Making things is fun
I’ve been building a vertical garden with my brother, on and off, for the last couple of weeks. We’d already assembled the frame, and today we installed the watering system. Below is a video from last week’s 300 Seconds of Fame at Pumping Station: One.
I had a friend take some pictures of it today and I’ll post them as soon as she gets them to me (Anne).
This past week has been pretty hectic at work, so I haven’t been keeping up with Thing-A-Day, but I’m getting back on track as of today.
The basis for today’s project was a Chanukah present I got from my parents: a compass from an airplane.
The tag says "Airplane Compass | Made in Chicago | Does not point North"
It has a bulb built into it already.
All it took was some solder and a power supply and I had myself a nice little night light.
On day three I tried to make banana muffins, but when I started preheating the oven a nasty smell filled up the apartment. This is the brand new oven in our new apartment, so we were understandably confused. Turns out, you need to leave new ovens on for 30 minutes at 400 degrees before you use them. After talking to the landlord and finding this out, I was all set to make some muffins.
I used this recipe, but used less sugar because I got confused with another recipe I had been considering where all the comments indicated it was too sweet. I also added dried cranberries, chocolate chips and walnuts. The muffins turned out pretty tasty, although they could probably have used more cranberries, chocolate chips, walnuts and sugar. Still, for my first muffins ever, they turned out pretty well. We’ve been putting apple butter on them to sweeten them up, and it’s been working great.
I’ve mostly finished the hollow book I started yesterday. I cleared the pages down to back of the book, except in the corners where my dull exacto knife couldn’t cut. It doesn’t look that great, but it’s usable. I gave the inside a coat of watered down glue to give the walls some structural integrity and it’s sitting with a weight on it. I may try to clean it up a bit sometime later this month. The spine was broken already (part of the reason I chose this book), so cleaning up the inside and fixing the spine might be a project for another night.
I can’t say I’m happy with the way it turned out — it’s definitely not something I want to show off to people. With that said, it was fun to do, and turned out pretty well given the lack of tools. materials or planning.
Today did not go exactly as planned. I wanted to kick off Thing-A-Day with something substantial, so I was originally planning to go to Pumping Station: One and finish the construction of a vertical garden I started with my brother. Unfortuneately Snowpocalypse had other ideas and I ended up at home. Due to my recent move, my tools and materials are in quite a bit of disarray, so my options were fairly limited.
I ended up starting a hollow book. I found some directions over here and started looking for a book to chop up. I went with an old Harvard Collection Philosophy book that I, uh, borrowed from the library ~10 years ago. I didn’t get too far. I glued the sides together and got about 1/4 inch down into the book. I couldn’t find an appropriate dremel bit, and the one I ended up using gave off some unpleasant smoke.
This wasn’t the way I wanted to kick off this month, but it has been a good lesson in how crucial planning is. Hopefully I’ll finish this off tomorrow and give myself some time to plan things out for Thursday more carefully.
This month I’ll be (trying) to make one new thing every day. Or at least working on part of a larger prokect every day. The details are over here, if you want them. Over the summer I tried to do something similar. I wanted to write some new piece of code every day. I didn’t last too long, but I really liked the idea. A couple of months ago I came across some sage productivity advice — make a mark on the calendar every day you practice your craft. I started doing it a couple of weeks ago and have been doing pretty well, so this fit very well into something I’m already trying to do. I’ve got a couple of larger projects planned out, as well as some smaller ones. If anyone is interested in joining us, there’s also a good sized group of people from Pumping Station: One who will be meeting regularly for company and to help each other out.
A Stranger's Sojourn 