Video: Circle Center

9 June 2017

Andrew Art and Design, creativity, design, Makery, Philosophy , , , , , , Leave a comment

Once you finish a book on geometry, everyone wants help. 🙂

I wound up making this short video on how to find the center of a circle for my dad.  It’s not ideal; I need a better set-up for making videos at my desk.  But the essence of it are these steps:

  1. On a given circle, find three points about 1/3 of the way around the circle, A, B, and C.
  2. Arc the distance AB center A, and BA center B, so the arcs overlap one another at two points, D and E.  Draw a line between D and E — the center will be on that line.
  3. Arc the distance AC center A, and CA center C, so the arcs overlap one another at points F and G.  Draw the line between D and E — the center has to be on that line.
  4. Point O is the place where lines DE and FG cross. That’s the center of the circle.

I hope this helps!

Sewing: Viking Bag 2 

29 April 2017

Andrew creativity, design, Makery, textiles , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Remember that cute viking fabric that I made into those little drawstring bags?

I found another strip of it.  But it wasn’t enough to make into a bag, unfortunately.  I was going to have to combine it with another kind of fabric? What goes with vikings, though? How do you combine viking warriors with anything else? Floral prints?

But how about a brick wall?  If I make the bag tall enough, it will look like warriors peeking over the battlements of a tower, and that conveys the image that we’re looking for — not a bag, but a tower, not a small purse but a fortress.  It becomes a thing of the imagination, as much as a physical object.

I’d rather it was a stone wall, or maybe spiked logs, like on a rough-and-ready motte and bailey castle.  That would make sense, after all.  The vikings didn’t build too much in brick (they also didn’t wear horned helmets — not very practical in warfare, really).

No matter. I found some brick fabric, and it matches pretty nicely with the vikings.  And then I found some other fabric that sort of resembled the Lord Baltimore colors in the Maryland flag… somewhat heraldic, though not TOO heraldic… not shields with lions and snakes and so on.  That would have been a seriously lucky find, though, in an American fabric store.  In general, though, we don’t really understand heraldry’s rules, so they often get used against us — in advertising, in snobbery and class warfare, and other ways, as well.  That’s not really at issue here, though.
What is at issue, for me, is how much of Makery in schools seems to be “making for the sake of making” — that students should simply be allowed to make whatever it is they want to make, full-blown from their imaginations. I don’t know that there’s anything wrong with just letting people make what they want to make, mind you — there’s benefit to that, and real results can emerge from allowing that spark of creativity.

But I think there’s a place in Making for making with a purpose.  There’s a lot to be gleaned from making a quilt to keep a baby warm, or from making a bag like a tower for holding a bottle of wine or something similarly fragile and precious, or a bag that looks like a pencil case. There’s a place for unbridled creativity. But there’s also benefit to knowing how to do something the right way.

I mean, think about it.  In a tailor’s shop 500 years ago, an apprentice would have to work on a variety of tedious projects — sharpening scissors, ironing fabric (I can’t imagine how difficult that work was before electric irons), measuring clients (and then measuring them again when the measurements proved wrong), learning to sew straight seams. They would have made a variety of things that no one would care if they were slightly off — bags with drawstrings, bags with handles, awnings for market stalls, aprons for the shopkeepers, tool rolls for traveling workmen, sacks for flour, and similar projects.  These are a vital and necessary part of the learning of any artisanal technology, be it sewing or woodworking — the cruddy projects that no one really wants to do but that are genuinely vital to the good functioning of that sort of society.

Thirty years after my own first sewing experiences in a Home Economics class in 8th or 9th grade, I find that these skills are returning to me with some rapidity.  I’m much more skilled at whipping up a bag or an apron than I used to be, in part because I’ve trained those skills to a level of complexity and skill where it’s easier to just do it.  I’ve learned a good deal of the apprentice work of this business of sewing (maybe not everything, because every so often I encounter a challenge that I have to go to a YouTube video to solve).

But that’s what the Walking Foot was about.  That’s what making potholders was about. These aren’t “stupid projects” but the foundations of the craft.  In carpentry it’s probably smoothing boards; in bookbinding it’s folding and punching pages; in fabric it’s making potholders and bags.

What are the foundations of your craft?  When did you feel like you went from being an apprentice to being a journeyman or journey woman? When did you become a master of your art form?

Sewing: potholder

25 April 2017

Andrew Art and Design, creativity, design, Makery, textiles , , , , , Leave a comment

In almost any quilting project, it’s always the case that you wind up with one or two or six extra squares. It’s basically a byproduct of mathematics —  x number of squares will only fit into y number of columns and z number of rows.  But the cut-and-sew process of generating the squares — this one was the result of piecing together six strips of 2.5″ cloth into two units of three strips each — one arranged blue-green-blue; the other arranged green-blue-green. Those were then sliced into strips 2.5″ wide, and then reassembled into 3×3 grids — all the while picking up noise and getting smaller along the way, because I’m apparently messy like that.

