I left my house at 9:30 and headed on I-5 towards Delia, which is located in north portland right next to peninsula park. I met with chris, my mentor, and he gave me a tour of the building and a run down of the different work areas. In the front of of building there is a gallery for the artists to sell their pieces, and then there's a giant shop (maybe the size of a tennis court) in the back where the artists work. It was funny traveling through the clean, quiet gallery area, through the doors into the loud, dirty, and industrial workshop area. A complete flip. On arrival I met a lot of the artists who worked there, Ivan, Dave, and Jeff. They all were very nice and funny and had distinguished personalities. Jeff would sing from his workstation to the all classical music on 89.9. He was pretty good too. After getting the lay of the land, I set about my first (and only) task of the day. My job was to clean and smooth pieces that had been recently made so that they were ready to be displayed in the gallery. To do this i had to file off goobers or blobs of metal so everything was smooth. Then I went over it all with a coarse rag to get rid of some discoloration from the welding and smooth it out even more. Most of the pieces i cleaned were these tall spirally wine racks. The process seemed simple but took quite a while to do. I cleaned about a dozen of them  in 2 hours. After lunch i got a tutorial on the basics of welding. The protective mask was very high tech and electronically blocked out the harmful light. Basically, if you just had the mask on, it would seem like you were just wearing sunglasses. But when you started welding, everything would go pitch black except for a bright neon light wear you were making contact with the two metals. It was pretty cool. I spent the rest of the afternoon putting pieces together here and there until in the end I had a very abstract piece of junk. It was fun but also difficult to make it look pretty. Most of my welds were globby and bulking, not smooth and round like they should be. All in all good time though.

I forgot to bring a camera, but will make sure to bring one next time to show the workshop and gallery etc.