I had a good week!

For the first time in several weeks I finished off my school week feeling good about school and myself. I finished the projects that I had fallen behind on and was proud of myself. They weren't perfect, but they looked reasonably like everyone else's projects. By Friday I had nothing left to do. Our instructor went to a conference in the states and left us with someone who is probably going to retire this year and didn't bother giving us real lessons. He did give us one lesson this week having to do with circles and layout which I found very valuable! I saw flowers. What you do is you mark a line with your straight edge (a ruler, whatever). From that line you scribe your first circle. From that circle you can mark as many other circles to pass through that circle to make whatever you like and all of it can be perfectly symetrical. I used that lesson to make flowers. I scribed them in some scrap metal, cut them out with the plasma torch and took them to the belt sander. It was at that point that I realized the importance of a steady hand in this kind of work. There was a lot of slag build up on the bottom of one of my flowers and it was very hard and wouldn't sand off easily. This, however, didn't upset me the way it might have if my regular instructor had been there this week. His opinion means a lot to me and he doesn't give compliments. Anything he does say is usually criticism. If he says nothing about my projects or my work, I take that as a good sign.
Coming back to the positivity. I left there on Friday feeling like I had enjoyed my week and was excited about working with metal again.