ScrapHappy August – or Travel With A TARDIS

You might have spotted my Doctor Who obsession enthusiasm, well, I make quite a few Who and geeky themed pieces, all of which are available on my website, and many in my Etsyshop.

I have a no- quibble guarantee with all my work, and occasionally I have a return.

This week I was contacted by someone who’d been bought one of my TARDIS pendants as a gift

The story was as follows:

“…my gorgeous tardis fell from my neck. I searched everywhere and remarkably it turned up a week later on my driveway. It would appear it fell on my way to the car and was then picked up by a bird and left on my roof until heavy rain washed it down.

It looks like it has been run over. Would you consider reviewing the damage and repairing?..”

Well, how exciting. And how lovely to have one of my pieces described as gorgeous.

That’s a #HappyDance right there

For those of you not in the UK, we’ve been quite restricted in our movements – although not actually ‘locked down’ like some areas, we’ve been asked to stay home as much as possible. It seemed to me that my customer’s TARDIS had, true to the original, taken it upon herself to go for a wander, properly travelling in Relative Dimensions In Space and quite probably in Time too, before choosing to return home.

This made me very happy.

As did the opportunity to repair her.

My customer has returned her to me and I reviewed the damage.

Surprisingly minimal – the bail on the back was properly crushed, and there were some serious scratches on the back too, but the front is mostly undamaged. Here she is, on my (new) peg, whilst I reviewed the damage to see what needed doing. You can see she’s also got a bit of a wonk going on, which definitely wasn’t there when I sent her off to this lady’s partner back in May

Repairing was a simple task – just heating to melt the solder that was holding the (now useless) bail on; a bit of judicious filing some serious sanding and polishing back to remove the scratches and the remnants of the excess, old solder and then making and applying the replacement bail, (utilising an off-cut from my scrap pot) with a polish and a trip in Betty-The-Barrel-Polisher

Finally I gave her a waft in some XL Gel (my favourite liver of sulphur solution) to bring her back to full glory

I always check back with my customers throughout the process of making or repairing a special item. It’s amazing how often a request will evolve during the process of a commission,. To my mind, half the point of commissioning a crafts-person is for the interaction and the other half is the resulting uniqueness.

Because this TARDIS had been off on her own adventures, I thought it would be nice to reflect that in my repair, and keep the wibble-wobbly-ness in. My customer agreed, and so the finished, repaired TARDIS is nearly as good as new -in fact she’s arguably better than the original because she has such a delightful story to tell.

So, I got to repair something for someone, enabling her to wear something she loves, and because I was able to reuse my offcuts, I was able to do so at minimal cost.

A two-fer. Splendid. And double duty for August’s #ScrapHappy

Kate , Gun, Titti, Heléne, Eva, Sue, Lynn, Lynda,
Birthe, Turid, Susan, Cathy,  Tracy, Jill, Claire, Jan,
Moira, Sandra, Linda, Chris, Nancy, Alys, Kerry, Claire, Jean,
Joanne, Jon, Hayley, Dawn (me!), Gwen, Connie, Bekki, Pauline,
Sue L, Sunny, Kjerstin, Vera   Del and Nanette