I Ate’nt Dead
Nov 26th
A couple days ago 
I made a couple fairly quick items for my sister’s upcoming 40th birthday.
The first is a wooden sign she can wear around her neck when taking naps. Such things are important as you get older. 
(Fans of Terry Pratchett will understand the reference.) I printed out the text on some decorative paper and then découpaged it onto a piece of wood that I had sanded and stained.
The second is the card I made to go with the gift. I wanted to photograph Nutmeg with a cane and use that as on the card. (If you’re curious, Nutmeg is a stuffed bear I got when both my sister and I were children. He’s a rather crazy bear.) I happened to go to the grocery store the day I was making the card and found a plastic cane full of psuedo-M&Ms for $0.89. The candies were made of a rather disgusting chocolate (how did they manage to ruin chocolate?!?), but at least I now had a cane. The body of the cane was clear plastic which probably wouldn’t look good in a photograph. So I printed out a wood texture that I had tinted purple, rolled that up, and put it inside the cane. The rest of the artwork on the card was inspired by the Paddington Bear T.V. series whose props and backgrounds were white with inked details.
Muwahaha
Nov 25th
As with the last few posts I’ll be describing something I made before starting this blog. I did this one during the summer. I découpaged a bunch of big wooden letters for my kitchen (the black around the edges is india ink). Steel strips are mounted to my wall and the letters are held to it with magnets, so I can change them when I feel like it. For now, I wanted a good mad-scientist laugh.
Mushroom Table
Nov 24th
In my previous post, I wrote about my canopy bed. Now that I had a bed that looked like something out of a fairy-tale I desperately needed a better bedside table. I had just been using an old metal filing cabinet. It was functional, but didn’t look all that great. So for my next project, I decided to make a table. And what goes well with a fairy-tale bed? A mushroom, of course! Thus the mushroom table was born. While designing the table, I struggled through all sorts of very impractical ideas that would have made a 3D surface in the shape of a mushroom (fiberglass, papier-mâché, lots of thin bent wood strips, etc.). None of these seemed very workable, and furthermore, I didn’t really like the looks of these designs. I wanted something a bit more artistic. As I worked at the design I decided that I didn’t really want to make an exact mushroom shape – I just wanted to give a suggestion of a mushroom. And then it occurred to me that I could use flat sheets of wood to build up the correct envelope (outline) of a mushroom in three dimensions. The resulting table is shown in the pictures (note that some of the pictures show the table in my living room before I moved it into the bedroom).
Canopy Bed
Nov 23rd
My very first sewing project! I did this project in December of 2009. I had recently purchased a canopy bed frame, so the next step, of course, was decorating it.
I bought the fabric from Vogue Fabrics, a local fabric store. The sheer coppery-orange organza curtains are hung from the frame with fabric tabs which are held together with velcro, so they are easy to remove for washing. I kept one corner of the bed free of curtains so I could more easily watch thunder storms through the windows in the corner of my bedroom.
Steel Beam Chair-Rail
Nov 23rd
I’m going to take a bit of break from writing about my Crystal Ball Lamp and describe some of the things I made before I started this blog. This article will be about a chair-rail I made for the wall behind my dinette table. I live in a converted factory building. With its high, exposed concrete ceilings, exposed metal duct-work, and outer brick walls, I decided against a more conventional chair-rail made of wood moulding. I wanted something a bit industrial. The place just screamed for a steel beam.
Crystal Ball Lamp, part 3
Nov 20th
—— The Electronics ——
In this post I’ll discuss the design of the electronics part of the Crystal Ball Lamp.
The lamp is controlled by an Arduino Mega microcontroller board. I was originally going to use a less expensive Arduino Pro Mini. It doesn’t provide enough PWM outputs for the nine LED channels I wanted to control, but I could do some multiplexing to get an approximate PWM signal to each of the channels independently; it would complicate the circuitry, but I could endure that if it saved enough money. As I worked through the design, I began to get concerned about the small amount of RAM available on the ATmega328 used by the Pro Mini (2 KB), fearing that this would not be enough to run my lightshow programs for nine channels and be able to run a scaled-down graphical-user-interface through the oLED display (mostly just menus that a user scrolls through). Furthermore, the Pro Mini only has one hardware serial port. I wanted to communicate with two serial devices – the XBee module and the oLED display – so with the Pro Mini one would have to be handled through software, which would use even more RAM and slow down the performance of the whole device. So with all these concerns, I just went ahead and splurged on the Arduino Mega. It had more than enough PWM outputs for my nine channels, more RAM (8 KB), and more than enough hardware serial ports.
Crystal Ball Lamp, part 2
Nov 18th
—— The Materials ——
This post will be fairly short, but hopefully will answer some of the questions I’ve received about where I got my materials.
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- wood
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- aluminum sheets
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- LEDs, heatsinks, and lens
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- circuit boards
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- LED drivers
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- ribbon
The pictures above show what some of the raw materials look like. The list below tells where I got them:
Crystal Ball Lamp, part 1
Nov 17th
I purchased some high-powered RGB LEDs from Sparkfun Electronics mostly because I wanted to play with them enough to learn how to use them, but also because I thought I might use them in a chandelier I’m going to make to hang over my dinette table. As I played with them, I realized that they wouldn’t be all that good for my dinette chandelier for a couple reasons:
- While the three colors combine to make something that looks like white light to our eyes, it’s not really white light. The combined spectrum of the RGB LEDs is very spiky, with narrow bands around the red, green, and blue parts of the spectrum and not much in between. This causes food (and other things) to look weirdly discolored when lit with this kind of light.
- The LEDs on Sparkfun’s circuit boards are spaced far enough from each other that the objects casting shadows cast three differently colored shadows. I actually like how this looks, but I decided it would get annoying as the main light source for a table that I use regularly.
After playing around a bunch with the LEDs, I somehow managed not to fry any of them, so then I had some spare LEDs without a destiny. Time to have some fun … I’ve been wanting some kind of decorative lamp in my hallway, so a new project was born. This article is just an introduction – I’ll explain the project in more detail in later posts. More >
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