A warning to Pinterest users: Redbook may steal your ideas

(UPDATE, 1/1/13: According to Jen, Redbook is promising to make things right, and according to Michelle, I got some things wrong. UPDATE UPDATE: And Jen got something wrong, too! See updates at bottom.)

The first time I ever saw anything from Pinterest I had no idea what the site was about. It was a photo of cakes baked in mugs. Ohh, I see, it's a place where people creatively use mugs - pint mugs? - to...ummm...make cakes? Which I suppose made as much sense as it being a place for people to discuss the works of Harold Pinter, which I also considered a possibility.

Michelle Hryvnak Davies, co-administrator at NEPA Blogs and Queen of All Media, Social or Otherwise, tried to drag me into the world of Pinterest last year when she added a Pinterest component to the NEPA Blogs media empire. Which I still didn't understand; by this point I had determined that Pinterest was some sort of image posting site (though there were already, like, a billion of those at the time) merged with a social network, all of which for some reason appealed overwhelmingly to those of the female persuasion. It also now was coming across as some sort of creative-works outlet, which seemed like an odd fit for a blog about blogging in Northeastern Pennsylvania, but whatever. Even when Michelle and local blogger Karla Porter went on Blue Ridge Communication's ComputerWise TV to do a full hour-long program on Pinterest I still didn't understand - though it didn't help that I fell asleep early on and woke up right at the end. I was exhausted from work. (See updates below.)

So gradually I've worked out that Pinterest is an image posting and sharing site merged with a social network, designed to allow people to share and showcase their creativity and see the creativity of others. Unlike, say, Flickr or DeviantArt these aren't just photos or artistic creations; these are, for the most part, creative projects that can inspire others to their own projects, or even be recreated by other people. Like, say, cakes baked in mugs. It's not just that, so NEPA Blogs can post our blog headers and whatnot and still not be tossed off the site, but it's mostly creative works, being posted and "pinned" and "repinned." Sometimes with attribution, more often - like photos on Tumblr - without.

There are a lot of creative people out there. A lot of people who invest a lot of effort into their creativity. A lot of people who deserve credit for their creativity.

And there are some people out there who want to skim off the best ideas, repost them, and claim them as their own.

Redbook magazine has just done that to one of the biggest names in blogging.

Jen Yates is the blogger behind the wildly popular Cake Wrecks site and the author of two books based on that blog. She also has a spinoff blog, EPBOT, that provides an outlet for her non-cake-related stuff. On this site she also features some creative projects and tutorials, the sort of stuff that finds its way to her Pinterest site. As with her blog, her Pinterest posts tend to have broad general appeal and are enormously popular.

In a recent article, Redbook magazine copied some of the most popular Pinterest posts, created  artwork from the posted photos in an apparent attempt to avoid copyright issues, and presented them without attribution.

EPBOT: Shame On You, Redbook Magazine

Now, this is a dickish maneuver to begin with. But what makes it entirely douchey - perhaps unintentionally douchey, but douchey nonetheless - is the fact that the project of Jen's that Redbook stole and reprinted without attribution was one that was scheduled to be presented with attribution in an upcoming edition of Better Homes & Gardens Good Housekeeping.

You may get the sense that bloggers - especially successful bloggers - see themselves as New Media hotshots who look down upon the Old Media, especially the "dead trees" media of newspapers, books, and magazines.  But nothing could be further from the truth. Most bloggers I know consider it to be the height of success to get your work presented in published form, on paper. Newspaper and magazine articles are considered incredibly valuable for getting the word out about your blog to new audiences, audiences that might otherwise never hear about your blog. So having the opportunity to get her work featured and credited in Better Homes & Gardens Good Housekeeping was extremely important to Jen. Now that may not happen at all, since Redbook has effectively scooped the article by publishing the details of the project first. Will Better Homes & Gardens Good Housekeeping cancel the article? Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, Redbook claims that it is planning a response to the numerous messages it has received complaining about this situation. Do they plan to make this right? Or will they hunker down and claim that once an idea is published to the Internet it becomes public  domain?

