Weeding, welding, and quilting?

That's right--all in a day work.  If you've been wondering why I haven't been blogging, I've been a bit busy on the farm and at home.  My activities lately are quite an interesting hodgepodge.  Last Thursday, I spent the morning weeding a bed of beets in the leaf-root block.  (I'm sure I did other things that morning, too, I just can't remember what.  Hand weeding is slow, but not that slow!) That was followed by an afternoon of welding class.  Until that afternoon, I had never welded a thing in my life, but given the amount of welded things in this world, I figured it couldn't be too hard.  I was wrong.  Just cutting metal proved challenging, let alone trying to join two pieces of metal together.  We learned three kinds of welding in our hands-on class: oxyacetylene, arc, and MIG.  The oxyacetylene setup consists of a tank of oxygen, a tank of acetylene, and a torch/wand. 

Oxyacetylene welding kit.

Getting started is a bit tricky and requires your brain to be engaged--the acetylene has to be turned on before the oxygen and its pressure kept below a certain psi or explosions can happen.  Once the acetylene gas is running, you ignite it using a sparker (chemistry lab flashbacks!), making sure to get your hand out of the way of the flame quickly!  Then you add oxygen slowly to make sure you don't extinguish the flame, adjusting the oxygen until you have a one inch or so cone of blue heat.  To cut metal, you hold the tip of the cone over the area to cut, heat it up until the metal begins to liquefy, and then use the flame to push the liquid metal along the cutting line.  Wild stuff.

Next came arc welding.  Arc welding is weird because it uses electricity instead of a flame to heat the metal. 

Our arc welder.

The challenge with arc welding is that you are practically working blind.  To protect your eyes from the intense light emitted, you have to wear a face shield with very tinted lenses. 

A fellow apprentice models welding safety attire, including face shield, leather coat, and gloves.

Until you touch the electrode to the surface to be welded and start conducting electricity, you can't see a thing.  Even when the electrons start flowing and the metal starts glowing, you can only see things that are really hot.  As if working half-blind weren't enough of a challenge, the stick of metal you are using to weld (the electrode) gets shorter as it melts.  So you have to lower your hands as you go to keep the tip of the electrode near the surface to be welded.  It reminds me a bit of tetherball in the sense that the rope gets shorter as it winds around the pole, and your arm swings have to compensate.  I was never good at tetherball, and I don't think I will be good at arc welding for a similar reason.  When I wasn't burning a hole in the metal to be welded, I did manage to create a very lumpy and uneven bead of weld.  I have a long ways to go before I can fix anything metal, that's for sure. 

My attempt at arc welding.  On the right is a hole I burned in the surface to be welded when it got too hot.  On the left is a lumpy, almost bead.

After welding class, I headed home to prepare for a night of quilting with my fellow apprentices.  One of the Green Corps teens had a baby recently, and we are making a baby quilt for him.  It's a teaching/learning quilt, with me demonstrating each step of the quilting process for my colleagues, then letting them have at it.  The "see one, do one, teach one" approach used in my medical training also works with quilting, I've learned.  At the end of the night, the quilt was in one piece, and now needs only to be ragged and laundered before it can be gifted.

Fabrics for the baby quilt.

The juxtaposition of welding and quilting seemed perfectly natural to me, but I imagine others must find it bizarre.  Sometimes I feel like a farmer, and sometimes I feel like a farmer's wife.  What can I say?  I'm just me.