Thanks for the prayers everyone , I think we may be on the downhill run with radiation treatments for a fewore weeks and only one more chemo next month.
OJAM is all but over, one more morning left before cleanup begins .
We still have tents to take down power tools to load up benches to load campers to hook up and try to get the Rutter farm back to the way it was last weekend . If the weather holds out there are a few more bows to work on and there will be a couple that will have to wait a while before they get finished ( some of them had purchased Osage that had been cut for two weeks , still green ) . It stayed damp and cool all day and there was not as many people showing up as last year. We used a classroom type of class this year with two yellow hats ( those comfortable with marking out bows , cutting out bows , final tillering and running the class) and three or four red hats ( those that knew how to make a now but still needed a little help in some areas such as marking out bows running power equipment or or just needed the confedince of teaching some new to bow building ) their job was to teach new people how to chaise rings show them how to tiller a bow help them cut nocks and just talk them through the bow making proses , and there were ten to fifteen students to a class . This worked out pretty good , it was like having two students to a teacher and you could work closer with someone that may not be able to keep up with others or had a difficult stave. I worked with one individual that had a thicker stave that we split into two , he kept getting in a hurry and had to go down another ring once on the first stave and when I turned around to help another for just a minute he cut down two growth rings on one side . When he did that I picked up his other half so a stave and got him started on it , he did learn to slow down and finally made a bow . A young girl was working on a bad knotty stave but kept at it for over an hour without giving up so I went to my pickup and got a decent little stave out and gave it to her , she got here bow done before her father and even shot better then he did at the running pig shoot . It sure felt good to see someone so young tackle something like that and not give up ( she did get a real nice little bow out of it , just wish I could have gotten some pictures of all of this but they kept me hooked up ) . I did graduate from a red hat to a yellow hat , looks like I'll be running a class next year now I need to practice running my bandsaw and cut bows out .
