My son—now four, but three when I conceived this project—loves numbers and counting. More than a few times I’ve peeked in at night to find him asleep with a calculator in one hand and a flashlight in the other. And one of his favorite things to do with the calculator is incrementing “1 + = = = = = = = = = =” until he can’t keep his eyes open any more. I decided to build him a dedicated machine that would do nothing but count up and count down.
My initial concept was simple: a seven segment LED display so it could be read in the dark, a rotary switch in the middle to choose the value to operate with, and big buttons for adding and subtracting. Green makes the number get larger and red makes the number get smaller.
Below is the finished product. Click the “Continue Reading” link under the picture for details about the process of building and programming. I didn’t take a lot of photos through the build process because there wasn’t much to see, so I’ll illustrate relevant parts of the writeup with photos of the finished counting box. Also, please be aware that this is meant more as a documentation of my build process and the things I learned, rather than as a step-by-step how-to guide to make your own. I hope you’re still able to learn something or be inspired.
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After doing some freezer paper printing* on a shirt for my son, I wanted to do some more intricate designs and maybe even sell some of them, but didn’t want to spend a lot of money buying a press. So what do I do instead? Spend a lot of money building a press! Click the “continue reading” link for some details on the construction of my homemade screen printing press.
*cut a stencil in some freezer paper, iron it onto a shirt, dab on ink, pull up the stencil, set the ink with an iron.
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For a while I’ve wondered what kind of shape the neckwarmers were in when they arrived at their destination. Were they crumpled, wrinked, was the packaging torn? In the back of my mind I had an idea to ship one boxed to family on the east coast then ask them to mail it back in the standard shipping bag, but I never got around to it.
But I found out today in a big way when a Christmas package meant for Australia was returned for having an insufficient address. That’s about as far as anything could be sent, and then doubled for the return trip. It was shipped on the tenth of December, and marked “Return to Sender” on January 5. I’m not sure when it arrived down under or how long it was kept, but it only got back to me here today. That’s over three months on the road — a far more rigorous test than I could have devised!
It's pretty smooshed up. Good thing there's only fabric inside.
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When you receive your laser cut wool (in my case, from Ponoko), the first thing you’ll likely notice is the smell. It makes sense if you think about it — wool is a kind of hair, lasers cut by burning, therefore the perfume of burnt hair. Mmmmmm.
Lean in close and take a deep whiff.
So what can you do about this? It obviously won’t do to ship to your customer (or use in your own project) as-is. Follow along as I clean up the most recent order of mustaches for my fleece neckwarmers. Your project will be different, but here’s what works for me…
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Ponoko is an awesome service that lets you design your own items to be laser cut and delivered to your door. I’ve been using them to cut mustaches for mustache neckwarmers, and I’ve got a few more projects I’m working on but haven’t uploaded for production. They have a marketplace where you can sell what you’ve designed, but since this project has so much additional assembly, that wouldn’t work. So how long does it take to get your goodies into your hands? Their shipping FAQ states:
The ‘average’ order is custom made and delivered within about 2 weeks, give or take a few days.
It turns out that’s not too far off the mark. Keep reading for the timeline of my most recent order.
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For the fall of 2010 I’ve got some awesome new designs, now featuring hardcore handlebars. The neckwarmer is still the same, but you can now get mustaches in thick wool felt or leather. These are laser cut for extra futuristic awesomeness. See pictures in the gallery below, or visit my etsy shop.With the introduction of these new styles, I’ll be phasing out the most intricate of the fleece mustaches because they were such a pain in the rear to make.
The chair at SD Botanic Gardens that served as my inspiration.
On a trip to California this February, my wife, son, and I visited the San Diego Botanic Garden in Encinitas. She was immediately taken with one of the installations there — an oversized adirondack chair.
I filed this attraction of hers away in my head, and like Roy in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, it started to eat away at me. I collected plans for dozens of different styles of adirondack chairs (all normal scale), I drew my own plans both on paper and on the computer, and I stood staring at the hardware store’s lumber aisle envisioning how the different sizes of boards would work together. No chairs were built from mashed potatoes, but only for a lack of that dish being on the menu.
I would have to build this chair, and Mother’s Day gave me a perfect excuse.
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Some of my earliest dates with my wife were playing Skeeball at the Seaside arcade. I wanted to commemorate those good times, but our house doesn’t have room for a full Skeeball game, so I thought I’d give her the next best thing — a backlit scoreboard.
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This was one of the first sewing projects I did, based on the Gratitude Wrap from soulemama.com (1.6MB PDF). One friend calls it the Art Pack (which has an undeniable grandeur), but I tend toward Coloring Kit. What can I say, I’m a fan of alliteration.
Instead of being for the storage of thank you notes and accessories, I wanted to make a pack my wife or I could throw in the diaper bag so we’d always have some entertainment for our then 18-month-old at restaurants. They’re not all thoughtful enough to provide colorable place mats and crayons, and when they do the crayons are so often just broken nubs scarred with the teethmarks of a hundred children before.
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I can’t really grow too good of a mustache. Certainly not one like these. So a few months ago I came across an idea I’d written down: “Scarf with mustaches/faces on it, to line up when you wrap around your own. Or maybe a fleece neckwarmer with just one face.”
I’d recently started sewing, and this seemed like a project I could tackle. I took apart a neckwarmer I already had to see how it was put together, consulted with a couple of friends who are far better at sewing than I am, and promptly began turning out some trainwrecks.
Eventually, things started to come together. I optimized the process so I could make one in less than the 3 hours each it took to make the first few. I put a few on Etsy and got a good response, even a few requests for custom designs.
I’m really excited to find that other people have the same sense of humor and fashion (although I use that term loosely) as I do. My dream at the moment is to be able to chase after a random stranger I see on the streets, yelling “Hey! I made that!” The odds are getting better and better every day.
About the Neckwarmers
The neckwarmer is made from two pieces of fleece: one color called “camel” (how appealing!) and one “charcoal.” A single piece would be a lot easier, but I think the look is really made by the way it angles along the jawline and mimics the shape of the face. It’s double-layered, and because the two layers are only attached at the seam it can be “rolled” to place the mustache in a different location in relation to the top of the neckwarmer.
The mustaches are also made from fleece. Usually three layers, stitched around the edges. The extra layers give the ‘stache some volume and rigidity, so that the handlebars will stand out appropriately. They’re attached to the neckwarmer down the middle and partway across the top, so that the ends are free to pop out.
