"Ahhhhhhh!"

That's the sound that could be heard coming from my room after I decided to try putting actual newsprint through my printer for authenticity's sake. It started ok, then promptly made a nasty crunching noise and died. I couldn't just pull the jammed out of the printer because newsprint is fairly delicate and it kept tearing off in wee bits instead of coming out in a sheet as normal paper is wont to do when one tugs on it. So I tore my room apart to find my toolbox that had the fancy screwdriver with the right head for the really weird screws that my printer is held together with and set to work taking the blasted thing apart. I did manage, and it even still worked when I put it back together again (a minor miracle really). The moral of the story is don't put newsprint through your cheap ink jet printer.

In the end I selected (some nicely aged) sheets of off-white/yellowish construction paper instead as my closest match. It's looks pretty good.

--The Wombat

Newspapers smell funny.

I don't usually read them these days--I've never had my own subscription and it's been years since I've had housemates who read the paper. But as two of the three pieces to my final packet were meant to be newspaper clips I went and got a few for reference and now my whole room smells like newspaper ink. Yuck.

I was particularly looking for the police blotter section of the paper--I know the Santa Cruz Sentinel has it, but I didn't come across it in the San Jose Mercury News. I ended up using the physical paper as a formatting template (what should the header look like, where does the date go, what sort of font, how many columns should a small article have, what do the article titles look like--that sort of thing) and going online and doing a google search for "police blotter" to get some content templates (what are the prime vocabulary choices for reporting a drug bust--"seized" is a good one, so was "armed with search warrants"--go figure, what sort of personal information about the criminals is provided, are there pictures, and so on).

My next step was to figure out how to print it out to look like a newpaper, but that was an adventure so it gets its own post.....

--The Wombat

Whoops.

I did the bad blogger thing. I've been keeping research notes, taking pictures, and all that good stuff but I just couldn't seem to make myself put it up online. Part of that it takes so damn long to upload anything to this site, and it seems like half of the time something goes wrong and I have to start over. Let's hope I didn't jinx myself there.....

So I'll start at the beginning with my rough draft/project idea thing (that's the picture up top--it should get bigger/readable when clicked 0n).

--The Wombat

Giant Purple Bug Worm Thing

So here's my 3D model thing. It is meant to be an enlargement (the actual thing being microscopic) of the Happy Bug Larva. My sketches were blue but I liked the purples better when I was looking around in the fabric store so I changed that. When I had sewn the whole thing up it looked like purple sausage links so it was back out to the store to get fabric paints to try to spice it up a little--now it's sort of cute.....oh well. I'm not sure bug larvae should be cute, but as it's meant to be a man-made bug maybe its designers also had art degrees or a weird sense of humor, or something like that. The whole thing took a lot longer than it should have--my sewing machine had a fit and had to be taken apart (I don't think it liked the last move very much) and then it had been a few years since I last sewed anything and I kept forgetting the simple stuff like which dials to adjust and the likes. Then stuffing a narrow tube in segments turned out to be extremely slow going if I didn't want to tear my seams. I did the body shaping by hand sewing/gathering with a fat needle and embroidery thread. I got the lights in ok, and sewed a battery pouch without too much trouble, and I managed not to get the electrical workings wet when I painted. There were originally meant to be model eggs and a fly too--a sort of life-cycle display, but I got sick and that slowed everything down this past week. I did make the eggs and the fly (and some red blood cells to for good measure) out of fimo clay but I fell asleep after I put them in the oven (my evil cold has been sapping my energy all week and I've just wanted to nap-- I never nap--it's weird). They turned black and the house smelled very bad. I got mad and threw them out--I should have taken pictures. But nothing caught fire so that's good, and I decided I'm not allowed to use the oven while under the influence of cold medication anymore......and that is the story of my purple bug larva, which looks pink in these pictures, alas, and is not quite as grand a project as I had hoped . I do like the silly thing though--it'll make a cute toy later.

--The Wombat

Ha!

I recently discovered that my computer has a paint program on it (part of Appleworks, which I've only used for word processing before). It's an Apple program and although it has a different name it works just like the old Paint program on the Mac Classic that my family had when I was 12. I used to love that program--I'd spend hours playing with it and I was actually pretty good at drawing with a mouse. I'm completely out of practice now, and my laptop has no mouse so I drew the ideas here with my trackpad--not easy! It looks like I did it with my right hand if it had been drawn on paper (I'm a southpaw). But it was a trip down memory lane and kind of fun so I'll put it up anyway.....

I want to build the larvae moderately large. I was thinking that paper mache might be the best medium--I could link a succession on little water balloons for the bubbly body and put my paper and goo over them. I've not done paper mache in even longer than I've tried to draw anything on a computer, but I mostly recall what to do. I think. Then I'm thinking I'll put the LED light thingy into it on the body just behind the head, mostly because I made the damn thing so I may as well do something with it. I also want to make a smaller model of the fly--probably out of Fimo clay. I'll put together a couple of eggs as well, and I'll have to play around with materials to get a transparent "membrane". Then I'll want to put the three bits together for a "life cycle of" sort of display. But I don't want it to look like a third grade diorama....I'll have to fuss with it a bit.

--The Wombat

Brain Parasites!

I found this quick video clip earlier this morning--I want my insect to look mostly like this, but it need to have a bit more of a recognizable head. And since it's at least part man-made maybe it will be a more interesting color....

VIDEO!

--The Wombat

LEDs and Solder

Right--so here's last week's project, uploaded a tad late as I feel as though I've been living in my car or at work for the last five days. Blah.

But here it is--note my lovely soldering ; ) I have a feeling the lumps weren't meant to be quite so big. But hey--it works. It's like sewing. I can make clothes, just don't turn them inside-out and look at the seems and everything's fine....

More later.

--The Wombat