The Feather Forge

Moving shop

2010-02-01T14:02:00.002-05:00

To my ardent fans and supporters:

The Feather Forge will no longer be updated here. Please go to the new site for your fix.

I know, it lacks some of the style of the old place, but it will get better! Truly!

Arisia costume 2010: False eyelashes are stabby, and other lessons learned

2010-01-21T15:32:00.005-05:00

So the costume ended up being "the Borg tried to assimilate Faery" and was made up of green prom dress + Borg torso and arm pieces + green shirt (for the non-Borg arm/shoulder + feather ears + long green false eyelashes. And some sparkly things in my hair. Also: gold lipstick on Saturday (silver on Sunday, which I liked much less).

Lessons:

1) If you do not get the inner ends of the false eyelashes stuck down really, really well, they will curl up and stab your upper eyelids every. time. you. blink. And sometimes when you aren't blinking. Two days after, I found I had flaky skin on my upper eyelids - scabs, apparently, from the repeated stabbings, which happened because I put the eyelash glue in the bag that I put in the coat check and thus didn't want to try to retrieve.

2) Carry the damn eyelash glue WITH YOU.

3) Strands of beads hanging in your hair are heavy and will pull the hairclips to which they are attached down towards the floor. This hurts. Also hurting? When hair gets wrapped around the beads in stupid ways.

4) The wire hooks on the ears were a little too tight on the first day. And needed adjusting to a more comfortable position much sooner than the end of the day.

5) Wearing a turtleneck + dress + cardboard and leather thing over your chest makes for some overheating. That Borg element needs some sort of ventilation. Pushing up my sleeves did help a lot; also, I could have not worn pants, because hello, wearing a dress. Which completely covered the pants AND the really long socks. (could have worn short socks, too, instead of the really long, almost tights, socks that I went with)

6) The flashy eyelashes were really quite popular. I think I got about as many compliments on them as on the feather ears or the overall look. (I thought they looked really weird.) And other than the STAB STAB STABBING, they were pretty comfortable.

I was complimented by one woman on how "subtle" the look was.

"Subtle?!" They were BRIGHT GREEN! And enormously long! YOU COULD NOT MISS THEM!!!

"Well, yes," she said, "Compared to putting on a whole bunch of make up."

Hmm, well, okay.

And some awesome things:

The layers kept me warm in rooms that I would have normally been freezing in.

Got to show off the construction of the ears to several people, including a couple of people who I sent the Flickr link to because they seemed particularly interested in it.

Noticed by the hall costume awards people. Twice, even! I was found late on Sunday by one of the people doing hall awards, who wanted to make sure I got one (which I already had earlier that day).

Person at a party who blurted out, "I'm sorry, I can't stop staring at you, but you're just so pretty!" (She was one of the people I sent a link to later.) I know that dress looks good on me, but the eyelashes were just so weird.

It must be nearly Arisia

2010-01-10T22:31:00.003-05:00

How do I know? Because suddenly I feel like I must spend every available minute working on a costume, because I put off working on it until um about a week ago (granted, I didn't have a good idea until about TWO weeks ago).

Anyway.

(I am feeling lazy and will therefore not be putting images right in the post. Maybe later.)

It involves feathered ear things, because it's been way too long since I made anything with feathers, and at this point I have enough feathers to build an entire flock of over-energetic birds, so I need to do something useful with them. (More birds == bad idea. Two is quite enough, especially when they decide to get a look at what I am doing. A really, really close look. And then get cranky and territorial and possessive about the thing in your hand that they want to chew on and carry away.)

One of the things on my mental to do list was to work out interesting wire ear cuffs, and finally, last month, I did just that! And the results are pretty neat, though I need to make myself another of the spiffy moonstone ones, because the first one went to someone as a gift.

The basic structure works out very well to support much more elaborate structures than mere beads. Not that feathers are such a weighty structure; the feather ear things are very light (SHOCKING I KNOW) and pretty comfortable.

Prototype nautilus

2009-04-14T22:23:00.002-04:00

Prototype nautilus, originally uploaded by jfeathersmith.

About 3 hours of work to get to this point. I sewed my finger to it once, and then almost did a second time (hand sewing, and the needle/thread only passed through the uppermost layer of skin, but it felt rather weird).

First time posting using Flickr's "blog this" option; let's see how it works.

ETA: Hmm, well that's rather convenient for posts containing just one picture. Except I still have to add tags via Blogger's editor.

It's interesting, but what is it good for?

2009-04-12T22:34:00.003-04:00

This project was actually completed a few years ago, as the final project in my Experimental Drawing class. I combined techniques from our puzzle project and our juxaposition project, primarily because I wanted to see how easy it would be to make a tessellating pattern that could also interlock in 3D. (The image above is actually of some of the test pieces, not the final set, but you get the idea.)

I was also interested in exploring what would happen when I scrambled an image (traced onto the acrylic pieces), overlaid some bits of it with other bits, and then linked sets of pieces together to form partial cubes. Since all the pieces are the same shape, the partial cubes can be stacked, made into rows, etc., so you get some depth to the recombined image.

