Madeline
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Homepage: http://www.sentient-potato.org
Posts by Madeline
Fishies in the Forest
Nov 25th
This project is yet another node in my home’s sensor network. It needed two main functional parts: (1) a motion sensor across the entryway to my bedroom, and (2) a switch to control the lights on my bed (my canopy bed has lots of little LEDs hanging on it). It would communicate wirelessly with the rest of my sensor network and also allow my computer to control the bed lights. Since it would be fairly visible, I wanted it to look pretty. My bedroom kind of has a fairy-tale theme to it. With a starry fairy-tale princess bed, a mushroom table, a hat vine, and dragonflies on the wall behind my bed, I decided that this sensor node should evoke the feel of a forest pond or stream. A while ago, one of my art teachers gave me a bunch of slate because she was curious what I would do with it (thanks Dr. Ushenko!), and I decided it would be perfect for this piece.
Mobile Drill-Press Table
Sep 25th
My home is not all that large – it’s just a one bedroom condo. So I don’t have room for a workshop. But as you can tell from this blog, I like to make stuff. Finding space for my makery’s ever expanding collection of tools can be problematic. I recently bought a drill-press. While trying to figure out where to put it while it’s not in use, I decided to make a mobile table for it and for my vise. Then I can just roll it into a corner of my bedroom when I’m not using it.
The Hat Vine
Aug 10th
I’ve been accumulating hats recently. I’ve been piling them on my dinette table or throwing them over my couch whenever I needed the space, but that isn’t really a good long term storage solution. The time came for me to make something on which to hang my hats. Easy peasy, says I, I’ll just take a board, decoupage it, stick some pegs in it, and hang it on the wall. And then I bothered to actually consider the size of my hats. They’re big! The three biggest are each a foot and a half in diameter! This would take more than just a small board placed in a convenient nook.
After taking a look around, I decided to locate it in my bedroom, using the space between and over a couple mirrors. With the odd shape of the space and the presence of a faerie-tale bed and mushroom table in my bedroom, the place seemed very much in need of a vine – a hat vine!
Flower Chandelier, part 5
Jul 10th
I finally got around to making a light-switch for the chandelier. Weirdly, this wasn’t a huge priority – since the chandelier can be controlled from my main computer, I didn’t need to make a dedicated switch to control it. Having a light-switch on the wall nearby, though, is convenient. I didn’t want to always have to run over to my computer just to turn the light on.
It’s nothing all that fancy. I cut the green acrylic for the faceplate from a piece leftover from the chandelier. The yellow acrylic flower was an extra from the flowers I laser cut for the chandelier. I put some silvery mirrored paper behind each of the acrylic pieces.
Flower Chandelier, part 4
May 16th
The chandelier has been installed!
My dad and I mounted an aluminum beam to a concrete beam near my ceiling, and the chandelier hangs from that. Once the chandelier was hung, I added the butterflies that hang from the bottom of the chandelier. I still need to make a light switch so that I can control the light, but in the meantime, since it communicates wirelessly with the digital assistant running on my main computer, I have full control over the light from my computer. (See Flower Chandelier, part 1.)
Ugh! So Slow
Apr 28th
I apologize for the speed of this website over the last few days. It’s hosted through GoDaddy. They’re not known for their speed even on the best of days, but the last few days have been exceptionally slow. Things seem to be running a bit faster today, so hopefully that’s a good sign. I really should just find a different web host. /sigh
Flower Chandelier, part 3
Apr 25th
Aaaaaaaaaa!!! Hexapus!!!!
Queue the trumpet fan-faire! All the parts for the chandelier have been finished! This article is a quick photo journey through the assembly of the chandelier. Most of the difficulty in this project was designing and making all the parts. The actual assembly was fairly easy. All the parts are stacked onto a central rod. The rod is threaded over its entire length and I used nuts and flanges between various parts to distribute the weight, so it’s not all sitting on the bottom-most part. More >
Flower Chandelier, part 2
Mar 28th
I’ve been busy, busy, busy designing parts for the chandelier. The picture to the left shows a rendering of the parts I modeled in CAD. I dragged my Dad into the project for the wooden parts – he has a lathe and I don’t, but mostly because he’s really good at woodworking. (Thanks Dad!) He also ended up helping with a lot of the other parts, and he had many good suggestions as we worked out how everything will fit together. As I write this, he’s finished the wood parts, but I haven’t picked them up yet. I can, however, show pictures of our progress on the other parts.
Flower Chandelier, part 1
Mar 4th
All right, I haven’t written for a while and it’s because I’ve been busy designing my next project – a chandelier that will hang above my dinette table! This is so fun! I worked up an approximation of what I want in Googly SketchUp, shown in the picture to the left. The white parts are leaded glass crystal, the brown parts are wood, and the yellow and green parts are transparent acrylic. The butterflies hanging below are little fabric butterflies I got at a craft store.
Christmas Village Streets and Streetlights
Dec 21st
I have several Christmas village buildings and props that I put up each year on my fireplace mantel around Christmas. This year I decided to make streets and a backdrop for it. The streets and backdrop are ink-jet printed on thick photo paper. The backdrop was also glued to foam-core board.
Over the years I’ve accumulated quite a large collection of textures for use in 3D modelling on the computer. So I had some nice cobblestone, flagstone, grass, and snow textures on hand, as well as photographs of street details like victorian-era manhole covers and street drains.
I used the flagstones plus drop-shadows to depict the curbs. I masked the snow layer with a grunge texture to allow some of the grass to show through and used a textured eraser to remove snow from key areas of the street. The picture to the right shows one of the streets I made.
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