Sometime soon I am hoping to start on the project of refinishing a lot of the rowing club's oars. On some of the blades, the surface has worn down to the point where we're starting to scrape through the fiberglass layers. Other blades have chips and cracks. Not good. Those things ain't cheap!
Certain things clicked into place during a conversation with teammates about how to honor one of our teammates who has just moved down to NYC for three years while his fiancee undertakes a pediatrics fellowship there. P mentioned the idea of giving J a map of our section of the Hudson River, with our usual landmarks illustrated, so J would remember his rowing roots. When searching online, he wasn't able to find anything of the sort, but that all gave me Ideas.
Here's the original dirty old blade I worked with, one of a bunch of blades I salvaged when teammates wanted to throw them all away as Useless Boatyard Junk:

After sanding the blade down and coating it with primer, I put the first layer of paint on with a bristle brush, and quickly concluded I didn't like that application method, for reasons such as what can be seen here:

I switched over to a foam brush for the subsequent layers, which worked well enough for this purpose. Oar blade painting is almost as stressful as putting on coats of varnish, except at least oar blades are much smaller and easier to reposition. When it comes to repainting the oars the club uses, I'll mix in a couple of paint additives that a teammate recommended based on her prior efforts to repaint oars about a decade ago.
I used SignPainter's One Shot for the major design elements:

Then some Sharpies and more One Shot for the finishing details. Overall I'm pleased with how it turned out! I don't know how durable the SignPainters One Shot is, but hopefully durable enough?

As I told J, I'm now hoping that he can convince his future father-in-law to come up with a good method for mounting the oar for display, since his future father-in-law is a really good woodworker. And if the FFiL does...maybe additional ones can be made for the other 5 blades in the pile? That has been one of the aspects of Art Oars that I just don't really want to deal with.
I should point out that I've been carting around one of the oar blades in the pile since the Texas days, so it might be another decade before I'm struck by inspiration again, heh. Still - these are nice materials to work with for the sake of making display/art items for rowers.
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Project 2 came from thinking that my research students and I should make something to commemorate our summer of research work. Just based on our personalities, I came up with the idea of some sort of "Easily Distracted by Ants" concept. One of my research students is artistically inclined, and agreed to create a design based around that concept. After working on it, she got inspired to make a second design featuring the name of the ant species we're working with.
Once I showed the designs to S, he asked if we would like to do DIY screenprinting if supplied with a screen, ink, and squeegee. But of course!
On Sunday I picked up a stack of blank shirts at Goodwill, and yesterday I got additional shirts from 2 of 3 students, to print on.
The first design, which also went on the front of all the shirts:

Design on the back of all the shirts:

Shirts waiting while they dry:

I am SO PLEASED with these. There are definitely going to be more rounds of shirt-printing in the future.
So now you have some idea of some of the things that have been keeping me busy lately.