Club House Pt. 2!

So, today myself and a future supporter of the Maker Cave went out and started cleaning what's to be the design shop section of the Maker Cave. After rearranging and reorganizing, we found out that there's a lot more space than meets the eye! There's plenty of space for future equipment, entertainment and relaxing.

Thank you, Mike Hinman for lending a hand in getting the place looking nice. We also had fun futzing around with settings for camera phones. Mine didn't turn out as well as those from Mike's iPhone. Congratulations to Apple, that is likely the first and last compliment I will give them when compared to anything with a Linux OS.

This week will be packing and moving of my current workshop into the new location. I'm calling it Phase I of the move, because the final product will look nothing like what it will in its early stages. So far, the place is coming along to a great start.

The Maker Cave website is still getting edited and developed, but should be up sooner than later.

If anyone has any questions about this design space, please feel free to e-mail me. Especially if you want to lend a hand, donate funds, donate equipment, or even if you just want to offer support!

Thanks, everyone!
-Nash (The Cave Man)

November 27th: 7-9 pm: Claire Fraiser and Tinkers

           I have a short list of old and dear friends I can count on one hand, maybe two, of people who have known the real me for years and still love me for who I am. I am a terribly flawed person, and don't think I understood at 14 or 16 how much that would mean to me years later, but it's something that most days floors me a little.
          The second half of this gift is you get to see these people you knew as fellow awkward teens turn into beautiful interesting adults. Or maybe I was just the awkward one. Anyways, one of these people for me is Claire Fraser (you can see her here holding this sweet bear skull at an auction appraisal event at right). She is one of those cool people who while I was busy being a tomboy and getting into all kinds of trouble, managed to snag herself a cool degree in art history and today works as a cataloger or art appraiser at Leland Little Auction and Estate Sales (Claire I apologize if I have not given your job adequate billing here as I know you are super smart and do a lot more than that.).
           I am letting everyone in the group meet her for a night to  meet someone who sits on the other side of the gallery world from us artisans and craftsmen. A lot of people seem to make applying and getting into galleries a black box process and put many of their personal bias into the process. Instead you really need to understand what drives a gallery owner or staff to pick particular works of art and come up with a number. A critical eye is necessary for both sides. As many of the group expand their adventures into stores this new year, I would like to make it easier for everyone to understand where and why those sales commissions disappear to. Plus I get to buy a good friend beer for a night!

7-8 pm: Claire Fraiser (A Day in the Life Working in An Auction House/Gallery): Take a step behind the fun and fascinating curtain of art auctions and gallery adventures with my good friend, Claire Fraiser. She works at LeLand Little, a wonderful local auction house with an amazing reputation for quality and taste. Learn from an insider's perspective what does and does not work. Get yourself acquainted with a local art dealer with a great reputation.

8-9 pm: The Art of the Tinker (Soda Can Art): One of the oldest trades, tinkers are the stuff of legend and folk lore as the village gossips plying their wares from town to town repairing pots and bent forks. In modern times, you can make awesome art from tin and soda cans you have laying around the house with a few simple tools:

gloves
scissors
empty soda cans
ribbons
punches
paint (optional)

We will be making custom Christmas ornaments and lanterns for the holidays to take home. Please feel free to bring in empty clean soda cans you can manage to find and plan to take home extra goodies! The picture here is from a great Instructable on how to make tin can butterflies.

As usual we will be at:

Roth Brewing
5901 Triangle Brewing
Raleigh, NC 27617

Textile Friday: Project Runway Is Back!

                      Project Runway is back again for an stunning Season 10. It's a guilty pleasure to watch this show. I can't imagine the luxury most of these designers get to express their own voice which tells me at least that my commercial/brand work is overwhelming the process a little these days. Looking forward to Sparkcon a lot lately as it's a chance to open up and let the public see some of my private work.
                      My clear favorite this season is Dmitry Sholokhov. He calls himself a draper, but his stuff is lovely and very controlled for most drapers I know. He's a couple years older than me at 33 so his sewing is just drool worthy. I hope I will have half of his draping talent one day as I tend to lean towards flat patterning first and only approach draping second with eyes closed and a pained expression. Several of the judges have already commented on his sample making abilities. You can see their minds going, "How do I get him to be mine?" However, after the toss away last season with Anya over Viktor, I will reserve my opinions on this show. We'll see who actually wins vs. who is the most capable. Fashion, like life, is not always given to the most talented or able. I wish that had been covered in school that high test scores to not equal success in the real world. Still, I am hopeful. I just love seeing New York's garment district. Many of my sources, I have to drive around the State for, the idea of being able to walk into a store like Mood and just buy fabric like the selection they have is mind-blowing. Most factories around here specialize...you go to one place for one thing and another for something else. Even Mary Jo's in Gastonia, NC doesn't touch the garment district. Ah well, a girl's gotta dream. Well, I'm sitting back and watching this with happy popcorn on my one day-off a week.
                     Go...Dmitry...go.

Textile Friday: Draping, Japanese Origami in Fabric

               For those who have known me for years, you know I've loved folding origami since childhood. I've sent out Christmas postcards of stars and am fascinated with how it's possible to take something very simple starting out and create something complex. Considering I'm at Animazement this week, I thought I would celebrate my first love of draping, Japanese folding. Some of you may be familar with the TED talk a few years ago by Robert Lang on how he uses computers to model complex shapes to create in paper.
                 As a kid, I thought paper was awesome. As an adult, I've come to see that everything that one can do in paper, on can do with infinite variety in fabric. It creates a marriage of sorts for me between the two, my childhood love and my adult one. You see origami based construction more in societies that drape which means it is more common in Asian culture and French. It is also more common in couture design as many of the fabric manipulation techniques have not been forgotten or are considered worth the expense to do right.
                   Most designers learn some variation of this in school which is actually called "adjusting for fit without darts", "hidden ease", or a myriad of different ways of saying folding the fabric. My favorite "draper" to stalk right now is Shingo Sato who runs the TR Cutting School in Milan. You can see them make lots of different projects on youtube and I love watching the weekly project they post. Draping takes a lot longer than flat-pattern so it's not used as much any more, but for this week with Animazement, I thought it would be worth it to share a little of my joy with you. Draping is what I do in my spare time to work on my game and increase my handskills for complex projects.
                 Have a great week and good luck seeing you at the show.

Textile Friday: Uncrippling Ourselves in Modern Times

      The oldest tailor joke is probably about a guy going into a store to buy a suit. There's probably a thousand versions of this, but the one I've found that is closest to my grandfather's version goes like this:

     "This guy walks into the Ye Olde APL Tailor Shoppe. And wanting to buy a suit, the tailor pulls one of the rack, and has him try it on.
    The guy says to the tailor that the jacket doesn't fit right, one arm is much longer than the other.
    'No problem", says the tailor, 'Just hunch up your shoulder on that side, and it'll look fine.'
    'The lapels are uneven.' says the guy.
    'Oh, that. Well, push it over with your chin.'
    The guy also notices that the pants aren't the same length.
    'Hitch up your hip on the longer side, and it'll be fine. Now, my! Doesn't that look great!'
    The guy gimps out of the tailor shop wearing his new suit, and passes two old ladies walking the other way. After he passes, the one says to the other: 'Oh, that poor old man. Did you see how crippled up he was?'
     'Yes, but doesn't his suit fit him well?'"   ~Robert Bernecky in Quote Quad

      In general, it's agreed that our modern clothing and footwear weighs 20-40% more and provides 20-40% less mobility than our grandparent's clothing in the 1950s. And that's the expensive "quality" stuff. BBC did a great example article on this a few years ago you can see here. We've gained a lot through modern production methods, namely cheap affordable clothing. In volume, my wardrobe rivals a countess or lord of the 1850s. But, does it really free me to look my best? In our quest for disposable beauty, 86% of the population no longer has clothing that actually fits them. Myself included.
       Knowing a problem exists is not the same as fixing it. I've watched ill-fitting clothing slowly creep into the wares I sold at Belk's department stores for almost a decade. It's what made me decide to get into manufacturing. And they are symptomatic of a trend you see in any major department store: Dillards, Macys, etc. Everyone is guilty. The masters and experts of my parent's and grandparent's generation say it's been happening since the late 1970s and early 1980s which is almost 30 years. I should add here that JC Penny is considered the only noted exception by some judges, I leave the truth of that to people who actually have spent more than 20 years in the business.
        After 3 years of moving over to the manufacturing side of house, I have come to agree that newer designers, cutters, and sewers tend to allow a lot more "slop" in the system than older ones. The bull's eye gets much much smaller for acceptable pass/fail standards the more experienced the craftsman (or woman). I've got my own cheat sheet I've built to understand what a designer's actual ability is when they are talking to me, but I won't bore you with the numbers. Mostly, it's a technical way of saying sloppy. In short, it is as if moving up a level of trade skill involves recognizing and embracing these tighter demands.Some people never recognize these levels, but doing so helps you grow.
       Which brings me to computers. Computers are a huge crutch for beginning designers, manufacturers, and tradespeople. But to quote one of my favorite patternmakers, "Computers don't make your designs better, they just help you get there faster."  But no computer, no matter how shiny, is real substitute for ability and I think we as a nation are learning that the hard way after the technology boom of the 1990s. And manual (analog) ability often takes a lot of hard work to get to. Thankfully, there's a lot of great masters in my area willing to share their thoughts and ability so begins the hard task of moving up the ladder from journeyman to master. I'm reading a lot, doing a lot, and you dear customer get to benefit from better products all around. Hopefully, we can all answer this question together as American manufacturing comes home and we rediscover what being skilled labor means. I look forward to the future with you and hopefully we'll all have suits worth wearing that don't make us look like cripples. And set us free.

Recap: Part 2 of the 3D Printer Workshop

     Welcome back from another fun Acorn to Oak meeting on 3D printing. I am so excited to see this technology take off.  Last week everyone put together the electronics, this week everyone put together the outside frame to their 3D printers. One of the neat things about this event is there is almost nothing I can actually name in terms of parts going into these classes. It's a treasure hunt each week in identifying and being exposed to this wonderful world I had never thought about before. While there were a lot of cool things, the two neatest things in my mind for the evening was learning how shrink wrap tubing works and assembling the base. You can see Evan working on a neat stepper motor on the right.

           Once you finish your work, you wrap it in this loose plastic that when exposed to heat...suddenly shrinks. It's pretty neat stuff. While there's a lot of little tricks to assembling the outside, it's impressive when the last piece is installed or the y-axis. You can see Kevin hard at work here.

        I will post more pictures on facebook after I get a chance to look through them. It's so cool to see this all come together. Can't wait to show you all more next week. It's hard to think in 2 weeks all these machines will be up and printing.

         Yeah! Check in tomorrow for a really awesome surprise and the last of our 3 part series in how to build a wardrobe that saves you money.

Opening A New Door

         "There is a time for everything." -King Solomon Ecclesiastes

          Thanks everyone who came out to the photoshoot this weekend. It was fun to have you all. I've been spending the weekend relaxing and enjoying the weather. I love sharing the beauty of this area with others.
            Moving out to our new location has been amazing in terms of feeling as if it's also a positive parallel shift for both the company and myself personally. It's forced me to take a hard look at our personal and professional habits. Some of which need to change. Like personally drinking more water and taking lunch breaks to work-out, the company seems due to a similar tune-up. One of the great things about getting a new space is it shakes out the cobwebs of habit.
              Some of these have been obvious to me, I just hestitated to make the change. One is a desire to stop teaching beginning classes on a regular basis and cut back on my responsibilities that do not directly involve our company mission statement. I love the occasional moonlighting for a girl friend or guest invitation, but I've always felt happier working with my hands than giving lectures. There's something very real about making something people wear everyday with my hands that makes the smiles seem more real to me. Anyways, I hope to do more fun clothing this year. I've got a few surprises up my sleeve for spring and some new textiles I hope you enjoy. To a new exciting season and fun looks. Have a great day.

Day Twelve: Pieceables: 3D Fabric Design

Have an idea over your morning coffee? Want to program your bag with your iPhone? Now you can.

Nash and I love to do prototyping design, especially e-textiles.  For Christmas, we thought we would share our joy with you by creating modular fabric design kits called Pieceables. Simply snap the Pieceables together and program any electronics with your smartphone. Voila, the resulting art pieces are washable and can be endlessly modified to suit your taste.

We've taken a lot of the heavy lifting out of understanding various fabrics and connections to allow you to focus on the fun part of design...making. I love watching friends and family surprise me with their inventions, ideas, and coffee creations.Over thanksgiving we took a bunch home to family, a lot of fun cat toys were made. Not what I expected, but hey...if lol cats can take over the internet, then I don't see any reason they can't take over Pieceables. :-)

Over the next few Fridays, you are welcome to drop by Techshop's conference room and try out Pieceables for yourself. We are marketing these for Christmas on Kickstarter where you can pick up one of 3 basic Pieceable kits: Standard (Machine Washable/CPSIA compliant), Beginner Electronics (smartphone light programming), and Advanced Electronics (allows you to also program buttons, sound, directions, and temperature). You can also program these electronics with any computer screen in case you prefer to use a desktop or laptop instead of smartphone. Simply answer the simple 4 question order form so we know what fabrics and colors you would like shipped.

The last day to order one of the kits for Christmas is Monday, December 23rd. After ordering, simply print the gift certificate. The gift certificates may be redeemed any time in the next 6 months. We plan to start shipping Jan 1, 2012. 

We hope you enjoy your Pieceables! Happy Holidays everyone. And thank you so much for your support over the past year.

You can check out the brand new website here:
Pieceables


Copyright 2011 Li Sashay
Patent Rights Reserved

Day Eight: Battle Signs

Today we're kicking back and getting ready for the local Avalon campaign. It's fun to create the unexpected and guys are all about tribes. A group of guys getting together to play paintball, outdoor soccer, SCA reenactments, and other event is something intrinsically masculine. I honestly believe that if you leave 4 guys in a room with nothing to do, they'll invent a new game, sport, or activity in roughly 15 minutes. This is a wonderful, fun thing.

The second thing you need is a sign, an emblem to hoist in the air as a battle cry and this is where we come in. We have 2 types of textile signs we do. The first type is today's show which is an athletic or military sign. These are primarily for outdoor sporting events, naval, or military reenactments. They feature a fabric sign with an applique that is finished with embroidery. The signs are weighted, machine washable, can be left outside and hold up to mountains of abuse.
Teams often purchase matching iron-on labels which can be put on arm bands, belts, hats, or other clothing. Overall very cool. Check it out and we look forward to showing you the other type of sign we make.