Whatever happens, be warned: if you're posting the fruits of your creative efforts on a site like Pinterest, you might just be making it easier for someone else to come along, steal them, and claim them as their own.


UPDATES:

1. Jen has posted a response from Redbook that promises to make things right:

EPBOT: Redbook Makes It Right

Jen is satisfied with this response, so I guess we can put away the pitchforks and torches. For now.

2. Michelle pointed out that I have mashed together two episodes of ComputerWise TV from the past year: One which Michelle and Karla went on to promote the NEPA BlogCon, and one that featured Michelle by herself talking about Pinterest.

3. Jen misidentified Good Housekeeping, the magazine slated to feature her project, as Better Homes and Gardens in her original post. 

Zine Festival report

After my writing group broke up today a few of us decided to hike a few blocks across town to the Scranton Zine Festival before taking our traditional late lunch. I quickly met co-organizer Brian Fanelli and made my way around to local zinesters Rachel Goetzke of Word Fountain and the semi-anonymous author of Progression and Progression: Part Two (and the companion blog, bareing skine.) I also met Kenny Luck of the blog The Luck Report (which appears to be down as of this writing.)

Afterwards, as I enjoyed copious amounts of sushi and assorted other food at a buffet, I realized that I had forgotten to take any pictures! So I made a quick detour on my way home, got back to the Zine Festival minutes before everyone packed their stuff up, and grabbed a few quick photos.

The Scranton Zine Festival featured other things in addition to zines: used books, handcrafted bookmarks, arts and crafts, handmade buttons. It was really a celebration of artistic and creative expression. While the majority of zinesters in attendance were from out of the area - mainly Philadelphia, but there were a few from other places, including Canada - I was glad to see Northeastern Pennsylvania well-represented. And I walked away with a few zines to read, and at least one new blog to add to NEPA Blogs!

Scenes from the Arts On Fire Festival, Saturday, June 2 2012

As I left the house to go to the weekly gathering of the Northeastern Pennsylvania Writers' Collective, I realized I had forgotten to grab my camera, just in case we decided to head out to the Arts On Fire Festival in Scranton afterwards. "That's OK," I thought. "I can just use the camera in my phone!"

So. Sorry about the poor quality of these photos.

Some of the vendors and the crowd.

Professor Jared Jaffe of Keystone College and some of his RAKU ceramic creations. On the left are ladybug and chicken whistles, while on the right are "RAKU Rocket" teapots. I thought the blue one in the front row resembled one of Lovecraft's Elder Things, while the green one brought to mind a stirge!

One of the most popular exhibits was an interactive art booth. For a few dollars you could buy a hexagonal blank mold made of soft brick. You could then scratch a design into it with a nail, and then molten iron would be poured into the mold, creating a positive image of the negative you had created. On Sunday, all of the cast iron hexagonal tiles will be assembled together into a collective art project! 

Pouring the molten iron into the molds.

Some of the molds. The one on the right in the second row was made by NEPWC member Laurel.

Pouring molten iron into a larger and more complicated mold.

"Arts On Fire," literally: after the molten iron was poured, impurities continued to burn off the surface of the iron for several minutes. This image captures a small flame on the left edge of the rightmost mold.

Who needs Instagram when you have a low-resolution phone camera with a dirty lens and low-light conditions? This old-timey-looking scene was just across the street from the iron furnace.

The Arts On Fire Festival continues through tomorrow, June 3 2012, and will run from 11:00 - 5:00.

Pecha Kucha Scranton

Pecha Kucha. It's a simple idea with a distractingly ridiculous name: Twenty slides, twenty seconds each, no backsies. In that time, within those limits*, you do a presentation on...anything.

A few weeks ago I was invited to take part in Pecha Kucha Night Scranton on January 28, 2012. According to the event's Facebook page, it will take place from 7:30 to 9:30 PM at the Vintage Theater, located at 119 Penn Avenue in Scranton, PA.

