Remember the garlic press from the last post? Well I got it 3D printed at Shapeways in plastic, to scale. Before doing so I went over to McMaster-Carr and found a spacer and bolts that would act as a good joint. After making modifications to the model to allow insertion of this joint, I got it printed for 80 bucks. No more 2x scale crappy routed version. I was very pleased with how the pieces came together, how the press balances on a flat surface, and generally how it looks. It is currently not food-safe, but my next step is to design it to use less printed material in the hopes that I can get it printed in metal (and not have it cost $500). The main way I'm considering doing this is making the joint, press, cleaning nipples, and holes all metal, but having the model allow for the addition of solid wood handles, which can be carved to follow the contours of the original piece, or perhaps go a little further and make more comfortable contours. Again, you can see these photos up close and personal on my portfolio site.
0 Comments
Oh, why, hello there. How are you? I'm doing alright. A little tired I suppose. It's been a good 9 months since the last post, and I've been busy crafting products at Sensitile Systems. However, I've begun stirring once again, trying to plan out the next stages of life. So, I added two projects to my portfolio site: the Manta Garlic Press and the Mixmaster Model. Granted, these are both from 2012 and 2011 respectively. I'm also working on updating the Manta Garlic Press at the moment. I changed the model to make it slightly easier to manufacture and then sent a digital file to the 3D printing company Shapeways. I also ordered a couple parts from Ye Olde McMaster-Carr in order to make the two parts of the garlic press connect and, well, work. Time and testing will tell if this project is worth more time. Perhaps I'll produce one in solid metal like my plan originally was, some 3 years ago. Here's the Manta Garlic Press as it is now, a 3D Model. 3 years ago I attempted to CNC rout this model out of resin, but the router could not work to an appropriate fidelity (meaning that the holes for extruding garlic and the pegs for cleaning it out were impossible, even after practically doubling the size of the press) I'll keep you posted. Maybe. Perhaps. Merhaps.
Hello Internet
Just thought I'd update the ol' blog. I am now working full time at Sensitile Systems as a Full Time Production Craftsman in the Terrazzo division (where we make the Sensitile Terrazzo™, Terrazzo Lumina™, and PIXA™ tiles). I probably won't be updating this blog again for a while, unless I find time to make my own work. The last month of Summer went by really quickly and not how I expected it to (insert generic comment about ending a sentence with a preposition). First there was the family vacation on Cape Cod, where everything that could go wrong while weaving did. Then, on my return, I began working full time at Zenith Gallery, repairing artwork and furniture for Margery Goldberg. Between this work and moving out of my studio space; between getting ready to move back to Michigan and planning my wedding, my own work kind of got lost.
In other news, I have a book coming out this fall entitled "3D Modelling", which is part of a series called "Makers As Innovators", a series published by Cherry Lake Publishing and edited by UMSI assistant professor Kristin Fontichiaro. Booklist, a book-review magazine of the American Library Association, has named Makers As Innovators one of the "Top 10 Youth Series Nonfiction" titles. Here is the UMSI news link. You can even find the book on Amazon, though my name is misspelled as "Zizkaj" there. The chair has been glued.
set on the loom. I've been experimenting with sequences and patterns for the 4-shaft loom. Two patterns that I will use are: I have also been keeping busy working for local DC artist Margery Goldberg, a woodworker and gallery owner. I've been refinishing her older wooden sculptures and objects, which has been a great learning experience, and I've been getting paid to do so as well, which is awesome. *AND*, on the side, I've been turning more objects on the wood lathe, for practice, and perhaps for profit. I turned three prototype rolling pins (in Walnut, Cherry, and Rock Maple {photos to come}) and took them to Periwinkle, a dc gift store and former employer of mine. Judy, the owner of the store, gave me lots of great advice on marketing my rolling pins to other local stores and told me to come back with more gift-like objects to possibly sell in-store. This work would be sold on commission: owners of storefronts agree to have my objects in store without purchasing them. If a customer buys the object, the owner of the store gets 20% of the retail price. That way, the maker gets most of the profit, the owner gets profit without buying anything, and the customer gets something handmade at a reasonable price. Everybody wins.
