Billy's Update 1/15/07

This week I did okay, certainly not great by my own standards. I had a lot of free time.
I did this. It's about 14 inches high, which I learned was sort of short. It was mostly an experiment to make sure that it would stand up that way, since the thin, thin strips are all that's holding it up. Now that I've made it, though, I want to see if far larger. Like, a 5 foot high floor lamp made out of 1.5 inch wide strips rather than .75 inch wide like this one. That's a stupid thing for me to make when I'm going to move in 6 months, but I might make it anyway.


I also made these little guys. The one in the middle is the correct version of what some of you have seen the wrong version of hanging on my wall. The proportions were a little wacked. This is the "display model" for how it ought to be. The two little curvy guys on the side were experiments to make sure that the strips wouldn't snap when I curved them. They didn't. Now I don't know what to do with them. They're a little too small to function as is. I made half of another lamp too, but then the other half failed miserably and involved me pulling a piece of rice paper back and forth for ten minutes to get it straight, then having it unstraighten itself under the tremendous weight of a tiny strip of Elmer's glue. I swore and kicked some things and then wrote it off.

I didn't make this this week. I won't lie. I made this a couple years ago, and had to bring it home this week because I was afraid the construction workers in the Upstairs Cafe would trash it. It's made me realize how I miss making things that looked like this, and I've added a goal to my list to again try and make something like this but more portable, and with fewer giant problems. I may also switch to incandescent lighting for the next one. Cross your fingers it doesn't light on fire.


In other news, the library at Bennington got this giant 3 book set of the 999 best designed objects in history. I'm pledging to read the descriptions (short as they are) of all 999. So far I'm up to 131. This week's highlight: ancient Chinese scissors. Look at a pair of scissors some time. They're so clever.