It wasn't as successful as I had hoped (not that I really had any clear idea what it would be like), and I've often wished I still had access to a laser cutter, so that I could do more experimenting. I think it would be much more interesting if I had used much thicker lines on the acrylic, and chosen a pattern that would align better, so that the lines from the original image could link up with other lines that came from a different part of the image, creating an interesting new, fragmented/reassembled picture. It would certainly be easier with a pattern, rather than a picture.

If the pieces were larger - 12 inches on a side, or 2 feet - I could see them being used for shelving or end tables, although I'd want to make them from wood (probably), and work out a good way to keep the pieces together, because they slide apart /really/ easily, and that's a Bad Thing for furniture. (I could just cut the slots slightly smaller, but then they might bind, especially if they were wood.)

Because Easter has the best candy

2009-04-12T22:08:00.006-04:00

I figured I could justify buying some for myself if I also bought some for other people. And then I thought it would be more fun to actually make up little Easter baskets to put it in. But of course I didn't want to buy some small, cheap basket that wouldn't be worth the dollar-fifty, so I had to come up with another solution.

I could fold basket shapes out of newspaper.

Or . . . I could make use of the empty kleenex boxes that are almost always around (the household goes through a LOT of kleenex. Sorry - Kleenex).

Oh! And I could cut the edges down into grass shapes! And trim around the flowers printed on the sides!

So I did, and apparently they were a hit. One of the recipients encouraged me - repeatedly; one could say he egged me on, if one were inclined to make that sort of pun, which I am not, you're welcome - to write it up as an Instructable, no really, he thought it was quite clever, and it could be just one photo and a couple lines of text, how quick and easy would that be!

Well. See for yourself.

Make an Easter basket from materials found in the recycle bin - More DIY How To Projects

I am actually quite pleased with them myself, but it -is- more than one step! My only regret? That I didn't buy more chocolate eggs. But by some strange coincidence, tomorrow is the day after Easter, so there should be some good sales. And since I've been planning to hit post-Easter sales for cheap moving toys (glee! I can make Porkchop a friend!), well, I might as well take a minor side trip to the candy aisle.

(Part of the reason) Why I don't do electronics

2009-03-05T10:22:00.000-05:00

I like mechanical systems better than electrical or electronic systems. I trust them more. Do you know why? It's like this:

In the winter, when the air is dry and you build up a static charge walking around, and you walk over to the metal sink to empty out the dregs of your tea, and the liquid pours out of the cup and strikes the sink, that harmless looking metal spoon - which is still in the cup, and which you are holding onto with one finger - will deliver a surprising and painful shock which has traveled to you from the sink UP THE COLD TEA.

Electricity may be useful, but it is a jerk.

Picture hangers - the exciting anticlimax!

2009-02-17T22:04:00.003-05:00

Or perhaps the actual climax, as everything after this is just repeating what's been done already, only better.

It works! The prototype works!!!

See?

Hanger on a shelf, under some magazines:

Hanger being used; cute picture of birds covering boring magazines:

The prototype all by its lonesome:

I used the small sheet metal brake to do the bending; it worked wonderfully. Very fast, very easy; I was done before the other folks around me had any idea I'd done anything at all (okay, they were in another room, they couldn't see me, but I was wandering around flipping through books for several minutes before they realized I was done with the hanger).

So. The concept works. It needs a little bit of refinement: more length along the longest unbent section; it only just barely fit over the shelf. It could also use a little more room in the vertical section of the over-the-shelf hook on the back; I don't want to end up messing up the shelf by scraping the shelf up. And I need to get the bend at the very end closer to parallel, so that pictures will hang level.

Picture hangers - some actual progress!

2009-02-17T13:16:00.005-05:00

Remember the picture hangers? Which, as it turns out, could not be easily cut out of dead fluorescent fixtures without some considerable difficulty?

Well, I finally hauled a small pile of dead fluorescent bodies to the metal shop and asked the monitor in charge if there -was- a way to turn that scrap into useful strips, or whether I should just go find some nice flat metal, maybe even already in narrow strips.

First he thought the metal chop saw might be the right approach. Then reconsidered and tried the metal bandsaw, which was quite impressive, but the fixture was way to light (and squashable) to easily be clamped down -and- sawed. It got partially cut, and then was pulled free of the clamp by the saw in a not very spectactular but still kind of alarming fashion.

So he just cut off the end of the fixture with tin snips, and suggested using a jigsaw to cut the strips out. After flattening the fixture out a bit, we (well, mostly he) set up some scrap wood to clamp the metal to, and I took the jigsaw to it. (Dangit, I should have photographed that setup. Next time . . . )

It worked great! For future, though, I want to cut the strip in one pass, rather than two, because I couldn't get the two cuts to line up, which left a jagged edge that took too much grinding to get even.

Still, for a first try, it worked very well. Jigsaw. Who knew! (It's all in the blade you choose. This should have been obvious to me.)

