February is traditionally a time for fertility celebrations. In the spirit of this, I made earrings (via a lasercutter) that act as a physical hyperlink to the wikipedia article for the Fertility Goddess. Taking a photo of these earrings using a qr code reader on your phone will take you to the mobile version of the page. I generated the code using Semapedia.

Unfortunately, the ones I made without writing “Fertility Goddess” (so just the code) didn’t turn out dark enough…but this works to show the concept.

Today I made a MESS.

Really, I made a rubber mold for casting resin .

I was given a section of a large display recently that was made up of 6 5×7 led modules. The modules were embedded in epoxy with the lenses built into the front. As most of the led drivers I have are 8×8 (and over $10 apiece) , building displays with the modules wastes a third of the driver. I thought I would try to build 8×8 arrays using the leds I got last week. I took one of the 5×7 arrays and pressed it into some DAS air dry clay and made an 8×8 pattern.

Then I attempted to make a positive using an expensive clear plastic material that I have never had much success with. After two attempts to get a decent positive I decided to try a wax positive using a large candle that was left in my apartment by the previous tenants. This was successful and so I went to make the mold.

The a part of the mold compound was so thick that it was almost impossible to work with. For a long time I wasn’t sure that it would set. But in the end I would up with a fairly decent mold. Tomorrow I will get some casting resin from tap plastics..

Title: Same fame
Would their fame have been the same if they’d used their real names?
Description: Musicians photos collage captioned with real names [full size]
Inspiration: Today is Get a Different Name Day

Coastal chapparal and eucalyptus.

This one almost didn’t happen tonight. I had a very long day teaching guitar lessons, and I taught a class that didn’t end until 8:30. I got home exhausted and saw our monstrous electric bill. Stress. Tomorrow is my estranged father’s birthday. More stress. The gash on my back from this morning when I awoke with a full bladder, wasn’t wearing my glasses, trying not to squish two cats and hit my lower back on the protruding air-conditioning unit. Pain. Two false starts.

I almost didn’t do it at all. I started it and got discouraged. I told my wife that I wasn’t going to do it tonight. Then the shame set in. I HAD to finish. For myself. For you, whoever you are.

I did as half-assed a job as I can possibly allow myself to do without hating myself for it. It’s much looser than the other ones. In some ways I really dig it (the vibrancy, the motion), and in other ways I hate it (dammit! I can do better).

 But I couldn’t leave you without someone to tie your respective Penelopies to the train tracks (tremolo diminished chords ascending in minor thirds…).

More progress on the red paisley duck egg today. I finished waxing the main lines of design in red, and dyed and waxed parts of the egg pale pink and magenta. After waxing in the magenta areas, I scrubbed the exterior with a gentle brush using Ivory liquid soap (a gentle cleaner, not detergent-based) and returned it to white. My husband thinks I should leave it white, but I want to add at least two more shades of red and pink/purple before removing the wax. Tomorrow I’ll post the finished egg.

It’s been about 11 years since I had plenty of America On-Line CDROMs lying about with which to make coasters — literally, they graced my coffee table for years.

So today, when a dual-layer DVD+R went bad on me (substrate problem right out of the box), I decided to revisit that old trick. I also have a crappy microwave that I don’t care if it dies.

The results were gorgeous. The disc separated into two layers, each with a distinctive pattern.

I love how the corporate motto above looks like “is it evil or is it.”

One more photo and a video of the dual-layer coaster in the making are offsite.

Could you guess that my almost five year old is suggesting what I draw? And does anyone have an idea how I might go about protecting the surface from accidental kiddo damage? I’d like to put together a little book of the dinosaur scratchies for my son when we’re all done, but I suspect he’d have them unrecognizable in no time…

Just knitting. And I find progress shots of knitting to be pretty boring—especially when what you’re knitting is a seemingly endless sequence of garter stitch squares—so I haven’t bothered to post any. I’m on the third square of the third strip of that baby blanket, though I didn’t finish the second strip because I spilled some very strong tea onto the lightest blue square (of course). I tried to soak it out, but the spots are still there, so I’ll have to rip back to the beginning of that square and reknit. Blah, blah, blah. See? Knitting’s horribly boring.

Meanwhile, Wednesday is the night I make dinner for my mom, so I did make some food, in addition to knitting. (Making food may not seem like much of a project to normal people out there, but although I’m a pretty good cook and like doing it, I rarely bother cooking for myself. It’s not nearly as much fun as cooking for someone else, and the leftovers too often end up festering in my fridge.) Mom had pretty much nothing in the house to make dinner out of, besides stuff we’d both eaten too recently to repeat, and we weren’t ravenously hungry, so I said, “Well, I could make David Eyre’s Pancake . . .” (more…)

This little aluminum wire man does Tree Pose (Vrksasana) all day long.  He even balances all on his own.

He’s standing on the Buddha for good measure. And his form isn’t so good…
Aluminum wire is now officially my least favorite wire. It just breaks a ton, doesn’t have nice bend properties, dirties the hands.  That must be why I had some left over & sitting around… this guy is light on his foot though.

i got behind yesterday (fiance’s birthday) and didn’t get a chance to upload this, so this is my tuesday work.

i’m almost finished with today’s (the 13th) but won’t have it ready before midnight. oh wellz.

I was originally going to do something else for today’s
thing-a-day, but I got sucked back into putting more
layouts together for my portfolio. I am sure I have way
over the limit but this way I can swap things out here
and there. I still have about 5 more magazines to go
through yet! whew! So……not very exciting, but feels good
to continue making progress!!

Tonight, I used some of my favorite fabric to make a pin.  I got about 4 yards of the forest-print fabric at a garage sale a few years ago and it’s my favorite fabric find ever.  I put interfacing on the back for support, and then layered the sage green fabric on top of it.  Then I finished it of with embroidery loops in the center.  And a fastener in the back.

Not much time to do anything today, as I was in meetings and  plugging away on work projects today well into the evening. I didn’t eat dinner till 11 and I’m exhausted. Thought I’d fit this sketch in 15 minutes before this day was up.

Took this iSight photo and sketched over it in the (very cool) Mac app, Skitch.

A collaborative effort between myself and my husband tonight for dinner.  Since he was home, hubby put the chicken thighs in the oven to roast, let them cool and removed them from the bone.  Once I got home, I was responsible for the veggies, noodles and getting it to ’soup’.  It was delicious with some bread made on Sunday.  Made about 5 quarts - it will last us well through tomorrow with the predicted 5-9 inches of snow.

I made this illustration for Illustration Friday. Their theme this week is “Choose”. I could only think of standardized tests, which start creating anxiety in kids around this time every year.