I spent Monday making large pile of orange sawdust in a friend’s pasture. They lost an Osage orange tree and it fell across their fence. Took about 4 hours and four chainsaw blades to get it whittled down to a more manageable size and get the fence back in operation.
Social distancing or not, when a friend is in need you do what you can to help.
Big job for that tree. Very kind of you to help them with it 
On a different note…Oooh! Osage orange bits and/or sawdust
If you ever have, I’m interested. Great for natural dyeing. Gorgeous color
(I know might be too late here, but just putting it out there)
Why unpin? I know doors shutting but doesn’t mean folks don’t have pics they’re might have posted.
And maybe folks might continue their making efforts at home. I’d love to see it.
Plus that keeping the connection. Some areas of DMS have gone more virtual. Why not this?
I know with all the crap happening from various fronts, it’s refreshing to stop by the show and tell thread for good news and inspiration
Unpinned it’ll just sink
Right now health and safety is more important than having a ton of things pinned on top. It will go back up once we can safely return to the space.
Sounds good.
Looking forward to it once it’s practical
Main thing I was checking was it wasn’t just doors closed = no one making so no need for thread
I’ll enjoy seeing making where it happens once thread going again
Personally, there may be benefit in continuing to post makery stuff done at home during the pause.
whats the blue stuff brah?
That’s called flocking, which is basically powdered felt that you glue In and felt the inside of the drawers.
So in the past few days I’ve been off, ironically on scheduled vacation, Ive done a few repairs/maintenance on my own junk. Well not at the space unfortunately.
My oldest & I rebuilt the turbo. I let him put it in.
We then dropped the fuel tank & then did the Hutch & Harpoon mod. Basically you removed the secondary pre-strainers & then move the fuel return away from the pickup. By moving the fuel return, it keeps the air from getting sucked back into the pickup. My pickup tube was actually broke which I was not surprised.
Great job in sharing the Wisdom, that’s what it’s all about. Take care
California Condor egg I casted for a preservation group in Boise.
Cut it close on this one. One last cuff. Keep on making!
Thanks to all that helped shut her down tonight.
So this has been sucking all my time and energy for the past couple of months…
I took a LOT of photos during a trip with @ioport51 to visit some of his relatives in Maine during the fall color season. This was one of the many. I edited in Photoshop to make the border of the photo black & white, then had the photo digitally printed on fabric by a local fabric-printing company - My Fabric Designs.
My idea had been to stitch the black/white with black, white and grey threads and the color with a gazillion shades of colored threads. But - with the twist of choosing a specific tree or two that would bleed into the border in full color.
I don’t think I anticipated stitching as heavily as I did on the leafy portions of the trees, but once you start down that road, you have to continue. I nearly threw in the towel several times. But the work paid off! It captured a first place ribbon in the Pictorial category at the Dallas Quilt Show. Sadly, the county pulled the plug on the show about three hours after we closed our “preview night” for members and entrants. So not many people got to see it “in person” after all. (sad face).
It started out 25" x 36". After I finished all the stitching, it was trapezoidal, with sides in the vicinity of 35" long, the top 24" wide and the bottom 22.5" wide. Yikes. But thanks to the magic of a lot of steam blocking and the coaching from two fellow quilters, I got very close to square! We all lamented not taking a “before” photo on the blocking board…
Here are some closeups of the heavier stitching:
Beautiful! And congrats on the ribbon!!
That is stunning! The level of detail is incredible!
Making from home! Not as much fun, but I guess I get to finish up some projects lying about.
Peacock is finished and hung. It only weighs 6.5 lbs, but it seems much heavier.
!
I etched this cup last week, it was my first time attempting to use the rotary tool by myself and I’m very happy with how it came out!
I also finished making this koi fish at around 11pm Tuesday night… It was my farewell to the makerspace project
I hope the space will be able to open back up soon so we can all continue making.
Yesterday’s project was to make a case for my Buggy Barn-designed “crazy-piecing” quilt project. This style involves making ginormous piles of fabric, then cutting them apart while keeping the stacks in a particular order. (hard to explain, so I won’t try.) In any case, all these stacks of fabric need to be kept intact so that the right pieces end up together. I had tried a science project board as a keeper-device, but it pretty much failed miserably.
I considered pleading a pizza place for a big pizza box, but few places make pizzas bigger than 16" - and if they do, they don’t indicate on their website actual size. Just say small/medium/large/extra large. Not helpful.
Then I thought about the designs used for bread basket covers, or for casserole dish carriers, and decided to adapt that. I had some cool oilcloth I purchased many years ago without a purpose in mind, and it was almost the perfect size. Larry wanted to make a field trip to Lowes for fly strips, and I tagged along to see what sizes of corroplast they had available. Score! 24x36 piece. Cut it down to 22x22, and then began sticking all the parts together with double-sided release tape (basically rubber cement in tape form). In retrospect, I should have done all the velcro sewing and edge-finishing BEFORE I combined with the corroplast, but it was a “made up as I went along” project, so lesson learned.