I got the strip cut to size, and one end cut and rounded off (this will be the hook that the picture hangs from), and used a belt sander to remove all the rough bits from the raw edges. It is nearly done!

I think tonight I will see about bending the strip into the right shape, using the very small metal brake (or perhaps a vise and pliers).

Belated post-mortem on the Borg pirate

2009-02-16T10:44:00.003-05:00

I really should have written this up right away after Arisia, so that I would have good notes on What Not to Do for a future iteration of the costume. Assuming there will be another. Which there might. Or at least there might be a future prosthetic arm, perhaps in a steampunk style rather than Borg.

So.

Cables: A cable that runs from the forearm all the way to the chest is Not Good. It meant I had to take off the upper arm piece, and disconnect the cable from the battery pack, in order to remove the forearm. Having a cable that can plug in at either the battery OR the forearm would be much better. I think having the cable attached to the upper arm, and then running from that in both directions, would work much better. (Or, put the power source for the arm activator -in- the arm, and reduce the number of cables. Though in this case, more cables was good, because Borg have lots of cables dripping off them.)

Arm activator: The pager motor worked fairly well for something thrown together in the last couple nights. But something that did something more interesting than spinning around and going VVVRRRRRR! would be nice. Something that moved in a grabby sort of manner, perhaps?

Weight: The leg was heavy. Actually, it was the foot that was heavy. The Borg foot (which just fit right over a normal boot, like an immense spat) was heavy and made walking difficult. For the future, making a foot/lower leg assembly out of paper mache, and then covering that with leather, would be better than chopping up a heavy pair of rubber boots and sticking them together with duct tape.

Leg awkwardness: The upper and lower parts of the leg armor got hung up on each other at times and made walking a bit tricky. And stairs VERY tricky (esp. with the big, heavy foot). Adding some hinge-looking bits to the outer knee would have been a nice touch aesthetically. The cable ends came loose a number of times, too.

Cable attachments: Cables were firmly fixed at one end with duct tape (or Gorilla tape), but shoved into a loop of tape/leather at the other. Some of the cable ends stayed in place pretty well with that arrangement, but a lot of the leg cables pulled out of their tape/leather end. Should look for some sort of easy-release clip or something. Perhaps some sort of clip that is designed for cables/tubing - which could be hidden inside a leather shell so that it doesn't look like audio cable, but like it penetrates into my body. The cable that I wanted to run from my head to my torso didn't work at all because I didn't have a good way to keep the body end of it from pulling free.

More fiddly bits: Could have done with more LEDs and mechanical pieces. Matter of time, by which I mean I should have started more like 6 weeks, minimum, in advance instead of 4. Tritium keyring things would be a great way to get a nice glow without having to worry about a power source.

Eye prosthesis: It looked great, was pretty comfortable, and the visibility wasn't terrible (though I really missed having peripheral vision on that side!). However, it would have been great fun if I'd had it hooked up to the shutter thingy. I need a longer remote shutter release for that, and a good way to connect that cable to the headpiece and the rest of the body armor, so that it will stay in place, and not be too likely to get hung up on things in the environment. Perhaps adding some LEDs to that (which I could turn on and off - don't want them on ALL the time, thank you), or an other layer of lenses or something that could be rotated into place from time to time . . . So many possibly variations and so little time!

The pirate bits worked pretty well. The kerchief was unbelievably slippery and I had to clip it to my hair, and the shredded shoulder made it a real pain to get Frankie attached to my shoulder cables, but since I probably won't redo the pirate part (or even the pirate Borg combo), that's not something I'm much worried about.

People pretty well "got" the pirate aspect of the costume. I think. I heard several comments like, "Oh, there's someone doing that steampunk/cyberpunk combo" or just plain "steampunk;" about as many people understood that I was (partially) a Borg as did NOT understand, but whether that was due to lack of familiarity on their part with Star Trek, or due to my failure to make something that was obviously Borg, I do not know. I got a lot of compliments, it was fun to make and fun too wear, and not too terribly tiring (though a day and a half was a bit long, see:weight issues), and really that was the point.

I need to get a bunch of photos of the pieces, since I didn't document the process well (too busy building to stop and photograph), after which this will all make more sense to people who are not me.

Background notes about Frankie

2009-02-15T21:14:00.006-05:00

For a while now, I've thought it would be fun to make some kind of stuffed or robotic parrot that I could wear on my shoulder as part of a costume, or just for fun, at events like Arisia.

One of the problems with perching a fake bird on your shoulder (as opposed to a fake cat or dragon or other long quadruped, which can drape over your shoulder and look natural) is that it won't balance the way a real bird will. If it isn't anchored properly, and stiffened in the right places, it will bob back and forth in a ridiculous manner. And I have simply too much dignity to put up with that.

Finally it dawned on me that if the feet/legs of the bird were firmly fastened to some kind of shoulder armour, that would provide a sturdy, rigid enough base that the bird wouldn't bobble around and look ridiculous. Plus, if I were making a cyborg kind of parrot, then having a cyborg kind of shoulder on me would look perfectly natural and not at all ridiculous (at Arisia of course, I'm not going to wear this to go buy lettuce).

