A colossal blunder

I’ve made several miscalculations with my monumental project. Grave oversights. I’m trying to figure out a way to salvage my project.  The idea of having to trash my Hanshi Festival ( Cold Eat Festival) poems calligraphy piece nauseates me. 

To begin with, my premise was totally wrong.  I assumed that by using my Rotozip tool on paper cardboard was such a clever idea.  If veneer posed no problem to my Rotozip bit, cutting through cardboard paper would be like a hot knife through butter.  The harsh reality was that because cardboard did not have the density of veneer or gypsum board, the bit was not able to make a clean track through the cutting. Instead it just shredded the paper into lint that refused to vacate.  It was far from the crisp cut edges and hollowed out trenches that I was expecting.  Also the torque of the Rotozip was a little too much for the corrugated cardboard and it was difficult to to precisely place the bit, especially if I had to start or stop the drill in the middle of carving out a line. 

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In my infinite wisdom I switched to my Dremel.  I wasn't thinking clearly when I picked my next bit.  I thought it was on steroid and should be a piece of cake in hollowing out my cardboard.

I picked a word with straight lines to test my new setup.  The lint problem remained and the bit was disappointing in its performance, perhaps due to its weird shape.  That bit was probably better suited for carving and shaping than hollowing out something.

I finally decided on a more traditional bit.

This bit was fine in control and efficiency and all that, but it had no answer for the lint problem.  I resorted to using my tweezer to pick off the lint.

I eventually decided to give my Exacto knife blades a try.  I was hoping that I could achieve crisp edges with more success.

I was right, but my surprise was that these sharp blades were no match for the corrugated cardboard.

The cardboard had a sandwiched layer of undulating paper with peaks and valleys. When the seemingly sharp blade cut into this layer, it did not meet the necessary resistance to make a clean cut and the paper tore and left pieces of chads.  These chads were stubborn and subsequently required the use of a tweezer to be removed.

The insert showed the exposed corrugation which was resistant to cutting and the resulting chads.

In the end I was using the Exacto for my initial cuts and finished with my Dremel and tweezer to dig out the chads.

Obviously this whole project did not progress as I had expected.  The project changed abruptly from the moment I first turned on my Rotozip.  The lesson I learned over the years was how to salvage my miscalculation.  How to mitigate my mistakes. 

As luck would have it, or extremely bad luck, depends on how one looks at it, I was having some grave health problems all of a sudden, which totally blindsided me.  New health problems kept popping up and I just couldn't get a break, always worrying about when the other shoe was going to drop.

As I had to retreat from my usual activities, I was thankful that I had this project to occupy my mind and time.  I also looked at this project as a parallel that tested my resolve.  Was I just going to throw my hands up and said I screwed up.  Of course not.  So I must deal with my health problem with the same resolve.  I stayed positive and stuck to the agenda of what needed to be done next to move forward.

I had faith that my efforts would not be in vain.  

This was what I had so far and no I couldn't tell you the significance of hollowing out the words.  I just felt like doing it.

A monumental project, I hope

I kept looking at my carvings on my spaghetti squash peel and I was itching to do something similar, but in a much grander scale.  I wanted to do the same thing with the calligraphy of Su Dongpo's Cold Food Festival poems.

First order of business was to fix my calligraphy work onto a substrate that I could easily carve into, hopefully rendering the brushstrokes as void spaces.  I chose double walled corrugated cardboards. 

I stacked and glued two pieces of such cardboards together such that this back support was never going to buckle on me.  I was also hoping that the thickness of the boards would make the hollowed out brushstrokes more dramatic and three dimensional in appearance by creating a shadow inside the hollowed out carvings.

I then glued my calligraphy onto the prepared cardboards, running my stiff bristle brush over the paper to ensure adhesion.

My project was ready for carving.

I planned to use my Rotozip with a bit that would gouge a channel through material,

I had used this tool for a project before and I absolutely enjoyed that journey.  That project was done on thin wood veneer and the Rotozip made it a cinch.

My work of the Cold Food Festival Poems was the result of countless times of copying and emulating the original work, which is housed in the National Palace Museum in Taipei.

For Chinese brush calligraphy students, we use the image of the original as our copybook.  This is somewhat different from the elementary copy book for alphabets, such as the Speedball Textbook for Pen and Brush Lettering.  A page from the Speedball Textbook:

The original Cold Food Festival Poems:

Su Dongpo composed the poems while he was banished in exile, putting his anguish and despair into words. 

I shall attempt to translate the poems,

"I have spent three Cold Food Festivals now in Huangzhou, I regret the passage of Spring each year and yet time does not relinquish itself.  The spring rain this year has been relentless.  For two months now it feels like autumn.  Lying in misery, I hear that the crabapple blossoms have fallen off already, their  petals wilting on the muddy ground.  The devastation is as if someone hauls off all the flowers in the deep of night.  I feel helpless.  No different from a youngster fallen ill, only to wake and realize that his hair has turned gray, and is now feeble.

The river is rising and reaching my hut and yet the rain shows no sign of ceasing.  My hut is like a little skiff struggling in this soup of haze.  I am trying to cook some grub, with damp reed as firewood in my dilapidated fire pit.   I have no idea what time of the year it is, until I see crows with burnt paper-money in their beaks.  I now realize this is Cold Food Festival.  I wish to serve my government, yet it has kept me out.  I want to go back home and pay respect to my ancestors' tombs, but home is thousands of miles away; unreachable.  My heart is dead, the ember has been extinguished."

I'll be remiss if I don't explain what Cold Food Festival is.  Cold Food Festival ( Hanshi Festival) is a holiday that falls around the Tomb-Sweeping Festival (Qingming) in China. 

Legend has it that in China during the Spring and Autumn period ( 770-476 BC) a nobleman Jie from the State of Jin had no interest in politics and avoided at all cost to serve the court by vanishing into the forest.  After numerous failed attempts to lure Jie to serve him, the duke set fire to the forest to attempt to flush Jie out.  Jie and his mother were found burnt alive, their bodies still hugging a Chinese Scholar Tree (Styphnolobium japonicum).

The duke atoned by banning all fire, not even for cooking,  for a period of time as a memorial for Jie. Hence the Cold Food Festival.

Qingming or Tomb-Sweeping Festival is a traditional Chinese holiday when tombs of our ancestors and beloved get a visit.  It is customary to bring food and incense sticks and specialty paper money folded in the shape of silver bullions.  The tomb site or headstone will be literally swept clean and made  presentable. Incense  sticks and paper money will be burned, the smoke carrying the offerings to the underground/Heaven, symbolically anyways.  

The reference in the poem to crows carrying burnt paper money in their beaks was how Su Dongpo poetically hinting at Qingming when people burn offerings of money to the deceased and Cold Food Festival, using the setting to introduce the source of his feeling of abandonment and despair.  He wasn't able or allowed to fulfil his filial duties.