Practice just to practice

Herring gulls, a composite sketch made over a few days from observation and memory. Window gazing and walks on the windy beach. They’re a bit of a pest sometimes but I’m fond of these birds

Mystery box

We saw this nice old box left out on the street. Since it had a sturdy handle and looked like it would make a nice box for storing LPs in, we took it home.

The handle is also the closing mechanism, the sections of the box are secured by tongue and groove along the top edges

Wow! No way you can store LPs in this box unless you rip out all the original features. And we don’t want to do that! The most interesting detail for me is the printed instruction on how to operate the telephone this box once held. Such a shame only the box remains and in a pretty parlous state of repair ( the front section was coming adrift and we glued that back together straight away) .

Is this where the phrase “get on the blower” comes from?

There are some faint pencilled additions to the diagram here and there

We both searched for information about the telephone itself, and neither of us could find anything that resembled this set up. The box will get a thorough but gentle clean. It looks like it’s been home to a few mice at some point.

Keeping up the habit

I made a new sketchbook for my watercolour skies and covered it in leftover leather scraps.

Book number three under way today. The Imperial Good Companion 5 makes a nice stand for a photo too.

Night typing

The wires look a little messy but I like the effect of the lights on the key rings. There’s no impediment to typing and no typewriters were harmed in the making.

It’s the little springs

An Underwood Universal I had the pleasure of dusting and investigating over the weekend

One dodgy and loose key

Culprit: missing spring

No matter how much I fiddled and twiddled I could not get the spring back into place. As it wasn’t my machine, and I had very limited time, I secured the spring to the return lever with a bit of fuse wire for future repair. I revitalised the ribbon with WD40 and typed out the details of two repair people I could confidently recommend. Then I made a quick type sample for the database.

The ribbon was super dry so I was surprised that it managed to come back to life even a little bit!

Lovely green shift lock key