I'll try to write here about stuff I'm up to and working on.
Farewell
For the last two years I've been suffering through a relationship with a person who turned out to be violent, controlling, and abusive. Fortunately that is over now, though the trauma inflicted on me will take some time to heal. In a way, it's not her fault, she has lived with severe, chronic depression for most of her life, and all that it has wrought. I had hoped that the darkness would lift, but it didn't. The person I fell in love with disappeared before my eyes, and the person that emerged... well, let's just say she was the kind of person who would hit my cat and then lie about it. Or rather, convince herself that she didn't do anything. Still, there is goodness in her that I hope will come out again with time and the right mental health care.
The dynamic of being in an abusive relationship was almost textbook. Friends and loved ones told me to get out of it, and didn't understand why I didn't find it that easy to do so, and why I defended her. They were right though, and I wish that I had possessed the courage and strength to do it earlier, but self-esteem is the first thing to go in an abusive relationship, and it definitely went.
Things have been difficult, but now I get to rebuild my life. I'm working on so many wonderful (to me at least!) things, and I hope to be able to share them with you soon.
link - blog - April 28, 2010
Things I saw today that made me smile for humanity
A little girl with a little (but real!) guitar slung across her back walking down the street with her (I assume) mom. She looked bad-ass.
A guy one might describe as "tough"-looking with his cat in a carrier on the subway. He was obviously concerned and smitten with his kitty and spent the whole ride peering into the carrier and offering up his fingers to the cat.
An older gentleman wearing a "Hillary for President" hat. One day, one day.
link - blog - April 17, 2010
Vector Illustration Apps
I have an iPod touch and I've kind of fallen in love with doing guitar and jewelry design work on it. It lets me focus on one thing at a time, which can be a difficult thing for me!
As of this writing, there's only one app that does real vector drawing with bezier editing for the iPhone/iPod Touch though - miniDraw. It has a bit of a weird interface, but it works well. There are some limitations, it's a pain to add or remove points from an existing curve, and there's no way to do a copy or even as Save As... for making different version of a design.
There's an app called Bezier, but trust me, skip it. It's more like someone's curve programming exercise than an app.
For the iPad (which I don't have so I can't verify any of this firsthand) it looks like iDraw is the app to get for vector illustration. It looks quite slick, I'd love to try it. There's also an app called Freeform that has bezier editing, but apparently only circles are currently editable (!). They're working on better functionality however.
(As much as I would have liked an iPad before, simply because it's nifty, like lots of other people I just didn't feel it could do anything useful for me. Sure, there's lots of stuff to consume on it, but I like to create. Now that I see how fun an illustration app can be on my little iPod, I totally wish I could get an iPad.)
miniDraw and iDraw can bring in photos for use as a background, very useful for reference or for tracing. For when you need to get your work out of the apps, miniDraw can export (via email) an SVG file, and iDraw can export a PDF.
As far as I've been able to find out, that's it for illustration apps with bezier editing on the App store at the moment. A little disappointing, but so far miniDraw is working out quite well for me.
link - blog - April 16, 2010
Sometimes it's worth getting up early...
Sunrise over Brooklyn.
link - blog - April 8, 2010
Laptop bed desk
I had an old Ikea desk chair with wooden armrests that were forever wobbly. Their choice of fasteners was flawed, once regular use loosened the nuts holding the armrests on, they were impossible to tighten securely. No wonder they don't make them anymore. I decided to simply remove the armrests. Their form was very nice however, made from bent, laminated wood. It suddenly occurred to me that I could probably transform them into a laptop desk for a bed, and since I had promised to make one for Shannon anyway...
All it took was a spare Ikea shelf that had been floating around, I can't even remember what it was for, and a bit of trim ($2) to hide the raw MDF shelf edges. Some glue and some screws later, and...
I put the shelf under instead of over to get the height right.
What's really nice is that because of the armrest shape, the desk hangs nicely off of the end of the bed frame for storage. I quite liked that it worked out so well and easily, and repurposing the armrests instead of throwing them out feels good.
link - blog, woodworking - December 27, 2009
An LED ring light for jewelry photography
I came across this post on how to make a LED ring light for a camera and I thought I'd make my own for photographing jewelry and the like, instead of working up a more traditional three-point lighting setup. I ordered the same rings from dealextreme.com (90mm and 120mm), they took about three weeks to arrive and cost about $14 shipped. Then it was just a matter of getting out my dial caliper to take measurements and creating tool paths in Illustrator. From Illustrator I export to svg and then use Blender and custom code I wrote to generate g-code, which I run in EMC2 under ubuntu.
The scrap plywood I used has a very thin veneer face and it chipped a bit in one spot during milling. Oh well. The holes in the rings are for passing through the LED ring wires.
My camera (Canon Powershot S3IS) takes a barrel for lens attachments, so I used that to mount the ring. Simple friction fit. It can still take filters and lenses and the like.
The LED rings need a 12v power supply, which I got from an old, non-functioning DSL modem. I also desoldered the power jack from the PCB, CA'd it to the back of the wooden ring and soldered the LED ring wires to the lugs.
With no diffusion the LEDs show up as points of light. A piece of paper held over the ring doesn't do much to change that...
...but held a short distance away it does a nice job. I'll probably make another ring to hold a diffuser. Of course I'll cut the center out silly! Oh, there's a color difference between the two LED rings, which is pretty clear to see in these photos. Not ideal, but workable.
A couple of test photos. The first one looks a bit surreal, like it's been photoshopped, but it hasn't. The white balance was on the wrong setting though.
Cat hair? Really? I swear it gets everywhere.
Anyhoo, I've got to work on my camera technique but I'm pretty happy with how the ring light working.
link - blog - December 21, 2009
Sanding boards
In my pursuit of making wooden jewelry I've been doing a lot of sanding. To make my life a bit easier I made some sanding boards today. They're just scrap pieces of flooring with sandpaper glue-sticked to them, and sheet cork white-glued to their bottoms so that they stay put on my worktable. The grits go from 150 to 1200. After 1200 I like to use micro-mesh pads to really polish the wood, those go up to 12000.
I also used another piece of scrap wood to make a sanding puck. The cork glued to it holds the piece I'm sanding so that I can apply even pressure to it, and it also saves my fingertips a bit.
link - blog, woodworking - November 9, 2009
Wood and silver...
I've been spending a fair amount of time working on various jewelry designs and workflows (I do love my workflows) using wood and silver. Here's something I made not too long ago. It's walnut and maple sanded to 12000 grit (overkill maybe, but hey) with a 100% tung oil finish (about 10 applications) and argentium sterling silver. I fabricated the bail myself as well.
It's a 45 record adaptor, in case you didn't know. I like how it came out. There's something in me that wants to craft small, beautiful things, beyond the simplicity of the buttons. I often think of it as moving atoms around.
link - blog, woodworking - October 10, 2009