My presentation - one of many to be done that night - has a remarkably pretentious title but focuses on a topic familiar to longtime readers of this blog: The stained glass windows of what used to be Our Lady of Czestochowa (St. Mary's) church in Nanticoke, Pennsylvania. More than that, I look at the closing of Catholic churches in Nanticoke - which was the driving force behind the Stained Glass Project in the first place - and the passing away of an old world that we have an opportunity, and perhaps an obligation, to preserve, even if just photographically. (OK, you twisted my arm. The presentation is called "Against the Dying of the Light.")

I'm a bit excited about this. It will be my first opportunity to display these photos before a live crowd, and the first chance to gauge reactions directly. It will also be my first attempt at threading a storyline through not only my stained glass images but also my Churches of Nanticoke images, and bringing it all home in a way that will connect with people. Maybe, based on the crowd reaction, I might decide to go further with this.

If you're interested, stop in at the Vintage Theater in Scranton on Saturday, January 28 starting at 7:30. If this event is well-received, perhaps this will be just the first of many Pecha Kucha nights locally!

Other posts about this event:
The Vintage Theater
NEPA Blogs
Brent Pennington


*So this has me wondering about limits. What if someone includes the same slide twice in a row, creating eighteen 20-second slides and one 40-second slide? What if they took this further? What if they took this all the way, and displayed twenty identical slides, effectively displaying one slide for 400 seconds?

Be back soon

I haven't really felt like blogging much these past few days.  There are really much more important things I should be doing that I haven't been doing.  But in the aftermath of the Tucson shootings, I'm getting hit with a lesson I took away from this post by Bill:  You really don't want to know what other people are thinking.  Some people, anyway.  It's more disturbing than you could imagine to discover there are psychopaths and sociopaths lurking - well, not everywhere, but in enough places to make the world an uncomfortable place.

(As Jon Stewart pointed out, the life stories of the six mostly-random people who were killed in this past weekend's shooting are enough to make you realize that any random person may in fact have a truly amazing life story, and there's a greater likelihood that any given person falls into this category than into the "crazy" category.  But the crazies can definitely out-shout the amazings.  And out-shoot, too.)

I'm thinking a lot about the basic question "What is a blog?"  Someone set out to answer this back in 2003 for an actual scholarly reference work, and this is the definition she came up with.  Compare this definition to the sites listed on Regator's Top 50 Blogs of 2010.  How many of them fall within the definition from 2003?  Can an argument be made that some of these are not, in fact, "blogs?"  What is the definition of a blog in 2011, and how has it changed since 2003?

But enough of that nonsense.  That's all for another time.  I've been playing around with a...thing on Facebook, something I did once before.  It's a way of generating imaginary album covers.  The rules:

1 - Go to wikipedia and hit random. The first random wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.


2 - Go to quotationspage.com and hit random. The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.


3 - Go to flickr and click on “explore the last seven days”. Third picture no matter what it is, will be your album cover.


4 - Use photoshop or similar (picnik.com is a free online photo editor) to put it all together.

5 - Post it with this text in the "caption"

Here are the album covers I've come up with tonight:

38541 Rustichelli was a techno-trance outfit consisting of a single member who kept his identity a closely guarded secret.  His exclusive underground performances usually consisted of banks of keyboards and sequencers playing by themselves onstage while the anonymous artist mingled with the gathered crowd.  Tragically, he was often the only person in attendance, and his career ended after a single album which, while completely digital in composition, was released only on vinyl.

Trying to tap into a Japanpop groove, Matthew's Best Hit TV was eventually revealed to be a quintet of North Korean spies seeking secrets of nuclear weapons manufacture.  Their efforts at espionage were slightly less successful than the sales of their lone album, a collection of somewhat sweet ballads and, inexplicably, sea chanteys.

George Maniakes was one of the more successful Greek lounge singers to prowl the clubs of San Francisco in the late 1960's and early 1970's.  Like "No Guarantee of Maturity," most of his songs seemed to be directed towards pre-pubescent girls in an other-than-avuncular manner.  He eventually vanished from public view after a  scandal involving currency speculation and the importation of exotic fruit.

