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Leaves

Winter’s late, this has a silver lining in that we have extra time to wrap up the previous season. It’s a lot of work going from Fall to Winter. I finished building both additions, roofing took far longer than expected, it was really 3 small roofs with many angles, and I used the nice weather to go through a backlog of fascia & soffit detail work. The angles on the bay window were very hard to make work. I didn’t do a great job at making things look perfect, but I know they’re solid and weather tight so I don’t feel too bad.

I love being up there

Nicole dug up the potatoes, the onions, a little more of everything every year. Garlic was planted, all routine like construction now.

No apples this year either, the wild trees seem to produce a decent crop only every other year. I scored several dump trailer loads of horse manure from the horse property next door. They don’t want it and I help them with backhoe projects in exchange, total win-win. With the mountain of wood chips we got last Winter, we’re feeling wealthy with resources. We go fetch leaves from the forest to add green matter to the manure.

Esther’s surprisingly efficient bunny hop technique

It all gets added and mixed into the manure, along with some ash, and some chips why not?

Robin’s building another treehouse, they get a little better every time. I let him use screws for this one. I hope I’ll have time enough to build a real nice one with him before he looses that little boy energy. I unfortunately cannot do all the things I want to do.

All routine, all perfect, may they never grow up, and may we never grow old.

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Poya & Découpage

I was introduced to the art form of Découpage. It’s simply one where cuts are made in paper or other mediums to represent a scene. A niche of this art form is the “Poya” representing alpine life, often depicting transhumance. I had this on my radar for a while as I figured it would make for some good plotting material and it does that to a decent extent.

The more interesting part however, is the artform’s unique property of always having material connected. Which means it’s perfect for laser cutting, and for playing with shadows.

In its rightful place

I unfortunately didn’t take good pictures of my trials, I attempted to fill the gaps in epoxy which was a disaster. There is definitely more to explore, and I will further delve into it in due time.

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Majestic Cats

This is the culmination of my collaboration with Lara Laubert. It turns out that Majestic Cat was only a preliminary test for this piece.

Each of Lara’s pen stroke was processed to be outlined and hatched so they would have enough visual weight on such a large scale. The basic “traveling salesman” algorithm I implemented doesn’t discriminate between outlines and hatches, so parts of the drawing look nonsensical until they all come together at the end.

I occasionally would stay near to machine to watch people’s reaction and had a few chats with them too. It’s a real pleasure to see how well received it was. When I took it down 3 students were curious about what I was going to do with the drawing so I offered it to them. It completely made their day and I couldn’t think of a better thing to happen for this drawing.

As always there were several trials and refinements before the public render.