I cheated, but it was worth a try. It worked reasonably well but it was still cheating.

Today was a day for random tasks as it turned out that our oldest had school (normal for some schools) and that She Who Must Be Obeyed was going to an open house at the school. That meant I was watching our youngest.

Because there was no way to make other plans I did a few things I’d been putting off. First, I finished cleaning pens and chose a couple that will be put up for sale. After the cleaning, of course, comes the reinking and that led to some rethinking and I thought about putting a couple more up for sale. Of course, I’ll have to clean them first, which adds complications. (In a future post I’ll talk about the criteria I’m using for keeping or selling.)

That process, of course, took a lot of time. I had to pull the pens apart, rinse them out and soak the nibs and feeds to flush out all the old ink. While the nibs were soaking, I took on a different task: sharpening knives. This is where I cheated.

I recently acquired a diamond sharpening stone and, just as an experiment, a guide for helping the lazy/unskilled keep a knife at a consistent angle for sharpening. I spent some time playing with that and the main problem was it was sharpening the knife at a much different angle than I usually use. This meant I had to spend a lot of time removing a lot of steel before I could actually form the apex and sharpen the knife. This meant I spent a lot longer sharpening the knife than I’d planned.

The guide worked well, but it doesn’t solve the problem of curved edges and a lack of skill. It also probably won’t solve the problem of the way we abuse our knives and manage to dull them rather quickly.

After the cheating, er, sharpening, I managed to get some writing done, but the sense that I’d cheated at sharpening distracted me. Tomorrow I’ll have to freehand sharpen something just to prove I can still do it.

I’ll also think about cleaning and selling those pens.