Yesterday, I bought a walking foot for my sewing machine, and I was delighted with the results.  Posting about it on social media brought me a host of discussions about replacing my store-bought 100% polyester bias tape with hand-made 100% cotton bias tape.  I said I didn’t know how to do that, so I was sent a host of tutorials.

I bollixed up the making of the bias tape yesterday.  But there are a few important things to know about making bias tape — start big. Don’t try to make 1/2″ double fold bias tape the first time; go big, and make 191″ length of 2″ single fold bias tape, so you wind up with 1/2″ double-fold.  It’ll be much easier.

I also discovered that I had a gadget which allows you to feed a strip of tape into it at one end, and folded tape comes out the other, ready for the iron.  I bought it a while ago on the recommendation of someone, and then never used it.  Now I’m using it.

It’s a nice discovery.

This morning I made my first potholder (at least, my first potholder since I was six or eight years old).  Two leftover quilt squares from one project with some leftover batting between them, and a couple of strips of bias tape — one to make the jaunty red loop for hanging it up by the stove, and one for the blue trim around the outside edge of the potholder.  It still needs some trimming and some extra zig-zag stitching to hold it together, but it’ll do for a first effort.

There are worse things to do before breakfast.

Quilts: walking foot

24 April 2017

Andrew Art and Design, creativity, design, Makery, textiles , , , , 1 Comment

Ivy at Circle Thrice responded beautifully to my comment with a post about the magic of making things ourselves, and particularly for people that we care about.

It’s not a post I wrote myself, alas.  I shoulda.

Because this blog, for better or worse, is a blog about magic.  In large measure it’s a blog about the power of making things; it’s blog about the power of co-creation — the act of pulling the materials of the world to you, shaping them and changing them according to a particular vision, and producing something on the other end which is more than the sum of its parts.   Something of your self is woven into the finished product, for better or worse.  Yet in many ways, it is better than something bought through anonymous channels, through the mercantile trade of your hours for abstract concepts, and the trade of abstract concepts for the physical goods of your life.

Today I broke down and went to the local fabric store. It has a name that sort of rhymes with pollyanna, but not really.   I’d heard there was this magical tool there, something akin to a wand of fire or a disk of earth — a walking foot.  (I also needed binding for the quilt I’m holding in these pictures. The binding is the pale green band around the outside of the quilt — it’s better to make that by hand from a 100% cotton fabric, but I am not good at making bias tape or binding — I could spend as long making enough bias tape to make this quilt, as I spent making the quilt).

A Walking Foot? I hear you ask.  Don’t most normal feet walk? Not on a sewing machine, they don’t.  A walking foot attaches to the low shank of a sewing machine; and it has a mechanically-driven lever arm that hooks on to the needle’s drive shaft. The result is that the walking foot engages a second pair of dog-legs (those are the feet on the face of a sewing machine, that advance the fabric through the needle’s binding mechanism.

This particular quilt had been giving me trouble. Truthfully, all of my quilts give me trouble in the same way. The first part of the work involves stitching together squares. I’ve gotten a LOT better at that work. The second part involves quilting three layers together — in this case, the topper of green and blue squares; the batting, basically a thick layer of felt; and the backing fabric (the dark blue in the first picture).  The three layers can be seen in the third picture.

Today I broke down after doing the first half dozen straight stitches of this quilt. I needed quilt binding anyway. So I went to the fabric store for binding for this quilt, and got the walking foot.

What a difference the right tool makes! The walking foot guides the fabric sandwich into the needle-space with great diligence and accuracy. It’s a supremely powerful focus for the sewing machine, like a lens focusing a powerful beam of light into a laser — swiftly went the work of sewing the quilting stitches.

I was able to finish the rows of the quilting, and then the columns, with great accuracy. And then the binding around the edges went quite easily as well. Before the Walking Foot, this might have taken me the better part of two days of work with my old sewing machine. With the Walking Foot, a few hours at most.

This is my seventh quilt, I think.  It might be my ninth, but I think it’s probably the seventh. It’s taken me seven quilts to learn how to do this well enough, and effectively enough, that I learned what sort of problems I was having, and was able to do the research necessary to find the solutions.  Every single one of seven quilts, I’ve gotten better at this.  They may not be Etsy quality, but they’re a lot better than they were.  In a short while, they’ll be a lot better than they are now.

All aspects of Making are like this — you have to be an apprentice before you can be a journeyman; and you have to do the journey-man or journey-woman’s work work before you can be a master of a craft.  It doesn’t matter if you’re talking poetry or quilting or fashion design or musicianship or painting or carpentry or engineering or basket-weaving — or even magic and re-enchanting the world: Start somewhere near the beginning. Get Better. Keep Going.  To Walk the Path Of Power, the Work Is On You.

