Made some decent progress on the leg this past week.  Not as much as I'd have liked to, but more than I thought I would.  Struggled a little with the two thicker wires, trying to match the lines of the first leg.  I'm usually pretty good with symmetry, but mirroring the legs has been challenging.  I think I've got it though.  Working my way through and it keeps looking cooler and cooler with every wire I lay in.  A few more lines to the shin, then it's on to the calf!  Loving it so far.

Nothing too exciting to report.  Been working on the second foot/leg.  It's starting to take shape though, and it's looking good.  I bent the thick wires from the Achilles through the calf tonight.  The angle of this leg leaves the wires sticking straight out, rather than up like the other leg, so I had to build a second, smaller rig to catch those wires.  I now have twelve loose wires swinging around.  It's going to start getting crazy when I get up to the thighs and all those wires are so close together.  I'm going to need to sharpen up my weaving skills.

Well, after taking a few days off to let my eye heal, I finally got back to work last night.  The eye is still scratchy, and what worries me more, it's still a little blurry, but much better than it was Monday, Tuesday and even Wednesday.  I went in for a follow up on Thursday and I have to go back one more time next week, but overall, it's looking pretty good.  Hopefully this scratchiness and blurriness will go away soon.  I'm pretty sure the scratchiness will, but I really hope the blurriness does too.

I started working on the second foot last night.  I had already bent the toes when I did the first foot, to be sure to keep them the same size, so last night I shaped the rest of the footprint, attached it to the base, started building up the toes and started the toenails.  As I said before, she is standing on her toes and taking a step forward.  The first leg, her right leg, is the one directly under the body, supporting her weight on the ball of the foot.  The left leg, the one I started last night, is a step behind her.  It's really just touching the base with her toes and the foot is more perpendicular to the floor. 

So that's it.  Everything that's going to be making contact with the base, the support for the whole sculpture, is now there.  The first foot isn't as sturdy as I'd like it to be, but I think it's more than strong enough to support everything, and the second foot is really just sort of picking off the piece, so it only really needs that small point where the toes touch the ground.  This was one of my main concerns going into it, but now that those points are finished, I think it's going to work. 

Just adding that first little bit of the second foot has changed the piece completely.  It takes it from being this abstract... thing... a leg sticking up from the ground and unraveling into nothingness, and suddenly gives it context.  All it is is a footprint, but suddenly I can see the other leg.  It's pretty crazy. 

Great soundtrack all night last night, but when it started raining around 1AM, the cellos came out and everything sort of fell into place.  Nice moody end to the evening.  Johann Johannsson came out with the first raindrops, and then I finished the night with Olafur Arnalds.  Soooo good.

Well, in a bit of a holding pattern here.  You know how I've been saying I've been doing so much grinding?  Woke up to an itchy eye on Monday.  I assumed it was because I only got a few hours of sleep on Sunday night, but by Monday night, it was getting red, scratchy and watering.  I put some Visine in right before I went to bed and it felt like it made it worse.  Woke up this morning and my eye was dark red, puffy, really scratchy and incredibly light sensitive.  Even just turning on my phone in my dark room, with my bad eye covered, was enough light in my good eye to make it feel like someone was digging their thumb into the bad eye.  Weird.  Went to the eye doctor and it turned out there was a piece of metal in my eye that had already started to rust.  The doc gave me some numbing eye drops, then took a needle and first scraped off the piece of metal, and then scraped off the rust ring on my eyeball.  He said it would most likely scar, but thankfully it wasn't on my pupil, so it shouldn't affect my vision.  He gave me a few more numbing drops so I could make it home before it got scratchy again, which it did a few hours later.  So now it should be red, scratchy and watering for a few days, then should start getting better.  Still light sensitive, so I can't do any welding for a few days.  Bummer.  But I guess it could have been a lot worse.  So, time to move from safety glasses to safety goggles.  Lesson learned.

Had a fantastic week and made some really good progress.  Still need to do a few touch ups here and there, but for all intents and purposes, I finished the lower leg and began the thigh.

Looking a few steps ahead, I think I've hit the point where I need to take a pause on this leg and begin the next one.  The wires moving up through the thigh are going to continue on to the torso, so I really need the other leg at this point, so I can figure out how it will all come together.  Very exciting on one hand, a little daunting on the other, as this leg took me almost a month.  Hopefully the next one will go a little quicker.  I'm not holding my breath though.  This one didn't go so slow because I didn't know what I was doing, rather it's just time consuming work, especially since I have to do the finish work as I go.  But it looks good.  I got the shape I was going for, the design is looking cool and I'm incredibly happy with it so far.

The speed rail rig I made is finally starting to get some real use.  It had only been holding the two thick wires for the first few weeks, but that was because all the other wires were ending at the knee.  Once I got past the knee and moved back to the calf and started the thigh, the new wires I've been adding don't have a stopping point.  They're going to continue on up through the body.  So at this point, it's now holding eight loose wires, with many more to come.  It's gonna start getting tricky to move them around when I need to.  It's almost like weaving.

Time change happened this weekend.  Bye bye, daylight savings.  I'll see you in four months.  =(   It was also cold and a little rainy.  This part of the year always beats me down a little.  I hate that it gets dark an hour and a half before I get off from my day job.  Weekends take a hit too.  I'm a creature of the night, it's my most productive time, but then I sleep til after noon on Saturday and Sunday, and now it will get dark a few hours after I wake up on the weekends.  I really don't do well with the cold weather either.  I think I'm part lizard.  I could take 90 degrees year round.  It'll be interesting to see how this all affects me during this project.  Fortunately, my life is looking pretty good these days, so I'm starting off on a good foot.  =) 

Dug deep into the Cure's album Disintegration a number of times this weekend.  Maybe it was the weather.  Over twenty years after its release, Disintegration is still one of my favorite albums of all time.  It's perfect.  Flawless.  And it was the perfect work mood for me this weekend.