I’m a big fan of Princess Jellyfish. It’s stuffed with features and themes near and dear to my heart: gender identity and ambiguity, discovering a world outside your nerd bubble, finding outlets for your passions through building things, how style and aesthetics are a language unto themselves, the clash of cultures between the nerdy and the stylish. It’s lovely stuff.
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A few months ago, something magical happened. Over the years, I have been building, bit by bit, a way to twist the world into a shape more to my liking. With little pokes here and there, I’ve managed to eek out a life that has me selling the things I build, make, design, and hack for a living. Sleek and Destroy is now the source of my entire income and I even have employees. This is absurd. I feel like the police should be on to me and haul me off for impersonating a successful adult who knows what they’re doing any second.
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The world of bargain basement product design is odd. You’ve got people cutting corners in new and innovative places. Sometimes it’s labeling surplus or flawed items as new stock. Sometimes it’s taking something that gets manufactured for one purpose, rebranding it, and bumping up the price. Sometimes it’s giving something the gloss and polish of an above-the-board piece of merchandise without all the inconvenience and expense of original/licensed art or celebrity endorsements.
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One of the deep and subtle magics of fabrication is how many ways you can get approximately the same result with different procedures. It’s a bit like cooking, where the choice of whether to bake or broil, pan fry or deep fry, can have a profound effect or make little difference at all depending on what goes in and the desired result. Having a laser on hand means I can fiddle with my methods and iterate a bunch of different solutions each with minor tweaks until I get the result I was searching for. Also, with the coming laser singularity (when lasers become more common than printers), more materials and toys are available for added lazing satisfaction.
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I’ve had an outrageous streak of luck, lately. Firstly, I got a lovely plug from BoingBong (via the additionally lovely Xeni Jardin) that introduced a whole slew of new people to my store. Secondly, an event I’ve been hosting over at my shop, Craft Night, has been drawing an incredible crowd of excellent makers. It’s starting to feel like I’ve got a genuine tribe here in the city. Thirdly, I’ve finally been able to experiment with a technology I’ve been talking about and sketching for years: soft robots.
My friend, the extraordinary jeweler, maker, and programmer Aaron Waychoff, introduced me to Jim Bredt. Jim is many things. He moonlights as the human spotlight at the Ignobel Awards. He’s a metal smithing, mold making, 3d printing, material scientist, MIT professor. He also won an award for being a major ball buster when he taught “Introduction to Solid State Chemistry”.
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Sleep No More is an incredible production: an immersive live performance staged on an expansive five story set inhabiting New York’s abandoned McKittrick Hotel [I have been informed that the bit about the set being built out of an abandoned hotel is just PR fluff… SNM actually takes place in a warehouse scratch built to look like an old hotel. The more you know]. I don’t need to sing its praises. Other folks have done so amply, effusively, and more successfully in other formats. Just Google it.
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I just uploaded this little mechanical kitty to Thingiverse, and I think you should make a version for yourself. After a few trials with some cheap 1/4″ plywood, I ended up splurging on pressboard made specifically for laser cutting. The first cat I cut from the cheap ply ended up burning so much it was hard to get something functional out at the end. I blame the adhesive used to laminate the sheets. I think I might try and source some thin ply made with a natural wood glue. In the meantime, Laserbits makes some excellent laser specific stuff.
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I have lots of updates to share. I recently got a laser, made a new series of Guy Fawkes bandanas in bright, beautiful color, and spoke at HOPE. Unfortunately I’m being pulled in a thousand different directions by projects, interesting potential new work, consulting gigs, and new adventures with Sleek and Destroy.
Stay tuned for those updates. In the meantime, take a look of this time lapse I took of a day packing orders, cutting new jewelry, and folding bandanas right after the fold.
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I really like candle making. Despite the mess, the cost of materials, the burns, and the constant fear of spilling hot wax over everything I hold dear, it’s completely worth it. If you remember, a long time ago I made a set of candles cast from impala horns. I’ve wanted to do more projects like this, especially as I ramp up to doing an absurd huge candle project based on much larger and more elaborate horns.
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