Exhibition Pictures!

This past weekend the school where I teach held their annual exhibition. During the exhibition, all of the student's work goes on display for the public to see. The school rents a tent (DS and DD have referred to it as the "circus tent".) for my canoe builders to show their work. One new twist this year was that we were asked to have a "live demonstration" of what happens in the class. We found ourselves doing two. The first was a demonstration that I did on making Greenland-style paddles. The second was of adding gunwales to a nearly-finished canoe.

I guess I don't have to comment much here. The pictures really speak for themselves:

Three Wee Lassies and a Tom Hill Charlotte lapstrake canoe.

Close up of Arrow's Rear Deck and nice brass painter ferrule (Note the peaked deck and laminated coaming - the Devil is in the details.)

Arrow's feature strip.


Charlotte design's mahogany deck with tiger maple stripe.


Charlotte's tiger maple swiveling backrest


Double Espresso - a Wee Lassie Two design (rear) and Phoenix (fore) , a Newfound Woodworks Osprey design sea kayak.

All of the boats in my class earn a name over the course of the year. The Double Espresso belongs to a gentleman who owns a business selling coffee among other things and kindly brought a coffee machine to class for us to share every week! The Phoenix belongs to a man who is a professional cabinet maker and recently lost his shop to a fire that I blogged about here.

Another one of my students lost his boat in that fire. The school asks that if you take a class that you bring your work, finished or unfinished to the exhibition. Fortunately, he had a good sense of humor and brought this little diorama:

This canoe, the Tesseract (think Madeline L'Engle's "Wrinkle in Time"), is a Wee Lassie design being built by a novice woodworker. I think that this student has been doing a marvelous job and should be proud of her work!

Phoenix (fore) and Crossed Canoes (rear)

Crossed Canoes is being built by a woman who is a quilter as well as a boatbuilder and is named for the quilting pattern. If you look closely at the accent strip she chose, it is a quilting "nine-patch" that has been slightly stretched. Here's a picture of the quilt square:

Crossed Canoes

We also had a display of a paddles including a variety of Greenland-style paddles including a child-sized paddle, storm paddle and a full-size paddle showing the various stages of cutting during fabrication. There were also two traditional touring paddles.

Here's what I'm focused on at the moment - a 1/3 scale model of a Tom Yost Sea Tour 15R I'm going to be starting on shortly...

Last but not least is the absolutely stunning Harpoon. (The student carried his tools around in an old Harpoon beer box.) It is a staple-less Wee Lassie Two design. Accents are Peruvian walnut and poplar in the feature strip against a western red cedar hull.

Seat and unique swiveling backrest/thwart combo of his own design are made from Kentucky walnut and are hand-caned. Gunwales are ash inn'l and out'l with Peruvian walnut as scupper blocks.

Decks were more Peruvian walnut with a butternut chevron. Coaming is ash like the gunwales.