bias to the right (don't worry, my politics have not changed). After killing many pieces of junk wood, I do believe that we were all sawed out. And yet,  not sawed out enough, since this past week, we continued to saw, but added in planing as well. At least the planing was a fun diversion from ripping 2 foot pieces of wood repetitively throughout the day.

Doug here is demonstrating what fun planing can be. No really, he does this every time he planes a board.  Just kidding.

Less kidding, more planing. The real Doug at work.

So sawing is okay, it just takes a while and a lot of patience to do it by hand. But planing was definitely fun (as you can tell by the above pictures). We definitely were really trying to kick out the sawing so we could get to the planing by the end of our second day. 

Here we have one of our many sawing trains.

But honestly, we were having fun, and we are learning all of the necessary skills for woodworking by hand, although I think we are definitely getting excited to learn more about joinery. Hopefully our sawing skills are up to snuff.