Mixed Bag Monday

Here's a couple of friend's sites to check out.

Cara and Pam have their blog open for business; Visit The Grumpy Goat Gallery. I can't say it any better than they can:

We are two, funny girls who live and work in a wee, kooky cottage by the sea, in a tiny, little town in a quirky place called Newfoundland. We carve, paint, build things and run a 4 star hotel for cats. Life here can be hard and the ocean can get angry, but on sunny, calm days, the whales come out to play and it is the best place to be on earth. If you'd like to stop by our studio to have a gander at our artwork, we'd love to see you. There is a free cat with every purchase, and a complimentary lint rolling service as you depart. Can you ask for anything better than that?

Over at the Burnside Archaeology blog there is a new promotional video up. There's a couple seconds footage from the knapping demo I did out there in June and I play a tourist in the earlier video. Great job, Matthew!





As for me, I spent a bit of time working on Fibre Optics and collecting lichen on the weekend. I ended last week by adding one more artifact to the Finished pile in the Parks contract.

Broken Biface: This artifact comes Aulavik National Park. (Original on Right, Reproduction on Left) Its a fairly rough biface with one end broken off. A biface is a tool that is worked on both surfaces and gives you a sharp cutting edge. It may have been a small knife, projectile point, or endblade that broke in manufacture. It looks to be at a fairly early stage because the flake scars along the edge are so pronounced. Normally as a biface nears completion the edge gets flatter and the flake pattern gets more complex. I don't know the origin of the stone used in the original piece, but I used a piece of English Flint from Devon, England to reproduce it. The colour and texture of the stone was a very good match and the flint forms in chalk, so even the patina is very similar. I knapped the complete biface and then scored and snapped it with a tile cutter to get the break. I had some control over where the break went, but there was also a lot of luck. Some of the patina on the reproduction is the actual chalk patina from the flint and the rest is a rock dust and glue mixture that I carmelized with the blowtorch to match the colour of the patina on the artifact.

Photo Credits:
Top: Screen grab from Cara and Pam's blog
Middle Videos: Matthew Brake, Nova Media and Burnside Heritage Foundation
Bottom: Tim Rast

Photo Captions:
Top: A Day in the life at The Grumpy Goat Gallery.
Middle Video 1: Imagine, Imagine life at Burnside over the past 5000 years
Middle Video 2: Burnside Archaeology Web Video
Bottom: Side by side comparison of biface reproduction (left) and original artifact (right) from Aulavik Island National Park.

A Tipping Point -- The First Finished Parks Pieces

We have some leaves scattered around the back yard, so it must have been windy last night, but we seem to have come off pretty lightly in St. John's from the passing of what was left of Hurricane Bill. The biggest impact on our household was the loss of the satellite signal for 5 minutes in the middle of last night's episode of True Blood. Mercifully, the storm broke the humidity that we had all day and the wind and rain made for perfect sleeping weather.

Today is a normal workday. I'm in the shed making the modifications to the Parks reproductions that I mapped out on Friday. The Rooms visits to check on the progress are getting kind of overwhelming. I have pretty much every piece on the go now, which is a lot to keep track of in my head. However, I'm hoping that I'm passed a tipping point in the project -- some of the pieces are finished and won't have to go back for comparisons anymore. Hopefully, from now until the end of the project, there will be a steady stream of finished reproductions. I'm looking forward to having fewer pieces to keep track of. Here are the first pieces that I finished.

Net Gauge, Ivvavik National Park: The original artifact is in the middle and the reproductions are above and below it. I've talked a bit about this artifact in a previous post. Its a key shaped tool used to measure the diameter of the gaps in a fishnet. Its made on softwood and I tried to match the weathered surface using a combination of wood stain, rock dust, ochre, and a clear matte spray finish.

Stone Scraper, Banks Island: This one was a little challenging, but unless I can figure out how to stain the stone more I think it will stay in the finished pile. This little scraper was made on what looks to be a pebble with a reddish cortex and green interior, with blue and white layers in between. Its such a specific combination of colours and textures that even if I had complete access to the source of the stone (which I don't) it would still be unlikely that I'd come across an identical stone. I went through boxes and boxes of rock and found a heat treated flake from a source that I'm not certain off (Florida, maybe) that had a similar red cortex and colourful interior. I knapped the scraper to keep the patch of cortex in the same location as on the original and tried staining the stone darker with ochre and shoe polish, with mixed results. Maybe green shoe polish would give a closer match - does that exist? For now its in the finished pile, because I don't know what else to do to make it any closer to the original.

Photo Credits: Tim Rast

Photo Captions:
Top: Aftermath of Bill - note the scattered leaves.
Second: Net Gauges. The original artifact is in the middle.
Third: Scraper and flake
Fourth: Scraper and scraper reproduction made on the flake in the previous photo.