Fitting

I like working with black metal pipes (I made two lamps last year) but when you get them, they are very oily and dirty and need severe washing before you can use them.

At the point that this picture was taken, I was pretty excited and convinced I'd have one stool within a short time, but then stuff didn't work exactly right and I was missing a piece or two and so I unscrewed almost everything (and now two of the close nipples - yes, that's what they're called - won't come out of the forty-five degree elbows. I suspect they weren't quite dry when I put them all together and now they're rusted together.

This is not ultimately a tragedy.

Part of my kitchen plans involve replacing the extremely ugly formica legs of my bar/counter thing with legs made from pipe.

 It's a lovely plan except for my ability to measure perfectly accurately.

In all fairness, it's hard to judge how much of the nipples (really, that's what they're called: the bits of straight pipe with threaded ends) will disappear into the fittings into which they're screwed. Short answer: some.

And then I made a sample for Tuesday's class and learned just how horribly sensitive this design is to minuscule variations in seed bead sizes. And fire-polished bead sizes too. When they call it a three-millimetre bead, they really mean "more or less, randomly".

I don't think it's bad, it's just not the perfect glove-like fit of my original class samples.

Luckily class isn't until Tuesday and I know how to fix this.