So, I made this the other day in response to an entertaining challenge in one of my spinning groups on Facebook. Make a working spindle from toy parts.
This is my Easter Egg Extroidinaire Super-Bling support spindle. Modeled it after the physics of a Tibetan spindle style.
Spins pretty good actually. Current project is mix of wool, bamboo, and shiny stuff.
Here’s last spinning session. It always amazes me how big pile of fluff becomes just a little thin layer. Filling a spindle with finer thread takes quite a few hours.
Btw, this whole project careened wildly out of control. That’s always fun 
Here’s the gory details (and pics) if interested:
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In a FB support spinning group I’m in, the recent weekly challenge was to make a support spindle out of something found in a toy box. Here’s what I came up with:
To make this spindle, I stole from my cats and got my husband to take me out for pho.
Around Easter time each year, we buy a package of those plastic Easter eggs for the cats. If you put a small object in there (we use a penny/coin), then tape it shut, the cats LOVE chasing them around, batting at them, and they make a noise. They also last maybe 30 seconds before they get batted under furniture. But still. Then we periodically fish them out and the games begin again. Anyway, I stole an Easter egg from the cats’ toy basket.
For the shaft, it was a sacrifice dramatic look but my husband and I went out to dinner at a tasty pho restaurant. Because I needed a cheap bamboo chopstick for the shaft.
The rest of it…well, I can’t NOT over-engineer a craft project.
The hole in the bottom was easy. There’s a dimple already there for finding center. Was gonna drill it (power tools!) but couldn’t find my drill. Probably for the better. Drill bit just in hand, no bueno. So then I used a paring knife. I practiced on the larger end and totally killed it right away. Oops. Sacrificed to the Cause.
Ok, lesson learned. It was practice anyway. So the smaller end, I learned I should put the egg end for the hole down on my wood surface…the other practice one, end up in the air, totally stabbed it through the heart.
So with the good egg part down and fingers crossed, poked it with the tip of the paring and twisted back and forth. Ok, that worked to start. Then held in hand and kept twisting to enlarge hole for bamboo chopstick.
Careful not too much pressure or I’d stab that sucker too. And if I killed it, I’d have to go fishing under furniture to find another egg to steal from the cats.
They didn’t notice the first egg missing, but didn’t want to push my luck. Cats are subtle in their revenge. Beware.
Ok, so bamboo chopstick from pho dinner fits. Shaped ends with a pencil sharpener, knife, and file. (After spinning it, I’m gonna thin the flicking end a bit more).
Now for some weight.
This is also where things might have gotten out of hand.
Ok, they did.
I blame the cats. I was left unsupervised. They were napping.
First, well heck, we’re dealing with a lime green Easter egg already. That sucker is begging to be blinged. First I rhinestoned the edge (way easier before I added shaft and filled shell).
Then there was glitter and glue involved.
There might have been a Glitterpocolypse.
I might have dropped the shell a couple times while I was tapping the glitter around on the glue. Kinda like flouring a cake pan, but now that flour is a permanent part of your life. Glitter never leaves. It only continues its insidious spread, infecting all it touches.
When I dropped the shell (twice) on the desk during glitteration, it kind of exploded. Glitter everywhere. On me. All over the tools. I likely ingested some. On my jewelry workdesk. Yeah, there’s gonna be bonus glitter with each jewelry purchase. For the next ten years. I got told twice the next day that there was glitter on my face. Different places. Good thing the glue is washable.
Moving on. So, weights. I had a LOT of those orange freshwater pearls laying around. So those and some smaller purple pearls for contrast. I kinda mixed the pearls with some elmers glue and, you guessed it, more glitter!
I added the shaft, then packed the beads into the shell. Originally the plan was glitter all inside the shell and beads about 1/2-2/3 up. But things got out of hand. Big surprise. I kept playing with balance and tweaking pearl placement.
You know how you mess with your hair and sometimes you just need to know when to STOP?
Just. Back. Away.
Yeah.
Of course I didn’t. Duh.
So by the time I got it all balanced, it was close to full. Pearls aren’t light-weight. In retrospect, I should have emptied the shell and reinstalled. But noooo, that would have smacked of effort. I charged on ahead.
So I’ve been wanting a heavier spindle like for plying. Well, I’ve got it. I’d say optimally, it should be original intention of 1/2-2/3 full. So a bit heavy. Not crazy though. It just spins a bit slow. Well, and I have been using tahklis a lot lately so maybe it feels slow in contrast to that. No. Kinda slow. But it does have decent balance and spins a really nice long time with the weight. So I just need to chill and not compare it to tahkli speed.
Anyway, it’s a cool spindle. I normally like really earthy natural colors and not into shiny bling at all. So this was kind of a fun out-of-the box aesthetic to play with.
The weight is working nice to spin this small batt I got as a sample in one of those spinning boxes where there’s a lot of different things from various vendors. I love these colors.