While talking this over with a friend, one of us thought about the parrot issue and said, "Oh, pirate!" and the other thought about the cyborg issue and said, "Oh, Borg!" and then we both said, "BORG PIRATE!!!" Because after all, pirates are kind of like primitive Borg - replace the Borg arm prosthesis with a hook, and the Borg eye enhancement with an eyepatch, and leg prosthetics with a peg-leg, and there you go.

Not to mention they're both known for terrorizing other sea (or space) faring folk, boarding them, killing or enslaving their victims, and making off with all their neat toys.

So most of a year went by with me thinking I really ought to get going on this costume, because it would take a lot of time. And I really wasn't sure how to go about making the parrot.

And then, out of the blue, someone on the parrot_lovers community on Livejournal posted a link to this sun conure pattern at Silver Seams, which is free, and Open Source, and really quite excellent all round.

So I used that to build Frankie, only I made his primaries and tail out of silver paper instead of felt, and I augmented him with an LED eye (wiring and associated electronics done by a friend who had time and soldering experience that I did not), and made his feet out of aircraft cable (NOT recommended; that stuff is a real pain to work with - it doesn't want to bend the way -you- want it to bend) so that he could grip the cables and tubing on my assimilated shoulder.

Frankie's avian side.

Frankie's assimilated side.

Original pattern copyright 2006 Silver Seams, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0

Unsatisfyingly short work session

2009-02-15T20:53:00.004-05:00

I have a pile of wood to use for the automata kit. Some of it needs to be milled to the right thickness, but there were plenty of pieces that are nice rectangles that want to be the thickness of the wood I've got.

So I went down to the basement to use the kind of sketchy bandsaw and do that. And it went really fast.

Too fast.

I want to cut more wood up, but first I have to get to the shop where the planer and drum sander live, so that I can mill down the remaining wood. That can't happen until tomorrow evening at the earliest, and I want to do more stuff NOW.

Instead I will have to settle for uploading pictures of Frankie, the Borg parrot, to Flickr.

Like so: Borg parrot.

Automata resources

2009-02-09T20:50:00.002-05:00

Way back in September, I jotted these down with the intent to store them somewhere more useful, because the instant I started seriously thinking about making wooden automata, I knew that I must make some. (And I am - finally! having finished some other, more time-sensitive projects - in the very early stages of doing so now, using the pattern in Peppe's Automata and Mechanical Toys.)

Books:
Rodney Peppe - Automata and Mechanical Toys - has lovely color photos of a variety of automata by different people, and plans and instructions for building a basic kit of mechanisms.

Frost's Whacky Toys aka Making Mad Toys

Raymond Levy - Making Mechanical Marvels in Wood.

A book on BEAMbots, which sound like robotics I could get into.

Other Resources
Automata resources at Dug North.

Dug North list of useful books

A nice page of mechanisms.

Project: Completed conversion of zombie into mutant aquatic creature

2009-02-07T20:07:00.002-05:00

Right. So. Way back in October, I finished the squid-eel known as Pork Chop.

I used a pretty green pearlescent paper to cover the finished body, with some strips of thin, transparent, dark grey PVC used as a fin along the top and tail. The enclosure was a cheap bird (or small animal) cage I found at Goodwill, painted with silver and black paint. I slapped a label on the front to complete the look - I printed the text with an old-timey looking script, and used a marker to give the paper an aged look.

Pork Chop worked just fine - up until the first night of the Halloween show, at which point his eyes stopped lighting up. I still haven't debugged that, because in order to actually get at the interior, I'll have to remove (destructively) the paper exterior and then make a new one. Bad planning/design. Would be much better to have an exterior that could be removed non-destructively, but it turned out that the easiest way to quickly attach the paper to the denim underlayer was glue. Lots of glue. And since I didn't design/build the denim underlayer to be easy to remove, well, I have a problem. (Not much of a problem; I have plenty of the paper left, and can buy more.)

But moving on to the construction:

Leg in progress. I wrapped pieces of thin white foam ("Foamies" from Pearl Art) around the existing plastic structure, and stitched it to the denim underlayer, and to itself on the back side of the leg.

One little flipper foot. Thin white foam and PVC used for the webbing.

Beginning to cover Pork Chop with his pretty scaly paper skin. In the foreground are the flipper feet, with the foam covered with paper - the paper that isn't yet wrapped around the flipper will be used to attach it to the wire and to the foam making up the upper leg.

The finished beast. The fin along Pork Chop's back and tail is made from a thin PVC sheet. The original switch from the zombie is still sticking out under his belly - this will be wired in to an Arduino to set up the IR switch that will be used in the show.

I think I liked the floppy denim tentacles better than this rigid paper ones. Still, he managed to charm a couple barristas at the local coffee shop when I went in there, squid-eel tucked under my arm, to get some coffee to tide me over dealing with the serious electronics bit of business.

To line the cage, I took some packaging paper and spray-painted it with UV-reactive paint. Poor Pork Chop didn't fit very comfortably inside.

I had help with the electronics, because I know nothing whatsoever about programming Arduino things. See, we had this neat little handheld lights that had a UV tube and a regular LED. The LEDs were replaced with IR LEDs, and each exhibit in the show was set up with an IR-detecting LED. Waving the UV light over the exhibit was supposed to reveal the location of the IR-detecting LED; shining the IR light on the IR detector would turn on the exhibit.

Pork Chop had three ways to be activated: the pressure-activated switch from the zombie's hand, a light/motion sensor, and a sound sensor. Since I had already deactivated (or hidden) the latter two, the pressure switch was hooked up to an Arduino that was programmed and wired up to handle the IR-detection. We left the pressure switch intact for testing purposes and because, when the show was over, the Arduino was returned to its rightful owner.

The brains of the operation.

There was only a tiny bit of programming needed, to tell the switch how long to wait before resetting. Also we had to tweak the threshold at which the IR detector would pick up additional IR - the setting for the actual show was a much dimmer place than the sunny room the electronics were built in.

So, that was the squid-eel.

It was a lot of fun - I wish I'd bought several more crawling zombies, so I could have made an entire menagerie of weird twitching creatures! Maybe next October . . .

Project: Turning a zombie into a mutant aquatic creature, Part 2, the creation of a new skin

2008-10-21T09:30:00.006-04:00

I've had more ideas about how to proceed from the previous session than I can ever conceivably pull off, and what I ended up with wasn't actually on my list anywhere. It just sort of happened.

I started off by wrapping the body of the toy with some wadded up trace paper, to protect the wires and components, and to fill out the body so it didn't look weird when I put a new skin over it.

I have a bunch of cheap tube socks lying around, for use in other projects, and I used several socks stuffed inside another sock to start forming a long, fish-like body. The open end of the stuffed sock easily stretched over the base of the plastic toy. Then I cut some scrap denim (read: old jeans with a ripped seat and paint all over them) into a more-or-less eel-like shape, fit it over the sock, and started basting it together.

I left a gap in the belly so I can replace the batteries; this will need a better solution in the final model.

When I got to the head, I wrapped more trace paper over the existing wire and foam head, and then played around with how to wrap the denim around to make an appropriate fishy face.

I did not exactly end up with your typical fishy face.

What happened was, as I was playing around with all the excess denim in the head area, some of it flopped forward into a long thin snout, which I kind of liked. And then I thought I could cut it into multiple strips, like tentacles. And then I tried forming a normal sort of fish head again. But the tentacle idea wouldn't leave me alone.

So, tentacles.

Really pretty cute, no?

I think I'll name him Pork Chop.

Next up is figuring out what the arms er flippers er tentacles er appendages are going to look like.

I like the fins; they go well with the overall fish-shape.

But I've also tested out some more arm-like appendages, and I think that's where I'm eventually going. They look a little better scrabbling against the floor than the fins do.

Speaking of scrabbling, poor Pork Chop can't really pull himself along the floor the way Dead Ed could. Too much weight, or drag, or something.

I am now in possession of materials for covering the squid-eel, including some lovely pearlescent paper (kind of plasticized paper), and thin foam for the tentacles.

I still need to replace the switch with one that is magnetically activated, and build/buy/trash-pick some sort of cage.

Project: Turning a zombie into a mutant aquatic creature, Part 1, the skinning

2008-10-18T19:39:00.006-04:00

So Willoughby & Baltic is going to put together an interactive Halloween show at the Charles River Museum of Industry.

It'll be in three parts, and the third part, the part that appeals the most to me, is a series of interactive "exhibits" of weird aquatic creatures that have been captured or created or something by a mad scientist, in approximately 1910.

I'd been thinking about getting some plastic creatures - fish, lobsters, reptiles - and hacking them apart and gluing them back together in ways Nature never intended, and then figuring out a way to animate them [It's ALIVE!!!].

And then I walked into the Walgreens near work, and found Ed.

Dead Ed, the Crawling Zombie.

When the switch in his hand is pressed (or, if he's set to react to noise/motion, when the noise/motion sensors are tripped), his red LED eyes light up, he moans and groans and says things like "I can only crawl after ya so fast!," and his arms start moving at a frantic pace, gradually pulling his legless body across the floor.

You can see the potential.

It took me a day or two to decide I really wanted to acquire one of these, because none of them in the store actually worked, and while it might have been due to dead batteries, maybe it wasn't. Well, it wasn't.

I tried Dead Ed out on the kitchen floor, with Claude perched inside my collar. In retrospect, that might not have been the most brilliant move on my part, but Claude is rarely inclined to giving me harsh warning bites when something frightens him. Instead, he kind of puffed himself up and growled and muttered while Dead Ed skittered around the floor and groaned about not being able to feel his legs.

When I offered my finger to Claude, suggesting that he go hang out on the floor and take a closer look, he refused utterly.

Later, after the birds were tucked into bed, I took Dead Ed up to my work space and got out a utility knife, to get to the business of figuring out what sort of mechanism and structure I really had to work with under that rubbery green skin.