First step, besides making more objects, is thinking of a name for my business. More to come on that front. What has happened since the last post? Quite a bit. Even though I wanted to work with established furniture designers, Jonah Takagi's been super busy (and I've been sick when he's available), and Square Form did not like my lack of skills in metals. Therefore, I've been taking the summer to do my own work. I bought a wood lathe and have been graciously given a space to work in a family friend's basement. I then got some wonderfully priced, quality lumber from C. P. Johnson Lumber in Elkwood, VA. I'm going through a list of chairs that I've been wanting to design, beginning with a lounge chair that uses a straight piece of fabric for the back and seat simultaneously. This means that the strip has to wrap around the chair at specific angles in order to be straight and form the necessary parts of the chair. I spent 26 hours on the lathe turning all of the pieces for the chair. The first couple parts took the longest, as this is the second time I've used a wood lathe with hand tools instead of a duplicator, but things have since sped up dramatically. I had to remake a leg today after a drilling mistake, and it only took a paltry half hour. I'll have the chair glued up within the coming week, which means the strip of cloth is next. This I am, of course, weaving by hand on a table loom. I purchased the loom from my old high school, as the school mainly uses floor looms now. For the warp, I'm using the thickest polyester sewing thread I could find, as it will provide an incredible amount of tensile strength. I'm not sure what kind of pattern I'm going to do, or what the weft's colors should be, but those considerations are on my to-do list.
And by extension, life after college. I have letters after my name now: BFA. The day after graduation, we drove back down to Washington, DC, my hometown. I've been talking to a couple local furniture designers (Atelier Takagi & Square Form) about internships with the hopes of getting paid, but no dice. In the mean time, it's design time. I'm working with furniture concepts that utilize long, straight pieces of fabric for upholstery and therefore rely on the geometry of folding to get the fabric to act like a seat and a back. Several of my designs require a lathe, but there are no lathes available to me (unless I dish out lots of money per month). I looked into HacDC, as well as Ann Arbor makerspaces (All Hands Active and Maker Works), neither of which have wood lathes. The Rockville Woodworkers' Club has a passel of wood lathes, but membership is rather steep (a 3 month membership was $145 a month in 2013). Instead, I'm most likely going to buy a lathe off of Ebay as well as a duplicator so that I can literally crank out designs. Family friends have offered workspace in their house/garage, and so all that's left then is materials. Getting good lumber in DC is trickier than getting it in Ann Arbor. I have my eye on a lumber sale in Elkwood, VA on May 17th.
Oh, and by the way, MoCoLoco picked up my Fårstol chair for publication. Okay, so I submitted it to them, but hey. Publicity. I was setting up in the gallery and John came rushing in. And so started another critique. I didn't like the way the clothed stool looked because the implied curves are obscured. The clothing also fits shoddily, and the mechanism by which it gets onto the stool looks like the crotch of tidy whities. John did not like the carpet from the beginning and still advocated for it's removal. I liked how it designated a space, but acquiesced and removed the carpet. The thinking is, if the carpet is for protecting the stools, then you shouldn't be having people sit on it. It's a design flaw if it can't take wear and tear. It feels better rocking on the concrete, for there's less padding to restrict the movement. John suggested another way to clothe the stools, but I simply wasn't having it. He then asked what I was going to do with the goo, and boy did he not like the answer. I had planned to leave a bucket of the goo next to the stools so people could play with it and/or sit on the stools. Formally, as well as contextually, the goo then has nothing to do with the stools at all. John therefore suggested that I fill a ball with the goo and put it in the spherical space beneath the seat of the stool (which was meant for a wooden ball). He ran off to grab some balloons to test the idea of filling that space. So I walked home to get my car and drove to the Reuse center, Salvation army, and ultimately Dollar Tree to buy PVC Vinyl balls of varying diameters. I tried several methods of sealing the cut-open balls, including welding it with a soldering iron, rubber cement, a patch with rubber cement, pva glue, and cyanoacrylate glue. The cyanoacrylate glue was the only method that sealed the ball filled with glue, but it was brittle and cracked easily with flexing. John suggested trying Weld-On, material for repairing pool-liner, or material for repairing bike tires. At this point I don't feel that this is the direction to go, and while John says "it can be done," that doesn't necessarily mean that it should.
