Fabric light bright
Here’s a fun looking project by Eli Skipp of Pumping Station One. Taking a departure from the permanency of traditional soft circuit crafting, he designed this customizable fabric light bright.
Month: December 2009
How-To: Pinecone People Ornaments
Jennifer Perkins of Naughty Secretary Club shares how she created these fun, vintage-inspired pinecone people ornaments. They are great fun at Christmas, but I can imagine them being modified to suit any season.
Designing in SketchUp
In my Principles of Technology class, we’re using Sketchup to design the parts we will make for the Mendocino Motor. Though we’ll fabricate the parts with hand and power tools, you can also use Sketchup to make the files needed to cut parts on a mill, Makerbot, Shopbot or other CNC tools.
The Mendocino Motor project appears in the Teachers’ Pet Projects section on
in MAKE, Volume 20, page 79.
Here are some techniques to design parts for the motor:
First get familiar with the Sketchup interface. This is pretty easy, the software is rather intuitive. A good place to start is by making whole shapes with the rectangle and circle tools. Draw a shape, then use the Push/Pull tool to extrude it up or down. You can make a shape on the side of another shape, then pull it out or push it in. Make some shapes. Mouse over the tool icons and you should see the name of the tool in a popup.
Making your own camera film
Dale tweets: Analog Award! A machine for making your own film for a camera. It’s a beautiful machine, too DIY Film
Mark Mawson’s underwater paint pictures
Mark Mawson takes lots of cool pictures, but I am particularly charmed by the simple beauty of this floaty paint in water series. [via Neatorama]
Tactical assault carriages for babies
I recall late great UT-Austin Philosophy professor Robert Solomon once saying in lecture, “We’re lucky babies are so helpless, because if they had any power at all they would destroy the world.” Well, Chinese artist Shi Jinsong is apparently trying to immanentize that particular eschaton by arming the world’s infants with engines of destruction worthy of a Space Marine Terminator. Way to go, dude. [via Dude Craft]
On a unicycle built for two…
Not a whole lot of build info, but this looks like it would be an exciting ride! [Thanks, Star!]