I used a utility knife to cut around the base of the skin, thinking I could just roll it up over itself and remove it that way. During that process, I realized that the motion sensor was glued into the skin, so I had to cut around that, too.

It was fairly tricky to actually fold the skin back on itself, and I realized it would not be possible to pull it up over the shoulders. Unless I removed the arms, first.

So I cut the arms off at the seam - well, I should I say I pulled them apart at the seam, as the glue holding them on was quite weak. It was fairly easy to pull the arm skin off of the armature, which was nothing more than some stiff wire, bent into an arm shape (oooh! And bendable into other configurations!).

The left arm contained the wiring for the switch; the right arm was just a piece of wire.

I still had to remove the arms, which turned out to be fairly simple. Each arm (the stiff wire) was held in place by a piece of plastic that was screwed into the shoulder. Once the plastic cover was removed, the arm could be pulled free.

Note use of lid of sewing box to keep small screws and things from rolling away.

Once the arms were removed, the skin of the body was much easier to remove. It was also greasier inside than I expected.

Mmm, zombie grease.

It turns out that Ed's head was just a small block of foam with some wire inside it.

That's right, there were no brains.

The last step was to remove the LED eyes. They were glued in place, but some firm pressure was all that I needed to pop them out, and then the entire structure and mechanism was free of the skin.

There are a lot of wires and electronic bits, protected by a thin plastic shell.

The wires are easier to see without the cover. I need to remember to replace that before I put the new skin on. Whatever that is. I haven't quite figured it out yet.

The speaker I will be disabling. Probably by careful use of a pair of diagonal pliers to the wires.

Tired of taking things apart (well, fearful, really, that any further disassembly would lead me to a state from which I could not return), I reassembled Ed, leaving the skin off.

I used a safety pin to hold the LEDs and the motion/light sensor safely on top of the head.

And here he is, in action, Dead Ed the Skinless Crawling Zombie.

What's next? Well, I need to cut the speaker wires and create a new skin for this beastie. I have some stretchy snake-print fabric, and lots of random scraps of other potentially useful stuff.

I may also take a trip to the nearest cheap toy store and find something appropriate to cut up and attach to the existing armature.

What's been keeping me busy

2008-10-02T11:05:00.000-04:00

Work has been fairly busy, but mostly it's been this.

Well, not the website, the spaces that the website talks about.

I've been helping get the spaces ready for use; painting and cleaning and moving furniture and lots of meetings. So there have gone many of my evenings and weekends for the last 2-3 weeks.

But tonight we're having an Open Hack session, and tomorrow (because it is the first Friday of the month) is an Open House, which hopefully will have some non-members at it who will love it and become members.

We still have a lot of work to do, especially in the large fabrication space, and there are various smaller tasks left in the Hackerspace and the Model Shop, but those two spaces are ready for use, now that they are all cleaned and painted and organized.

I'm really excited. Not so much about the Hackerspace (though it looks GREAT), because my knowledge of electronics is next to nothing, but the Model Shop. (And when it is ready, the Fab shop.) I've missed the shop I had access to at school, and while this isn't quite as well equipped - yet! - it is pretty close, plus there are tools we did NOT have at school, which I am especially keen to learn about and start using.

Headphone fixes; jacket to vest conversion

2008-09-09T14:15:00.005-04:00

I have a completed project that I should post; I have lots of pictures, even!

It was a pair of headphones, with the foam ear covers completely disintegrating. I replaced the foam with fleece fabric, so they are once again wearable.

The other project is still in process, and I am not documenting it well, but I should do some of that. It was a nice fitting jacket I found at Dollar a Pound, pin-striped, with some unfortunate white stains (nail polish? paint?) on the collar and upper back, not suitable to be worn anywhere nice without removing or covering them up.

At any rate, I was looking for a vest or for a jacket I could turn into a vest. If not for the stains, I don't know if I could have actually started to disassemble it, because it fit so well.

Well, it no longer has its sleeves, and I cut down the sides to make the arm openings a better fit for a vest. I'm going to deal with the stain on the upper back by making sewing black leather over the shoulders and upper back, and deal with the stain on the collar by putting some white lace over it. Should be an interesting combination.

Also, I screwed up the arm holes - cut them too big, they looked awful. So I am now sewing fabric back on. Argh. But it occurred to me that I could make this less obvious by adding pockets. Yes, to the sides of the garment. Why not? People have small under-arm bags and things, why not pockets.

(Also found at Dollar a Pound: a leather boys' jacket and a brocade handbag with a neat mechanical hinge closure; I want the leather for my next Arisia costume. The body of the jacket fits me well, but the sleeves are way too short. It was a nicely lined jacket, with a second zip-in liner in addition to the sewn-in quilted liner. I am saving the linings for a potential future project. The bag I couldn't resist because 1) mechanical closure! and 2) Dollar a Pound. Also, I need more projects.)

The aesthetics of disassembly

2008-08-26T10:45:00.003-04:00

Via Boing Boing, a set of really lovely photographs of disassembled household appliances.

