Home Made Vacuum Table

One of the techniques Julie has learned to use in her print making classes is silk screening.  One part of the process is to use a squeegee to apply ink on a piece of paper.  It's essential that the paper not move while you're doing this.  It's also undesirable to put tape or sticky stuff on the paper.  A vacuum table is used to hold a paper in place while applying pressure and ink.

Julie found directions for a home made vacuum table. The table is 36"x36".  I made a box using 2x4's and then screwed down a 1/4" piece of plywood on the bottom side.  The top side of the table was more tricky.

The directions called for drilling holes with a 3/32" drill bit.  Well, that's nearly a 1000 holes.  I used my neighbors drill press for a little while, but couldn't get to all the holes.  My neighbor Lindle decided to help and we drilled all the holes in one go.  We broke about 7 bits in the process.  We also wore through nearly 3 cordless drill batteries.  It was a lot of work.

The next day I put some supports in the box, sealed the lid on and drilled a hole for the vacuum hose.

Below is the lid - see all the holes?

Notice how the vacuum hose gos in the side of the box?  It really works and hold paper very still.

Hollyhock

 

Readers of the gardening entries on this blog will know that I have an experimental streak in me.  Frequently I get mystery plants coming out of my compost, or remains of some plant that rotted last year that decided to grow this year.

All our pumpkins last year were like that, we didn't know what they were until they started turning orange.  We thought they were just a weird squash (turned out they were small pumpkins), too small for Halloween, but just fine for eating.  We had some really good pumpkin soup, and will be planting pumpkins purposefully this year.

We also have had tomatoes spring up.  It's always interesting to see what you'll get, and I figure, if the plant really wants to try that bad, let it go for it.

Well this year, these things started to grow up, not too far away from where purple pumpkins and okra were planted last year.  The leaves were kind of squash like (see above), and so I decided to just let them grow.  After a while, they were just too bushy to be squashes, so I thought they might be okra, or some okra weird hybrid thing.  It was in the part of the garden I really didn't have plans for yet, so no worries, I just let them grow.

Then it started sprouting all these flower buds, and last week instead of squash or okra looking yellow flowers, we got these pretty pink things.

It turns out they are hollyhocks.  How on earth they got there is an absolute mystery.  There aren't any other hollyhocks around.  Maybe bird droppings, we really don't know.  These things will last years, so I guess it's their new home.  They grow really tall, these ones are over 6 feet tall now.

So, now you know a little about hollyhocks.

My mother reminded me of a favorite painting of hers. "Girl among the hollyhocks". A lovely painting.