The Shift Key was an early alternative band whose songs were relegated to college stations until well after alternative had gone mainstream and was considered passe.  "A Year and a Half," their seventh album, was considered their most upbeat work, despite controversial cover art apparently parodying the suicide of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain.  Following their breakup in 1998, the members all independently went on to form competing "new folk" bands, who now tour county fairs and jamborees and enjoy far more success that they ever experienced in their earlier incarnation.

NOTE: The original images, taken from Flickr totally without permission:

"Very Little on Office Supplies" :  Pericolose curiosità (parte 3) From Fabio Luffarelli
"Health Like a Waterman" :  "Look At All The Lonely People" by CantBuyMeLove
"No Guarantee of Maturity" : "1/52" by rockie nolan
"A Year and a Half" : "Humpty Dumpty *Explored*" by Nelson Oliver

Writing exercises

Still can't get back into blogging just yet. The thing with Gretchen, and the fact that I'm on night four of a six-, or seven-, or even eight-night string of work, and I'm just not up to it. Then factor in that I've committed myself to writing a letter a day to a friend who will be offline for the next twenty-two days, and that I've decided that each day's letter will be in a slightly different format. Plus I still need to sleep for five hours each day.

How many different ways can you write a letter? So far I've done five things:

1. Printed text on card stock, with illustrations
2. Longhand on printer paper
3. Typed in WordPad and printed out
4. Notes written in a pocket-sized notebook during breaks at work
5. Home-made card with black-and-white illustration (by Tenniel, from Alice in Wonderland) and matching quote

Today I'm going to get fancy and turn the letter into a puzzle. I may eventually do a Jumble or a cryptogram. And once I get a new HP 17 toner cartridge for my DeskJet 842c printer, I may make cards out of some of my paintings. Maybe even use one of the postcards I bought from Whim's store!

I fear I will run out of ideas before I run out of days. Any suggestions?

Out of sorts

Eh. I'm in a mood. It will pass.

Maybe it's related to the retirement party last night. So many Physics and Electronics Engineering alumni in one place. I can't say for certain that every one of them is more successful than I am, or was more successful at my age than I am, but I'm seriously questioning what I can do to get myself out of the pit I'm in. Right now I'm thinking that the best most of us can hope for is to stand our ground until things pass. But when the stock market crashes that same day that the oil market makes it abundantly clear that it is not fluctuating according to simple laws of supply and demand, I'm not sure standing our ground will soon be an option for many of us.

I'm having car problems. Stupid car problems. My right rear tire is losing air. I had these tires installed at Sam's Club back in April. This is where I have had every set of tires on this car installed. A few weeks ago, after the problem was first brought to my attention, I reinflated the tire using my handy portable air compressor and took my car to one location to have them look at the tire and check it for leaks. They told me that the tire was losing air around the bead and that the problem appears to be with the rim itself, and showed me a large lump on the rim that looked like a welding mark. They reinflated the tire and reinstalled the wheel. The tire held air for two days after that, and then lost enough that I had to refill it again with my portable compressor. (These tires were installed in the beginning of April, and the problem first became apparent as of mid-May.) I took the car for a second opinion to another Sam's Club, the one where I had the tires installed, and they told me the same thing, but also applied some sealant along the bead where the leak was happening. That held for about two weeks. But today I had to reinflate the tire again. At some point I may have to bite the bullet and take another day off so I can get this dealt with. Since some 90% of the miles I put on this car are for commuting to and from work, all these expenses - repairs, maintenance, even gas - should be partly deductible on my taxes. Shouldn't they?

I wanted to do some planting today, but the weather was just so insanely hot. Then it was insanely stormy. Now it's just wet.

I gave blood today. Three weeks of getting extra Iron paid off, and my donation went off almost without a hitch, except for some confusion with the PalmPilots that are used to streamline the donation process. Someday I should look into the question of why my Iron has been low-ish for the past few years. As with many things, I'm worried I might not like the answer I get.