While I often find the innards of objects quite lovely, I rarely manage to capture that in photos. I try to remember to photograph the things I take apart, at every step and from all angles, both to document the process and because, if I decide I -do- want to put it back together, I will not have to rely on my memory alone to remind whether this tiny ^%$#^&%$^ screw goes in -this- hole or -that- one. Especially when it's been months since I last handled it. If I get pretty pictures, I consider that a bonus.

Picture hangers - not so easy, actually

2008-08-25T15:28:00.001-04:00

There's a pile of unusable fluorescent light fixtures in the basement; their ballasts are dead, so they are good for nothing except scrap metal.

I thought they would be an excellent source of metal for making picture hangers, of the kind which could fit over a bookshelf, so that you can hang pictures in front of little-used books in rooms where there is NO EMPTY WALL SPACE WHATSOEVER on account of being lined entirely with bookshelves. What I want is a strip of metal about 16" long or so, which I can bend into a square hook at one end (which will fit around the back of the shelf and keep the hanger in place) and fold into a hook shape at the other end.

I've been plotting this for several months, but despite it being a pretty easy-sounding project, I hadn't actually done much more than sketch up some diagrams. Until this weekend.

I made a stab at cutting strips of metal off of the discard fluorescent fixtures with which to make over-the-shelf picture hangers.

And rediscovered that cutting lengthy strips of metal off of a larger piece is not as easy as cutting strips of cloth or paper or even chipboard, because the larger piece is - shockingly - just not so flexible! And so it gets in the way as you make progress with the shears/snips. Especially when you did not start with a flat piece, but with a piece already folded in several places to make a sort of boxy shape.

I did not succeed in getting anywhere near the 16 or so inches I need.

Conclusion: need access to appropriate power tool OR should break down and buy appropriate strips of metal already cut.

Am hoping that the impending community workspace will have such tools, because buying the material pre-cut seems like cheating, and then what I would do with this pile of ex-fixtures?? There's plenty of good metal in them, after all, it would be a shame to throw them out.

Meta: guilt at having not worked on any projects and thus not updated blog forced me down to basement to hack at metal unsuccessfully. Also to buy more rubbing alcohol to finish cleaning tool chest. Blog may not be such a bad idea after all.

To-do - more old things to fix

2008-08-12T21:08:00.001-04:00

Figure out what to do with the box with the resistor test kit in it. Nice box, interesting old electronics, kind of a shame to separate them but the circuit boards feel . . . sticky. Like the plastic is melting or something. *dither* Can't decide what to do.

Have a couple other old wooden boxes which need purposes. One is pretty crude; could do with the outside corners being prettied up - metal wrapped around them?

Um, that lamp base. Some kinda swing-arm dealie. Missing a bolt/screw at one joint. Also missing the lamp bits. You know, the part where you screw in a light bulb. It shall be another frankenlamp. (Another? What do you mean "another"? Well, there's this other small lamp which is very cute but needs its lamp shade part fixed up or replaced, and I said, "Well, I could always find another lamp with an interesting head on it, and remove its head and put it on this base," and then the engineer said, "You scare me," and I said, "But it's a perfectly reasonable thing to do!" and he said, "That's why you scare me!" and I asked, trying not to grin too much, "Oh, it scares you when I'm reasonable?" So there's another lamp that needs some fixin'.)

So I need to fix that thing so I can have a good swing arm lamp again. I even found a matching clamp with which to attach it to my desk!

Find uses for those wonderful, glorious old indicator lights. Uses that can be out of sight of the good doctor, so as not to offend his aesthetic sensibilities.

And then there's the mysterious thing that looks like a small swing-arm lamp - sort of; it doesn't so much swing as bend in several places - but has had both its cords CUT CRUDELY OFF and the part that used to perch at the end of the bendy arm was nowhere in evidence when I spied the base and decided I must take it.

Progress on the tool chest

2008-08-12T20:48:00.001-04:00

Saturday afternoon (no, really; this blog is choosing its dates in a way that is wrong) I hauled the chest outside and set up under the ever-watchful wisteria.

It was a nice day, except for being attacked by blood-sucking monsters (mosquitos; I won those battles. mostly) and by the blasted wisteria. I think HP Lovecraft must have been inspired by a wisteria. Nothing else with tentacles could possibly be more savage and treacherous. Every time I walked through the yard, I risked losing an eye to one of this year's new vines.

Anyway. I set up beneath the baleful plant, smashed a few mosquitoes that had apparently been awakened by my presence (it was the middle of the afternoon! I thought those damn things were nocturnal), and got to work with rubbing alcohol and a big pile of cotton balls. And a really nice 6-in-1 paint scraper thing.

Rubbing alcohol doesn't smell nearly as bad when you use it outdoors.

I got most of the adhesive removed, and then I ran out of alcohol. But it all went pretty quickly, faster than I had hoped, even, so it really shouldn't be too long before I can sand down the rusted areas and repaint.

On Sunday I pruned the wisteria.