I will probably go and and get more pvc balls of a good complimenting color and just put those, filled with air, in the chairs. Whether I include goo in the final gallery piece is TBD. At this point, I no longer care about the project, and I might not even put it in my portfolio. In terms of research and learning, this IP has been highly successful. In terms of making objects, it did not pan out nearly as well as I had hoped. *EDIT: Okay, that was rather harsh, and I was feeling out the angst in the moment. I think I've just been staring at this work for so long and struggling that it's getting to me. I can't sleep at night because I'm imagining what kind of projects I'm going to do when this is over. Bottom line, the craft of the stools isn't great, and the material could be better, but they have an interesting aesthetic.* However, it is important, Theo, to remember that this stool is a prototype and not a final piece. Do it over in quality wood or plywood when you have the time, make it flat pack, do that kind of stuff in the near future. Explore further without gallery deadlines and professors peaking over your shoulder. I'm going to take the small stool with me to work next Tuesday and have some kids sit on it for pictures in the gallery. I need to find appropriate process photos and take pretty photos of the final pieces, print them on free dumpstered photo paper and then pin them up on the gallery wall. Over the weekend I'm going to work on my next thesis draft and look for said process photos, maybe retake some if I still have the mock-ups around. I dropped off my work in the gallery on Monday, and Mark sent out an email yesterday saying that those in Slusser gallery can come in today to set up. So, initial set up, tests, and pictures will be done by the end of the day. Depending on how the photos turn out, they might end up on my portfolio site under the S.C.A.L.A.Y.C. heading. Speaking of my new website, I showed it to Roland and Camilla yesterday and got an hour long critique. Therefore, it has changed to a new layout since Monday. The layout that best suited my purposes was unfortunately the same as Nick Tilma's and Mia Cinelli's sites (which makes me feel like I'm plagiarizing). However, now the background is light, matching the majority of my photos, I have a header on every page that makes the work seem like it's mine instead of just a collection of images, and there's a menu on the left side of the page (never mind that the menu items are the exact same things as what's on the meat of the page). I also got some more feedback on my résumé (mainly that it still sucks), which I will put into action soon. My formatting was much better than the first résumé (no I will not show you, it's hideous), but it still has a ways to go according to Roland. Camilla is convinced that I need to get more jobs under my employment section, even if they are 3-days long each. It's not that I haven't worked several jobs, it's that the jobs I have worked have had nothing to do with Art and/or Design, and therefore I did not put them on my formal résumé. Checklist Days until Gallery opening (and therefore hard deadline): 8
Accomplished: Domain name purchased, registered, hosted, New website formatted, indexed with Google, linked to, Old website changed to just be a blog (if you hadn't noticed) Working on: Editing website, adding thesis project to it Setting up gallery, documenting, putting documentation online To do: Next draft of thesis (final is due April 23rd, meetings with thesis adviser next week) Odds and ends. Literally. Maybe. There are details on the stools that I find appalling (smudges of filler, cracks, etc) that I resolved to fix today, the day that work is due into the gallery. I started off sanding down the wax to get to these details when Roland came around. He started pointing to all these other problems that I hadn't had time to fix, which threw me deeper and deeper into despair. Once he left I realized that no matter how much work I do today, the stools will never look as good as I want them to (even though they're only prototypes and don't have to look good, I feel). Therefore, I stopped sanding and put my work in the gallery (which will get locked up throughout the week until Friday when we can come in and rearrange our work until the following Thursday). John came by to check on me and I told him the logic behind submitting work now and Roland's nitpicking. John said that because this is Roland's first time teaching IP, he doesn't quite get that students do not want feedback after a certain point, even if the feedback is accurate. I agree. The whole reason my project is at where it is (instead of, say, more complete), is because I've spent so long responding to critique when I should have just been finding my own way. After eating lunch I decided I would use my extra little bit of time to sew up some stretchy coverings for the stools just to try them out and see if that would solve the ugliness issue. Pictures to come of how they look on the stools (they just look like floppy cloth bags when they are not on the stools, and I can't get to the stools until Friday). In the meantime, I've been working on a better website for after college as well as for the thesis exhibition. Take a look here (note that it's still under construction). Checklist Days until work is due in the gallery: 0
Days until the exhibition (actual concrete deadline): 11 days Accomplished: Stools and Goo turned in to the gallery Stool coverings sewn Working on: Brand new website To do: Final draft of thesis, Documentation of work for website & professional packet (what is turned in at the very end) |