[de]sein

last night i went to an opening at honfleur for a show called gesture. an artist created a brick-sized painting for the every one of the almost 3,000 lives lost on 9/11. while i can’t say that i loved the individual images or imagery, the impact of the piece was forceful. as soon as you walked into the gallery you sensed the size of the impact of that day as almost every square inch of wall space in the gallery was covered. and you began to imagine the dozens and hundreds of other lives connected and effected by the loss of each of these.

the show was loosely split up into four or five base color palettes. this picture shows the transitions between the colors.

my favorite part of the show i couldn’t get a good picture of. all of the paintings are done on cellophane so that the artist could lay down large sections of background colors, cut them up, and then paint on the opposite side, basically allowing paint on both sides of the ‘canvas’. but because of the shininess of the material, each piece reflected the gallery lights onto the floor creating beautiful light patterns on the floor. it reminded me very much of light reflecting off of or light passing through water. another example of the unintended beauty of the things we create.

in the past couple of weeks i’ve recognized the sad state of my bag. the duct tape continually puts a sticky residue on my laptop, a majority of the pockets have holes, and the velcro has come almost completely detached. this, along with the high prices of nice messenger bags and lack of availability of cheap, cool versions, i began to investigate how i might make my own. thusly, i stumbled upon this. it’s a guy who took old vinyl signs and made them into bags. and the coolest thing is that he’s put his designs out with a creative commons license so if you want to make one for yourself, everything is cool, if you want to make some to sell using his design, you have to get his permission or pay him. seeing as how it’s just for me, i procured myself a vinyl sign (if you happen to recognize this logo, i don’t know what you’re talking about) and got to it.

the bag he designed was fairly large. larger than i needed so i shrank it down a bit, but used a lot of the same dimensions. and here’s what i got.

judging by the post title you may have already guessed that i sewed this by hand. and no, i did not have a thimble. but i now understand how one might really be nice. my fingertips are still sore.

there are a few details that i still need to do. i would also like to change the strap and how it is connected to the bag. for this one i just scavenged the strap and d-rings from my old bag. i would like to perhaps use a grommet to clip to, or perhaps something else. anyway, i wore it to work yesterday and it worked fine. it was nice and light, and without so many pockets i don’t feel a need to fill it up with junk.

i’m sure that all of you out there know this, but i just want to make sure. tomorrow is the first round of the world chess championship being held in mexico city (official site). you can follow along at chessgames dot com  or chessbase, or other chess blogs. enjoy.

that title is for jamie, from this. so lately i’ve been kicking around a new idea for a chair. i wanted to do something very clean, much smaller in volume than the negative chairs, but still interesting. i immediately thought of a chair based on a trapezoidal base. quickly, i whipped out these.

just very simple, clean, tapered lines. i was originally thinking of covering the whole thing in fabric. some sort of nice feltish kind of thing. which i still might be into, but i decided to tweak it a little. first the sketch (i realize that i don’t post sketches too much, so here you go.).

so this would be something with a frame and these inset panels. this way, i can still get that fabric look, but i could do it myself. covering a panel is much easier than making a form fitting slip cover. so i mocked up one of those.

this definitely gives it a bit more visual interest. plus with this, i could make the frames out of solid wood. this appeals to me as i’ve used plywood in almost everything i’ve made. so now i’m ready to mock this up full scale to see the massing and stuff. what i didn’t anticipate was this:

figuring out all of the angles involved was very hard because i didn’t make it just a square based trapezoid. it not only tapers top to bottom, but front to back as well. the hardest part was figuring out the dihedral angle. a dihedral angle is the angle at which two planes meet. eventually i got it though and got to work.

here you can see some of the angle guides i had to cut on the laser engraver to get my setups right.

and here’s the frame of the chair.

and me sitting on it. i like the geometry of it as far as comfort. the back wasn’t exactly perfectly joined, so i couldn’t lean back in it and give it the full workout, but it felt good. i think the frame pieces may be a bit heavy visually. and i made this one as simply as i possibly could, construction wise, and it was still a bit of a bear to make, so i’m not sure if i’ll be able to figure out simple construction methods for a properly joined piece. but it’s something to think about.

*editor’s note: did you know that in america a trapezoid is a quadrilateral shape with exactly two parallel sides and a trapezium is a quadrilateral with no parallel sides, while in britain and most of the rest of the world it’s the exact opposite (a trapezium has the parallel sides and a trapezoid doesn’t)? so if you’re ever overseas and want to talk trapezoids, just be aware of the possible confusion.

the past two weekends i have traveled to up into new england and out to the pacific northwest. both trips were a lot of fun, so i’ll let you see some of my favorite pictures from the journeys.

we played a lot of euchre.

we drove up mt. hood.

we rode the t in boston.

and we flew high above the earth in a giant metal death chamber full of highly combustible material. it never ceases to amaze me that we take off and land safely as many times as we do.

in the past couple of weeks i’ve been experimenting with vinyl records as a raw material for making new objects. Records are made from polyvinyl chloride (PVC) which is a thermoplastic polymer. “Thermoplastic polymers differ from thermosetting polymers (Bakelite; vulcanized rubber) as they can, unlike thermosetting polymers, be remelted and remoulded.” [wikipedia.org]. What this means is that a record can be heated up in an oven and be formed into something new. After cooling, it becomes rigid again.

There are several pages of people explaining how to do this on the web, such as here. So I thought that I would see what i could do.

My first try was with David Bowie’s Space Oddity record (insert your own favorite Flight of the Conchords reference. Mine: “Bowie’s in space. Bowie’s in spa-ace.”). So with this one i just heated it up, took it out of the oven and pushed up the sides with my hands until it cooled (quick hands, well-formed calluses (note: ‘callus’ and ‘callous’ mean essentially the same thing, but the ‘o’ is generally used as in ‘hard-hearted’ and the non-’o’ used as hardened skin), and/or gloves are recommended). Making this:

This was fine, but not exactly super cool. So i decided to take a record to the old laser engraver to do some magic.

So now we’ve got an even cooler starting point than a standard record. So with this one i heated it up, took it out and placed it over an upside down mixing bowl and formed it to that. This gave me a much wider, ‘bigger’ bowl.

So that’s pretty cool, right? Well, here’s the problem. When this thing was in the laser engraver, it put off some god awful fumes. I mean immediate headache fumes.
[This may be a good time to talk about the part of PVC that i didn't mention. Apparently no one has really figured out, or really agrees on how harmful it is. It is a documented fact that workers in PVC plants are at gigantic risk of getting bad news diseases and cancers. We don't really even know how much this stuff outgasses and how bad it is just laying there. So that being said, if you try to do this at home, just be careful. If it catches fire in your stove, it will not be a happy day.]

Plus, I mean, it’s still just a bowl. So then i tried just bending it after heating it along a crease line with a lighter.

This actually worked very well. I’m thinking of using it as an envelope to mail cool stuff to cool people. And when you get it, you would take out a lighter, heat up an edge and unfold it to open. I like this idea. So all of you cool people out there might be getting a record in the mail. And who knows maybe i’ll put some music inside to complete the circle.