The six dragon heads from the demo. Two have horns.
A couple with beards
A couple of months ago, actually just before winter break, my daughter's art teacher asked me if I could
come to the school and do a demo. It would take place right after winter break. Without really thinking, I said yes.Then I thought it through..You know how you spend the first 25 or so
years of your kids lives telling them to THINK ABOUT THE CONSEQUENCES OF THEIR
ACTIONS.I should have paid attention
to myself.I guess the tone of my voice
really is inaudible, although, it seems my kids did listen.Where was I while I was blathering on about
this crap.
Side view.
I will admit that I have
always been a girl who can't say no....sigh...get your mind out of the gutter. I mean when it comes to work.I very rarely say no when I am working.There has to be a really good reason.Like the plan defies the laws of physics or
something like that.Otherwise I will
try everything I can to make it happen.No is so final.Final is
done.Done is beautiful.Done without being right might be beautiful
but it isn't satisfying.It won't
satisfy my customers and it doesn't satisfy me.I'm a people pleaser.What can I
say?Phooo...if you know me, you know
that isn't true, but you also know how much I despise the automatic no
response.
Horns
No is easy. Yes is a challenge, and a challenge met is a
pleasure.So I said yes to the demo.
I've never done a
demo.There are a lot of reasons for
that.I don't see work as a spectator
sport.I can't think of anything more
tedious than watching someone work.Also
PERFORMANCE ANXIETY.Big sigh.
I like this one
I said yes to this without having any details.Yes can be problematic.I found out after saying yes that it wasn't
so much a demo as six demos.One for
each period of the day.After
hyperventilating for a few..well it seemed like days, I tried to figure out
what I could possibly show.What could I
possibly demo.I have a fairly wide
range of skills, but some of them would be really painful to watch so forging something seemed safest.The next
question was what could I forge that would be magical enough to hold the
interest of high school students.
These are the basic steps to convert square bar into a dragon head. Easy without an audience.
I don't know why I curved the neck
A
couple more days of panic and I finally settled on dragons. I would forge dragon heads from square
bar.To forge dragons I would need a forge, an anvil, a vice and
a few hand tools.I could do this.I felt that I should be as prepared as
possible because there's nothing quite as unpleasant as the scorn of
teens.That's what a group of teens
should be called.A scorn.A herd of cattle, a murder of crows and a
scorn of teens.
Different lower lip
It's impossible to predict all the problems you will
encounter in any situation until you have lived through something similar. My nervousness about this whole demo business
led me to what I now call "A dragon a day month".Yes, I did make a dragon almost every day for
a month.And yes, I now have a bucket of
dragons that I will have to do something with. It was actually a nice way to warm the shop in the
morning.
This is a nice trio
A couple of days before the demo was scheduled, the art
teacher asked what kind of power I needed.I had been worried over the detail questions.I told him I didn't need power.I was honest.I said I was bringing propane, an anvil, a vice and some hand tools.I also said it should happen outside.Apparently he had the sense not to mention to
the schools administration that I was going to have any of these things.He claimed nobody asked.
So...the demo happened.
There are so many
On the up side, I was able to make six dragons in front of
six groups of teens in the courtyard of
the high school without lighting myself on fire, or drawing any of my own
blood, or shooting a tool across the intervening space and skewering a
student.I consider that a win.On the downside, there were so many things
that I did not anticipate.I work in a
cave.It's dark and there's no climate
control.Out in the courtyard in the sunshine,I could not see the color of the metal.I was never sure if it was hot enough.I realized how much I rely on the color of
the metal to gauge the heat.Also I was
staged under a tree.I don't care what
the poem says, it'snot good under the
limbs of a tree.There are roots to trip over.
Another
Also, high school is weird.There are a lot of people, and these are
adults, that just seem to aimlessly wander around.They were distracting.Oh yeah, and some kids were setting up for some
event in the courtyard for the last three periods of the day.I had probably practiced too much so I
made my dragon heads too fast and had to fill.That was a pain that will linger.I can barely hold the interest of my own teen.Other people's teens, there was just no way.
Finally
All in all, though, it went really well.That the art teacher didn't bother to tell
the administration I was bringing a 100 lb bottle of propane, or
that I would have a 2000 degree open flame made it much easier.And nobody got burned.That's a win.Plus the final period kids helped me load the tools back onto my trailer
so I could get out of there.
Now I have six
more dragons to add to my collection.
Dragon candle holder. Black heat horn mishap
I don't know if I will ever do a demo again, but at least
now I have some idea of how, and in front of the toughest audience
anywhere.Sixscorns of teens. It doesn't get any tougher than that. I can demo for anyone now.
Dragon door pull
This is a fairly bad video I made of the demo. As you can tell if you watch it, it is really hard to see the color of the steel in the sunlight. At 3 1/2 minutes it's also incomplete. It was hard to get video without blocking the view of the kids so the angles aren't very good and a lot of the demo is missing. The sound was horrible so I turned the audio off. But it will give a bit of an idea. I'm working on my video skills so maybe the next video will be better.
If it doesn't load it's on YouTube. Here's the link
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