Undergrounded 24/09/11

setting up the stall

another pair sold

no-glue assembly bowls

What's New This Weekend

The anchor brooches are ready, and there are some friendly claw fruit bowls made from salvaged plywood.  The bowls are engraved with different snowflake patterns and can be assembled in a couple of minutes without any need for glue!  Claws+snowflakes+anchors = pirates in Antarctica!  Yarrggghhhhhh!

Yargghhhh Matey!

The tide is high, the sea is calling.  Even is the tide is low, the sea is calling regardless.  Time to embrace my inner nautical fiend.  Alright, maybe not that inner if my striped clothing collection if anything to go by.  I finally turned my more or less recent mirror acrylic experiments into brooches with the help of some clamps and epoxy.

Wellington Underground Market

This coming Saturday I'll have a stall at Wellington Underground Market (used to be called Frank Kitts Market).  It's gonna be good!

Flat Pack Fruit Bowl

 Intolerance.  Well, that is more or less what happens when you design interlocking parts that require decent tolerances, and the material scraps used in fabrication all come from different batches.  I decided to make some flat pack fruit bowls to use up some of my plywood offcuts, but the first bowl was to be made out of red tint acrylic for a ruby wedding anniversary present.  Acrylic is definitely not the ideal choice for something that is a combination of a) delicate, b) has lots of interlocking joints, c) will be handled a lot.  However, in this case it was more about aesthetics because the bowl was to be an exo-skeleton for a clear glass bowl.  The main design challenge was making the lasecut bowl fit precisely over the contours of the glass bowl.  I made the initial prototypes from corrugated card to test out whether my idea and contouring was going to work.  Once the acrylic design was finalised, I tweaked the form for a plywood version.  The files for the latter can be downloaded for free from my Ponoko Personal Factory showroom.  These customised if required and lasercut.

 

Spice Cabinet

I like cooking. Cooking needs spices.  Spices need containers.  Containers need storage.  Storage needs to be easily accessible during cooking. 

Spices - check.
Glass spice jars - check.
Storage - time to design some spice cabinets

This is a prototype for a set of stackable spice cabinets, which will be screwed to the wall.  The sliding doors, provided they are kept closed, will hopefuly keep the contents secure during an earthquake.  Don't want little spice bombs exploding around the kitchen!  Most doors will be clear, but the cabinet with all the odd containers will have mirror doors to conceal the "mess".

 These are pretty easy to make with Ponoko Personal Factory - jump here for free files!

Happy customer

These are extra large Gawky Ghost buttons that one happy crafter decorated her knitted hat with.  Yipee!