#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!🍵

[getamovieon]

[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.

[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.]

[mysterious-headhunter]

(Let’s make a tree that I will draw.)

[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