20/6/2016

I would like to apologise sincerely for my long absence from the blogosphere. We lost our internet connection at home for several weeks which curtailed my ability to load photos to this website. I also missed out on shop time for over a month due to traveling and other challenges. At the moment though, I am back in action working on several exciting projects.

As you might remember from a previous post, we had a wonderful week in Thailand some months ago. We picked up a whole heap of coconut shells in Ying’s (our cooking class teacher) backyard. They were then smuggled in our luggage via Hong Kong back to Namibia. A few of them were damaged during the arduous trip, which I then turned into spoons. The rest were lined up to become lights.

It is quite a mission to get rid of the fibrous material on both the in and outside of the hard shells. I used the wire bits pictured to do just that.

For the other halve of the light I used empty tin cans from household use. The big hole is for the light fitting.

The cans were then snipped into four strips to allow it to flare open.

Each of the four strips are attached to the edge of the coconut shells with one self-tapping screw.

In order to allow light to shine through the shells I drilled sets of “carefully messed up” holes. The inspiration for this is Aboriginal art from Western Australia that I saw many moons ago while at a Congress in Perth. As I am sure you can imagine, this took ages to accomplish.

One coat of Woodoc enhanced the beautiful natural colours of the shells.

I decided not to include any photos of how the lights were wired up as it might become a legal liability for this website, not to mention the myocardial risk in might impose on people like Jonathan White. So here they are hanging off the roof of our Shebeen called “Wamboland”  located in the backyard.

An accidental arty photo.

As an added bonus I include a few picks of super hot Namibian chicks hanging out at the Shebeen a while ago. If some of the photos are less than perfect it is because they were not able to keep still for long enough given the slow shutter speed in such a low light setting. Certainly not as a result of anything to do with the photographer!!