Quilts: finished

22 April 2017

Andrew Art and Design, creativity, design, Makery, textiles , , , , , , , , 1 Comment


Two quilts finished in three-ish half-days. The top one is the penguins from earlier, the bottom one in pink is the owls quilt.  Both are already spoken for, you can’t buy them.

Really, it’s three quilts but I’m having my doubts about the arrangement of materials for the third quilt. I think I could get the third done if I could get some feedback on whether or not people think it’s a good layout.

Here’s the third quilt. Tentatively, anyway.  I’m worried that the dark blue of the starry swirls doesn’t really match the green or the blue of the top of the quilt; and that the baby-blue trim doesn’t match either.  I suppose I could tie it all together with some thread of the right color… but it still makes me a little nervous.


What do you think? Leave me a comment.

Quilt: arithemtic

19 April 2017

Andrew Art and Design, creativity, design, Makery, textiles , , , , , Leave a comment

Increasingly, I find myself making diagrams like this. It’s a tentative layout for a quilt I am making for a friend; it’s one of two that she commissioned for some of her nieces. This one will be fairly simple, just 5″ squares sewn to some batting and backing with a bound edge. The accent fabrics are nice. I’m worried whether I have enough blue for the quilt; the fabrics that fill in the squares that are currently empty — I don’t know yet if they’ll be random or in neat rows. I don’t know if thequilts will be on diagonals or just crazily assembled.

I do know that the quilt will have to be 9 squares wide by 11 squares long. Ninety nine squares. There are 42 in this array; another ten on the cutting bench— I need 47 more. In some ways it’s pointless to lay out the squares before the cutting is done. In other ways it helps refine the thought processes that go into planning the quilt and figuring out if your next steps will actually work.

Entirely abstract processes in quilt design should work, in theory. In practice, just using theory doesn’t work.

Paper: 2D to 3D

11 April 2017

Andrew Art and Design, design, learning, Makery , , , , , , , Leave a comment

One of the things I spend a lot of time thinking about is the sort of principles one should adopt in a MakerSpace.  And one of those critical principles is this one:

Principle #2: 2D makes 3D

What does that mean? It means that a student or an adult should take a 2-dimensional material, such as paper or fabric or plywood or sheet metal, and turn it into a 3-dimensional object. (I watched a video of Adam Savage making a box using a metal brake recently, and it was inspiring to see a box made so easily. [see about 6:33 and following]).

It’s better if that object has a fold or a bend or a twist in in, or has some sort of functional purpose — but just folding or bending or shaping a piece of paper in a deliberate or conscious way can turn a flat thing into a product. Sometimes it’s a box, sometimes it’s a house-shape, sometimes it’s a bag, sometimes it’s a yarn-winder. Sometimes it’s a question of folding or stacking pieces, sometimes it’s bending them.

What does that look like?

How do we know when a student’s efforts at working Principle #2 have succeeded? How do we know when our own efforts have succeeded?

How do we succeed if we don’t have a metal brake in the workshop (or a hundred bucks of leather for each and every student to make their own Chewbacca bandolier??).

It’s worth remembering the cheapness and versatility of that key material:

Paper

Paper is enormously versatile.  I think I got a sense of that with the Paper Roller Coasters people, and the work of Rob Ives.  You can do amazing things with paper.  But pop-up cards have tremendous versatility as a way of teaching the basics of 2D to 3D thinking. In these few cards, you can see one that turns into an easel, several that turn into steps, and several that turn into folded panels. There’s even a Japanese envelope-letter: write on one side of the paper, and then fold it, and it becomes its own envelope.

What are the benefits of working with paper first, before working with metal or leather or cloth? First it’s a lot cheaper.  A sheet of paper starts at around a penny a square foot (though it can get more expensive), while fabric starts at around a penny a square inch.  Paper is the place to teach conservation of materials, 2d to 3d, and the principles of cutting and measuring carefully. This is where the work begins. This — and drawing.

If you have to equip a MakerSpace, and you only have a $100 budget for the year, start with a lot of paper in a lot of weights, and invest in cutting and folding tools like Xacto knives, rulers, and bone folders.  You can download all the origami and pop-up card designs you could possibly want from the Internet.  Measure, cut, fold — make templates ,and cutting and folding diagrams, and set up production lines.  Teach the industrial revolution, Hallmark card-style, and reinvigorate letter-writing culture at the same time.

(While you’re at it, teach students to make the Platonic and Archimedean solids — geometry learning should go along with Maker learning. That’s practically standard).

Remember: No matter what you build, it’ll be a beginning. And everything you teach about folding, cutting, bending and scoring will ultimately be useful when you do get around to having a metal brake.

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