Sunday, November 12, 2017

Finding Form (2)


October 2017 A couple of sunny afternoons have gone into the pad since I last posted. It may not be obvious from the pictures, but some more initial layout has happened, and I've started refining that first layout en route to mortaring in. Refining essentially means tightening things up, making sure the edges of adjacent stones echo each other, and swapping out any problem pieces. I feel blessed to have had weather warm enough to work in shorts and a tee, despite it being well into fall and cold enough to have lit a fire the night before. Leaves are falling abundantly now, maples in this case. Apple harvesting continues apace across the Penders, now tapering off into the later varieties. But I'm focussed here on pad at the back of our place, engulfed in a fabulous ambience for a day of laying out stone.




Tightening a layout is finicky work, often involving carefully removing knobs of stone to realize a more sympathetic shape. I use an old election sign from my municipal politics days as a kneeling pad, so I can keep close to the material without discomfort. I remove any pieces I need to modify to a makeshift banker (just loose gravel dust heaped up) so there's some cushioning of my chisel's impacts, which helps to avoid unwanted breaks along hidden faults. This being sandstone, it's easy enough to break a solid piece into bits inadvertently, and then be faced with having to fill in an irregular void. The next shot shows a section after some snugging up of the material. Note the slight wandering movement introduced into the pad's edge to take it off rigid square.

 
 This layout has been tightened up and the garden edge's gently curving alignment emphasized


What a skookum place to do stonework, smack dab in the scenery, with fall light and an overall ambience of forest edge. It's just a neat place to be engaged in doing this sort of work. Patience is required because the material is stone, a resistant medium that can be challenging to coax into the relationships you want. I was particularly concerned here to keep that crosswise flow going, so redid some sections on the right side of pad that were a bit notional. The left hand edge was good from the start, because I laid it out as a piece.


 
The left edge wanders agreeably, capturing a bit of motion, but the overall flow is crosswise


I kept myself at it for a good five hours, which afforded a sense of progress, albeit modest because this is slow work. It was great to get a little time with it in later afternoon too, after a nice warm tub to ease the aches from bending so much, at a time when the light was especially mellow with autumnal tints. It's satisfying as the maker to be able to note the signs of progress. I'm starting to feel a sense of expectation around this project, getting more committed to seeing it through, more keen about my next chance to advance it. It's a bit of a crap-shoot there, because my time comes in weekend-long increments and only now and then. Weather can readily confound you at this time of year, turning foul just when you finally have time for the work. But this particular weekend, near the end of October, the weather remained superb.




Looking very good in late afternoon fall sunshine after a day of tweaking the layout

I mentioned working in the fall light, with its golden quality, a facet that's manifest in the yellow leaves of big leaf maple.








Back at the time I noticed and began retrieving off-cuts for future paving, I did a quick layout on the a sheet of plywood to get a sense of what this jumble of bits might look like worked into a unity. I was immediately convinced it was worth the effort to retrieve the material and that something worthy could be made of it.



A quick and dirty arrangement just to get a sense of how the material might work as a whole


Later on, I took it a step further, beginning a layout on the notorious pad, again to see what it might look like. This in situ attempt sensitized me to the potential for a directional flow across the pad.


It was fun playing around in an uncommitted way with my stone trove


It was around this time that we were drawing the conclusion that our old cottage in fact needed a substantial rebuild. The premise for setting the stone out (embellishing what was already in place) had been overtaken by the much larger choice to put a proper foundation under the existing structure. The layout above and below was done quite casually, really more for practice and to see how quantities would play out. It allowed me to draw some useful conclusions (start at the edges and work across, not inside and working outwards). Nonetheless, I enjoyed the look, and it did help me draw some conclusions for the next attempt, some while after the construction and landscaping work were finally done. I didn't realize then it would be years before I finally got around to tackling it in earnest. 


Vertical and horizontal placements promiscuously arranged in a crazy paving way


The stone had to be repiled and placed out of harm's way for the duration of the construction, and the subsequent landscaping using rock retaining walls. It was an intrusive process, as the picture below indicates. Now it's time at long last to bring that back patio into full service. Did I mention I'm getting excited?


Construction creates chaos first, then draws order out of it
 






























 

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