Sanding Wood is Fun!

I Broke a Promise…

…but I also made a discovery.
When I began doing wood projects among my disabled friends I made some promises to myself. The promises were a personal, but unwritten, statement of policy.

I promise to:
do work that is engaging because the thing we make is interesting,
never to do all the wood work for them because all woodwork includes an act of construction,
never to just have them just sand a piece I made, and call it their work and
accept that sanding is so boring that nobody should be asked to do too much of it.

BUT

In the craft room, three stakeholders are present: clients who are the centre of our attention, regular staff who do the work with us, and my volunteer friend and I. If you step back a little and see everybody engaged then the work has been well judged. Three years have seen three reliable activities that give contentment to all.

1. Construction involves us drilling holes, banging in dowels and sharing trust in each other’s presence. We LOVE these close moments.

2. Every day begins with the question, Are we gonna paint today Bruce? Non toxic acrylics and fast drying shellac can be slapped on without supervision. I think my friends love the feeling of independent success when they have a brush in their hand. They LOVE painting.

…here begins the confession.
3. They LOVE sanding too! I have to eat my dislike. Again, I think there is a feeling of personal success happening here. We clip a whole sheet of abrasive to a piece of melamine. You can hold the thing we are making and rub it against horizontal sandpaper. Clumsy hands become competent, success!

Another Pencil Holder

I enjoy making wooden tubes and had a scrap of low quality plywood. I cut it into long strips and glued the strips into tubes. These tubes were then cut into 100mm lengths. But I had done most of the work for my friends and all that was left was the sanding! Hmm, does my policy allow this?

Sanding Reigned Supreme- a lovely story

As my friends sanded the cheap plywood tube the flimsy veneers rubbed away quickly. They revealed lovely contour like patterns and fine glue lines to define the shapes.  I instructed my enthusiastic decorators to paint the inside. Unable to curb their own enthusiasm, they painted for contentment, not for the lines. Now there was paint covering the nice patterns we had revealed. So, the next week, we sanded some more!

We have sanded more than I like to. I have done most of the construction. But a light bulb glows where it was previously dull. Sanding can be fun! It is nice that we never stop learning. It is nicer that students can teach the teacher.

I LOVE my job!

Each pen holder was labelled with the name of a staff member and my good friend played delivery man.