Shoes

2008-08-09T09:52:00.000-04:00

I confess that I have a weakness for shoes.

I don't buy many pairs (really!), but that is only because I value comfort over looks, and most cute/pretty/sexy/awesome shoes hurt too much. Largely because most women's shoes have those &^%#$$#ing HEELS on them that force your feet/legs into uncomfortable, unnatural postures. No thank you.

Flat shoes and boots are really not that easy to come by. And flat shoes or boots with a flexible, comfortable sole are really rare.

So for quite some time I have been thinking it would be really neat to have one pair of awesomely comfortable "base" shoes, with a thousand and one different tops for them. As in, today I want green corduroy, but this evening maybe something shiny and black, so I'll just peel off the corduroy covers and stick on the leather.

I have just started to work out how shoes (normal shoes) are put together. They are impressively complicated, which is no surprise, though it is a little dismaying.

I mean, you have to start out with flat material, cut into a shape that, when curved around an odd-shaped base, with form the right kind of three-dimensional form. Feet are not a nice, regular sort of prism.

And they MOVE. Your feet flatten and widen when you step onto them, plus they bend. This makes constructing a container for them kind of tricky, when said container is made of anything stiffer and less stretchy than knitting.

I have a pair of very pretty, sequined and beaded slip-ons. They're too small; it hurts to put them on for even a few seconds, despite the fact that they are actually my size (lies, all LIES I tell you!). However, they are very, very simple in construction, so they seem like an excellent way to get started with patterns.

Except that the sole is almost perfectly symmetrical. And are feet symmetrical?

No, they are not.

So transferring the vamp (that's the bit that wraps around the front of your foot) and the heel patterns to a sole that more closely resembles a real foot, that doesn't work so well. You wind up with an unattractive bulge over your foot.

While searching for shoe making patterns, I found this post, which had one pattern that looks like it might work for my purposes, more or less. Haven't tried it out yet, as I am still fighting with the sparkly shoe pattern as well as one I made up.

As for the other tricky part of this project, I haven't done more than start thinking of ways the shoe covers might fit to the base.

Tool chest renovation

2008-08-09T09:42:00.000-04:00

I recently acquired an old Craftsman tool chest. A small one, with small drawers for small tools. All the drawers were lined with felt. A lot of the felt was pretty worn in spots, down to the metal, and the top most part of the chest had been visited by rodents, so there was that kind of mess, too. Plus, the outside of the case has some large rust patches.

So the whole thing is really in need of a good sanding and repainting, plus felt removal and replacement.

It turns out rubbing alcohol does a number on the adhesive used to glue the felt down.

It also turns out that that quantity of rubbing alcohol should NOT be used in a closed, poorly ventilated basement, so I shall be taking the tool chest OUTSIDE to remove the remaining 95% of adhesive and felt (most of the felt came up pretty easily when I pried the edges loose and pulled).

I haven't quite decided what to do about repainting the tool chest. On the one hand, I like the old paint, because I like the way old stuff looks. But it's not in good enough condition to leave as-is. I don't want it to keep rusting, nor do I want rust to get all over me/other things.

I've been toying with the idea of painting it all black, or blue, and then painting a viney jungley sort of scene all over the outside, with trees and flowers and screeching birds and that sort of thing.

I'm also pondering giving it a coat of primer, and then covering it with interesting paper or fabric.

It's a surprisingly heavy thing for its size. When I first decided that yes, I did want to take it, I removed most of the contents, hoping that would make it a little easier to haul away. It did not. So it might be kind of amusing to put fabric on the outside, because of the contrast between the softness and lightness of fabric, and actual heaviness of the metal.

Upholstered tool chest? Sure, why not.

To-do list

2008-08-08T12:41:00.001-04:00

Feather fan. Not the handheld kind, the kind attached to a motor powered by a USB connection.

Bristlebots! With feathers, of course, and those used toothbrush heads I should admit I am never going to mail back to the manufacturer for recycling.

Repair the original mask.

Make the original mask useable by itself again (needs a strap to go around my head), rather than only useable by attaching it to the headpiece.

Brackets for hanging framed pictures from the bookshelves.
- use the metal from ex-fluorescent fixtures

Feather mask

2008-08-08T12:16:00.003-04:00

A mask made from parrot feathers; the headpiece was made a couple of years later.

The purposes of this blog

2008-08-08T11:36:00.002-04:00

To document, for myself, my processes, so that in the future I can read about what I was thinking and doing. And to keep track of my to-do list, because having it in pieces in half a dozen notebooks is not useful.

To share my techniques and methods and such, as I have enjoyed reading about others' techniques and methods. Having a community in which to discuss projects is a good thing; who knows if this blog will ever develop into that sort of thing, but at least I can go comment on other crafty/makery blogs and maybe people there will come and talk to me and etc.

To show off a little.

To guilt me into actually working on all the things I keep telling myself I will work on, because I know it is sad to turn to an interesting blog and find that it hasn't updated in ages, and therefore the thought of my hypothetical audience being deprived will spur me to go -do something- so that I can blog about it.

And I needed another project.