Posts Tagged ‘wood’

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Dowel Construction

Monday, March 14th, 2011

We’ve started rotating major toys through the living room about every week. I’ve never managed any kind of toy rotation, so It’s been pretty cool. Also, as I allow my living room to be devistated by blocks, it’s also relatively easy to clean up, unlike when I was trying to keep the living room clean. The blocks all get tossed into the same bin, but if there is ‘nothing’ in the living room, it fills up with stuff from all over that takes much longer to clean up. So by embracing the disaster, I have overcome it? It’s working pretty well so far.

Two weeks ago we built a puppet theatre out of 3/8″ dowels, rubber bands, 3-4yds of sari fabric and an old curtain. It was pretty cool! Although shortly after it was built Rebecca declared that it was actually a ballet stage, and showed how the curtain slid back for the show, proceeding to our ‘outermission’ and ‘intermission’ entertainment. ‘outermission’ being the show part of course!

It was a really awesome structure for minimal construction time, I think it took about 10 minutes, and it is now folded up and broken back down into six dowels for our next project. Flimsy yes, but it lasted two vigorous weeks, bending but not breaking. Pretty cool. The bookcases behind are sort of what holds the whole thing up. I made the face frame out of four dowels, two uprights and a cross piece at the top and one across the middle for the curtain. Then from each of the two top corners I attached another dowel, going out and back toward the book cases, to end tucked under a foot of books on a conveniently located shelf. The roof is tucked into a tent shape from the top shelf of the book shelf, and draped over the dowel structure. I was a little worried that someone would pull a shelf of books down on their head, but nothing shifted the whole week, so I guess it was okay!

The second week we added a table and cash register, plastic shopping basket, and put out the bins that our play food gets stored in on top of some cardboard boxes we keep for playing. Practically instant Farmer’s Market/Grocery Store.

Now I’m wanting to get more 1/2″ to 3/4″ dowels for more temporary play building construction. Dowels + rubber bands + light drapey cloth = lots of fun! And as a bonus it doesn’t involve all the chairs in the house being commissioned for forts and us eating dinner sitting on the floor…

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Painting on Wood

Monday, August 2nd, 2010

Sometimes you just need a different canvas.

Step 1: Scrounge around on trash day, someone will have tree trimmings out to be collected. Free is good.
Step 2: Slice. We used our handy dandy bandsaw, but a hand saw would work fine.
Step 3: Paint. We didn’t do any sanding, it’s all about the process! Besides, the wavy saw marks gave it some interesting texture. :-)

The girls also used these for stamping on their paper, monoprints (or tri-prints) of painted wood. The texture and irregular shape made these fun printing blocks.

Once you are done decorating them you can add them to your block collection too! Or they can be doors for hobbit-fairy houses. There are so many things you can do with flat rounds of wood!

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Soft Car Pattern

Saturday, November 28th, 2009

Car Pattern

Finally finally finally! This is what I’ve been working on for the last month besides my 2007 photo book. And suddenly I find I have nothing to say… I think the pattern came out nicely though, this time I decided to illustrate it instead of photographing it. I like how it looks, it isn’t overloaded with pictures for each tiny step, and I think the illustrations are easier to understand. I wanted to get this done further before the holidays, but it’s pretty easy to make, so maybe I’ll get some adventurous takers.

pinned-bottom

I think finding wheels is a little intimidating, so I put some sets of those up for sale in my shop too, although I really don’t want to get into the business of selling wheels. If I was a business major I’m sure I’d think it was great and call it something like horizontal productization or leveraged diversification or something, but there’s a reason I’m not a business major, and I don’t run a store. Because I want to make things, not resell them. Except, now I have a store. Hrm.

On a separate note, Thanksgiving was really low key at our house this year. We were going to go over to a friends for a group shindig, but Rebecca got sick Tuesday night. Thursday it got to be time to cook dinner, well, 20 minutes until dinner is supposed to be ready is a little late to start, and I felt lame that we didn’t have anything Thanksgiving-ish. So in 40 minutes I managed to cook elbow noodles (Rebecca survives half on whole wheat noodles and half on milk and fruit), sour cranberry relish, biscuit wrapped chicken sausage bits, and roasted chestnuts. And the biscuits didn’t come out of a pop-tube either. We opened a bottle of wine, and had the chocolate cream pie Jesse made for the party for dessert ourselves. I was quite pleased with my adrenaline fueled speed cooking session. :-) It brought back the days when we used to have Iron Chef cooking parties at our house.

I should probably have some kind of giveaway now, shouldn’t I? Maybe tomorrow.

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Posted in Crafty, Life | 2 Comments »

Wooden Puzzles

Friday, August 7th, 2009

There are SO MANY things I want to make right now, if I could create full time I might be able to keep up. I want to make a mechanical (automaton) music box with my husband, quilted mattress pad for the imminent baby, tiny one inch laser engraved hollow house box cubes at the TechShop, make doll house food and create patterns and kits for Etsy, doll house kitchen furniture, unpack and finish a half done quilt for the baby, clean and organize my space finish (proofreading now) my Blurb photobook for our 2006 Japan vacation, get started on my 2007 photobook (I try to make one each year, but I’m just falling depressingly behind on that, obviously I need to lower my standards or *something*.) And? There are only so many projects I can keep in my head at a time! I’m trying to prioritize finishing the things that are cluttering up my work space though, and trying not to start new projects, but new projects are so exciting! And once you start them, then they fall into the category of things that need to be finished! I know, that is so cheating.

Puzzles

Sometimes just thinking about something seems to move it into the category of things I’ve started that need to be cleared away from my mental workspace. In any case, I saved these birthday cards with the idea of turning them into puzzles, so the cards were cluttering up my workspace. Thus the puzzles had to be completed.

I glued the cards (with Mod Podge) down to 1/8 plywood with a nice veneered back, cut them into rectangles on the bandsaw, and cut the puzzle pieces on our scroll saw. I know, we have tools for everything and I love it, it is our greatest luxury. When we had our first one bedroom apartment we had a shop bench and bench top bandsaw set up in the corner. Of the fully carpeted apartment. And a mattress on the floor in the bedroom. You have to have priorities.

The first puzzle I sanded all the interior edges, and it looks nicer, but really, my daughter went through that so fast that I decided I should just cut them up and throw them at her, she doesn’t mind the white fuzzy edges on the picture, and the scroll saw doesn’t cut rough enough for their to be actual splinters, so whatever. Let’s go! Make!

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