Inspire your fellow makers by posting some photos and a description of something you are working on this month at the 'Space (or wherever) in this thread!
Small craft projects, large CNC router projects, quick & dirty tools made by tools, and so much more happen at Dallas Makerspace. Cool things done at DMS by cool people often go unseen by our peers, not to mention the curious public. Post up here to share the interesting things you are doing with Dallas Makerspace this month!
Posting here will help promote Dallas Makerspace, inspire others to make something. and help DMS PR show off what can be done here using social media or blog posts (with attribution to each maker of course).
NOTE: Please try to include the following on each post, to help make for richer experience:
a QUALITY photo
WHO you are (for attribution outside of this venue)
I’ve been trying to be more intentioned and detailed with finishing my pots lately as glazing is where I usually fall apart, get lazy and make poor choices. But recently, I’ve had some groovy successes. Yay!
I made this desktop, tablet holder for my iPad Pro but it can be used for any sized tablet. The base is solid concrete and wood. Marine vinyl was used to wrap the upper and lower parts. I did consider leather and canvas. One base shows M&M’s infused in resin and the other base shows birds-eye Maple Veneer. I made custom molds for the concrete (of which you cannot see) embedded in the base and the M&M infused, resin sides. The upper support holds to the base via an embedded magnet in the concrete base component. The magnetic force is enough to hold the upper support into any rotated position.
Leather two card-slot plus cash Mini-wallet
Holds cards on both sides and cash in a center pocket. I hand-cut this one from chrome-tanned leather and hand saddle-stitched the wallet.
I’ve built a digital, laserable version as well if someone would like to make a veg-tan version (since chrome-tan is a no-no on the DMS lasers). I recommend care in pre-punching the stitching holes one layer at a time with a pricking iron - trying to evenly punch 4 layers using pricking irons or a diamond awl would prove difficult. I put diagonal stitch holes in the digital pattern but have not tested them - YMMV.
The folder is in the Committee Drive under creativearts/Leatherworking.
Four inch square Blacksmithing project for the Rocky Mountain Smiths in Colorado. Steel dragonfly with brass brushing on the steel wings and beeswax/BLO finish on the steel backplate.
From concept to implementation, I like how it turned out, but I’m most proud of stretching a 3”x4” plate of steel to make the 4”x4” backplate. The bark texture was a bonus from all the cross-peening, but not unanticipated. I actually ended up at 4.25” square and had to grind it back a bit.
I had a Raku party tonight. I grabbed some leaves from the yard to use as combustibles. Apparently I rakued a snake. Good thing I didn’t feel it in my hand when I picked up those leaves.
So in my defense this is technically not a table but it’s very table esc! So I didn’t branch out too far but a friend of mine wanted a new counter top for her travel camper so we tabled it for a later date and then I countered with this!
So to seal the quick and easy way on the bottom I just painted it white, then went with a couple of coats of polyurethane which I’m not too used to using, a lot of times exotic woods have alkaloids in them that will prevent reactive finishes like polyurethanes from curing so Im used to evaporative finishes like lacquer and paste wax but it turned out to be a good choice for this one
Edit, oh it’s a mix of 4/4 maple 4/4 cherry 6/4 cherry and 8/4 walnut cut into 1” tall strips 28”x64 3/4
Ive been slowly but surely working my way through making graduation quilts for all the college-age offspring of my three closest cousins.
Maggie was the first to graduate - from Emory University. A few years ago. I’m quite late with her quilt… But I think it’s worth it. Her thing is literature, both writing and publishing. She is headed to England in fall to work on her masters. This quilt is made entirely out of fabrics with words or letterforms included. The quilting pattern, stitched out by the computer on a longarm quilting machine, is books.
Her youngest sister is going to be a junior at Georgia Tech this fall. One of the six-foot-tall women in our family, I enlarged a top I started during a DMS Quiltpocalypse meeting to suit. The quilting pattern on this one is called sunflowers.
Isabel is going to be a junior at University of Iowa. When we had a family get-together last spring and I had all my UFOs in tow (UnFinished Objects) to determine whether any could become graduation quilts, she chose the digitally printed flower panel I had as the starting block for her quilt. She’s another one of the six-foot-tall women. So this thing got big pretty fast. Her mom chose a funky feathers/bubbles quilting pattern for her quilt.
The center is a cross-dyed linen that is quilted to the black wool background, then all the wool leaves and penny-bits were fused around the edges. Then, I went a little crazy with my stitching… Most of the pearls cotton threads used were hand-dyed by my friend Laura Wasilowski via her company Artfabrik.com. (you too can own groovy hand-dyed thread!) I haven’t (yet) cut the table topper away from the background, as the black wool is kinda flimsy, while I wanted to enter the work in a quilt show or two. So I just added a black cotton hanging sleeve to the top for the time being.
Many years ago, one of the administrators at the school district I worked for decided we needed a “suggestion box”. The carpenters in the maintenance department dutifully built a very nice box out of oak, and attached your basic engraved plastic sign and stationed it in the breezeway of the administration building.
In the ensuing 20-somthing years, I think it garnered about 10 suggestions. Finally, a subsequent administrator decided it needed to go away. I grabbed it to use as a repository for “viewer’s choice” ballots at the Dallas Quilt Show. However, brown wood with a sign - whether printed or hand-written - taped on is just kinda butt-ugly. So I took it back home to do something to jazz it up.
I considered paint, decoupage, and other options, but settled on a decoupage option, utilizing Kaffe Fassett-designed fabric and modpodge. While I’m sure the wood-lovers among you are groaning “but it was beautiful oak wood!”, I say “not that beautiful…” I did, however, opt for better hardware, courtesy of WoodCraft in Plano.
NOTE: Please try to include the following on each post, to help make for richer experience:
