# making

[copperbadge]

Found this quote on a website about hacking programmable knitting machines, and I decided you all deserved to witness the poetry of inducing an existential crisis right before reminding us all that this is about a knitting machine.

[ID: A screengrab from a website reading "Working with these machines is very difficult. Before you begin, look at your life, and what choices brought you to this point. Are you proficient at using the knitting machine's normal functions? Can you read and run Python scripts?"]

[lexamakes]

Actually looked at what I was knitting and got wonder struck for a moment of how NICE it looked.

[futurebird]

I don't understand how lace is made, but looking at the bobbins and pins and patterns … listen buddy I know math when I see it. This is A Math Thing. Obviously.

Right away I want to know:

Can I encode information in lace?

How much of an expert must one be to make your own patterns?

What about the creation of surfaces?

Knitting is more accessible, and people have been exploring math with knitting forever.

But what possibilities does lace offer?

What is the theory of lace?

An excerpt from Mathematics Magazine Vol. 91, No. 4 (October 2018), pp. 307-309

Shows I'm hardly the first person to muse about this. Need to get my hands on the rest of this article, obviously.

[begemotthedog]

He's trying hard just to let us get some good tea from a cute teapot!!😭🤍

Commission for arelhyhahaha on Twitter!🍵

[leftinimaginationemily]

I made some tiny books 📚

[very-ito]

Rika Timelapse

[lurking-latinist]

Hey, tell me something you like about your own writing/art/whatever you make! Something you're good at, something you enjoy doing, or even just "I'm proud that I work on it"!

I'll start: I'm good at sticking the landing. I have a lot of punchy ending lines that feel satisfying to reread.

(That's why I write so many oneshots: I get to write more endings that way...)

[kipplekipple]

Every skill you learn, everything you MAKE, is stairs. You learn one skill and then another and then a third and every larger skill - drawing or painting or sewing or crochet or 3D printing or writing - is made of those steps, like a stair.

Talent is being able to learn some of those steps more easily. And of course sometimes there are barriers - I'm a wheelchair user and there is no ramp to pole vaulting - but it's so important that you remember that's it STEPS.

Especially if you're neurodivergent, because a lot of us have executive dysfunction, which can really fuck up your ability to turn stairs into steps, mentally. And then when you say you can't draw, what you actually mean is you can't climb a flight of stairs in one step.

Sometimes the stairs are in the Goblin King's domain and the way you get from one step to another is a bit different - or sometimes it's just hard to make out what the next step is. But you're building! And similarly, some of your works are just steps, instead of finished stairs on their own. That's okay!!! That's when you tap their imaginary shoulders with your imaginary sword and declare them to be Just A Sketch After All. You're learning how to build the next step, even if you end up tearing it down and starting over.

And it's all like that! Every single project is a flight of stairs! When I started painting with watercolours I didn't know how to layer things or how to blend colours that were wet. But now I know I start a painting and the process of painting is ALSO steps.

It lets you be a little bit more patient with yourself. And it lets you realise that:

A) if you can't immediately skip a bunch of the steps because of talent, doesn't mean you can't build the steps one at a time, and

B) if you CAN skip a bunch of the steps, doesn't mean there's something wrong if you can't skip them all.

I have a huge number of skills. I'm not bragging - I'm autistic and ADHD and I'm like House except my puzzles are how to make stuff (and I work hard not to be an arsehole about it). People always tell me I'm talented. I'm not. Talent means very little or nothing to me, because it's not something you choose or make happen. It's like saying I have brown hair - completely neutral.

What I have instead is hyperfocus, and special interests, and the luxury of access to a community makerspace. I'm in an ideal situation to build stairs.

You can build one flight. It can be crooked, it can be a loop de loop, the stairs can be anything you need them to be. You're the only one who ever has to go up them.

But next time you look at a flight of stairs you've built, or even a stepladder (my daughter would say, "you never knew your real ladder")... And you think it's terrible... Remember that usually means you haven't finished building all the steps yet.

Be the M C Escher you need in your life.

[mysterious-headhunter]

(Let’s make a tree that I will draw.)

[copperbadge]

Last year I got into imprint and letterpress in a hobbyist kind of way, and after visiting the Hatch Show Print shop in Nashville (well worth the ticket if you're going to the Country Music Hall of Fame, where the press lives) I decided I wanted to learn more about how printing worked from a mechanical point of view.

I'd like to buy a real letterpress, but I found a "build your own" kit on eBay and -- I have to say it doesn't work well but it is a functional press and I learned a lot about press construction while building it!

[ID: Three images; top left is the kit box with the parts and manual inside, while the top right is the half-built press. Bottom image is the press fully built, with a lever at the top, the inkpad inverted over the base, and a "press" plate between inkpad and base. It prints, kinda. I may be able to improve it.]

[beekeeperspicnic]

My kickstarter for The Beekeeper's picnic (cosy point and click game featuring a retired Sherlock Holmes) has the unusual reward of being able to buy the game's code, hand bound into a book!

But how?! Enjoy this little vlog of me making the interior of the book!

(This is definitely not supposed to teach you to bookbind, by the way. For that, try DAS bookbinding!)

[bhuxu]

timelapse, i wanted to try the clipstudio paint recording feature

[talenlee]

My Weirdly Embarrassing Love of Spreadsheets

This is gunna be a post about like, the nuts and bolts of making big projects like ongoing writing projects like this blog, but to get there I need to talk to you about silly stuff like journals and buses and spreadsheets. We get there, please, trust me.

One of the first tools I made for blogging was a table in my bullet journal. If you’re not familiar, a common thing to do with bullet journals (or ‘bujos’ as cooler or more tedious people than I call them), is to write up a calendar at the start of each month, something that lists what you’re doing through the course of the month. When I started doing this, I had a way to look at the month, that I could scribble on, so I did, and it meant I was able to get into the habits of putting an article on a game every friday and an article on a story every monday, resulting in my Story Pile and Game Pile series.

This was back in 2017, and the notebooks are in my bookshelf, each of them a record of a year that… huh, I could go back and reread.

Anyway, one of the problems that came up with this system was the bus.

Not kidding.

I would get a bus home from the uni most days. When I was on that bus, or when I was at the uni, I would have time to write, but I wouldn’t necessarily have access to my notebook. I found myself wanting a copy of the chart that I could manage on two different computers – my laptop at the university, and my computer at home. This is how One Stone got written, too, the trips home on the bus being when I wrote the blog posts that became the first chapters of that book, eyes closed, not looking at the screen, and focusing on the road to avoid being car sick.

It is wild to consider how much of my first book I loved writing I did with my eyes effectively closed.

In 2019, I resolved midway through the year that I needed a better system, and started on a system that would handle the transport between two locations better, for the year coming where I anticipated a lot of travel between two sites.

Ahem.

Yeah, uh, 2020.

Anyway, that it wasn’t necessary didn’t stop it being useful! That led to the creation of this Google Sheets spreadsheet:

I made this in Sheets because Sheets is like Excel, which I like using, and it’s like Calc, which I now use, because the version of Excel I pirated doesn’t have access to IFS functions. Point is, this sheet, as originally conceived, did not need anything as a spreadsheet to work; I wanted a table with 365 cells in it that could show the entire year at a glance and be given a simple, straightforward tick or cross. It became something more, as the years progressed.

I’ve been using this kind of spreadsheet now, for 5 years. In 2025, the spreadsheet looks almost the same:

Being a spreadsheet, it is an array of data. You can manipulate that. You can track data in it. You can use indexes. You can cocatenate things, and that’s the stage this spreadsheet is at now. When I sit down to work on a blog post, the first thing I do is not open up WordPress to pull at my drafts, it’s to instead open up this spreadsheet and look at when I have slots available, where my next upcoming gap is, and what kind of thing that gap wants.

Blue slots are story pile, green are game pile. I have all the video article slots pencilled in already with a ‘V,’ on the working version, so I can look at the line of Xes under each date and then see the point where oh, yeah, I gotta work on one of those spots. But see, also, in that top left? That number? The 0 is a count of how many blog posts have been set in place for the year, how close I am to being finished, or on track for the number of days in the year I’m at.

I try to keep the blog progress (blogress) at around 51 posts. That is not because this is the number I’ve decided I need or anything like that, it’s just a round number that makes me happy. Just being able to look at that number and see it being reasonably high? That’s a progress number. I could make it a progress bar proper, with a pair of graphs, but y’know, not worth it. I could make it a fraction too, like, the formula it’s doing over a “/365” if I wanted.

The thing that I’m most happy with though is the cell next to it.

See that cell looks like this:

='Topics & Ideas'!A2

And oh ho what is that?

Well that leads to this:

Here’s what this is: This is a whole spreadsheet of idea categories. Each category has at the top of it, a cell that looks down in the list for a random entry in that list and just provides it. For some things this is a long list of possibilities, for some things this is a tiny list of possibilities. But that is an index function – it looks randomly up and down the list and finds something. That means any time I want something for a specific theme, I can go to this sheet and I’ll see a random selection from these ideas. If I have an idea for a thing to write about at some point, I can jam that in the list, and know that it will eventually be exposed to me at some random point.

Then, at the head of that list, there’s the cell that also randomises the other cells along that horizontal line. Which means that any time I open this blog arranger up, I get to see a random offering of just… anything I could be writing right now. That list can include really broad things, like hey, write about an OC? and sometimes it could be really narrow and specific, like here’s a real event, you know about that one, you should write about it.

Now let me be clear: This is not a tool I recommend for everyone. This is a lot of elaborate effort I put into what is essentially, a producivity toy. This lets me produce a big pile of input and get a random output, and it lets me collect long lists or short lists of things and also, along with all of that, I can just get a periodic output from that list.

The original purpose for this chart wound up being unnecessary. I didn’t need to write on the bus any more. I don’t need to track the post count like this. I don’t need the randomiser. None of this stuff is in any way necessary.

But making this tool though, and playing with it, I have ways to engage with the project of this blog, with the writing when I can’t do that. When my ability to muster words has left me, I have still a chart, a tool, I have productivity items that I can work on. Sometimes just… fine tuning formulas is still working on it.

There’s this idea, maybe you’ve heard of ‘just do a little every day.’ Well, making it so there is a little you can do is really valuable, as part of that.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!