I opted out of the Belmont Stakes gathering today. But I heard that Big Brown, the horse who was not only favored to win the Belmont and, consequently, the Triple Crown, but also was as much out of the league of the other horses as Tiger Woods was out of the league of other golfers when he was playing at his peak, didn't simply fail to win, but actually came in last. If Big Brown's victory over Eight Belles in the Kentucky Derby could be viewed as an omen of Barack Obama's eventual triumph over Hillary Clinton in the race for the Democratic nomination, then the outcome of the Belmont Stakes is a very bad omen for Obama indeed.

On a positive note: My nephews were over and - I have to wipe a tear from my eye when I say this - have recently turned into Star Wars junkies. Having burned through all of the movies, today they contented themselves with the documentaries and featurettes on the Special Features disc from the Special Edition Trilogy boxed set, as well as some DK visual guides I've had tucked away for a few years. My younger nephew drew and colored a lightsaber on a legal pad my mom gave him as drawing paper. I then turned his drawing into a three-dimensional object with the help of a paper towel tube and some tape. (I even tapered the tip with some folds and tape, so it comes to a point like the lightsabers in Revenge of the Sith.) He then drew a Boba Fett-style jetpack for himself. I designed an alternate jetpack for him out of three sheets of scrap paper: two rolled up loosely and taped to form two 8.5" cylinders, and one rolled up more tightly and taped to form an 11" cylinder. I then lashed the three cylinders together with tape, and affixed the assembly to his back with two more pieces of tape, and then he was all ready to hunt for bounties until the day that some blind guy with a stick accidentally launches him into a Sarlacc Pit.

Major house progress

Today after work I installed some Magnetic Poetry on my refrigerator.

I was going to buy some for my new house when I was looking at the boxes of it I've had at work for many years. I turned one of the boxes over and looked at the price tag: $18.95. So I decided to leave what I have on our work refrigerator in place, and take the rest home. (I can always swap out words for variety.) Note: the best way to get Magnetic Poetry is to buy the Magnetic Poetry calendar the day after Christmas, when it will be half-price - it comes with a starter set. You can also make your own words using the Times New Roman font in the appropriate size (you'll have to work out the point size yourself*) and magnetic sheets or magnetic tape. (Be sure to leave plenty of space between words** and between lines***.)

You can also, I suppose, make Magnetic Ransom Notes by cutting words out of newspapers and magazines and attaching them to magnetic backing. Hmm...I wonder if that's patentable...

I have also purchased LED Christmas lights (will I even be moved in by then?) and the 2007 edition of the Old Farmer's Almanac. Still need to put up my Autumn / Halloween decorations - I'll do that this weekend.

* No, you don't. Times New Roman 20 point looks right, though some of my words from another set look slightly smaller.
**At least four spaces. Type up your text as normal, then do a global replacement of a single space with four spaces.
***1.5-spaced looks right. Double-spaced seems too far apart.

The return of Lisa's Amazing Grace

I blame Firefox.

Before I had Firefox I had no idea what RSS feeds were. With Firefox's Live Bookmarks feature, I can use the RSS feeds that come standard with many blogs to see when people have updated without having to open the blogs themselves.

Unfortunately I've been without Firefox and my Live Bookmarks for about two weeks, so the only way I know when people have updated now is to actually check for myself. Which I haven't been doing as often as I should.

Lisa at Amazing Grace has been posting again for more than a week after a nine-month hiatus, and I didn't notice until last night. Dammit! This is in spite of the fact that she and I discussed Sitemeters last week. I must be getting slow.

So stop by, catch up, and see how things are going with my favorite quilter / CPS caseworker!

The work gifts of 2005

Our Christmas party at work has come and gone, so now I can reveal the gifts that have occupied so much of my life these past few months: boxes!


I have tried to group the boxes in these photos by theme.

Top row: the Treasure Chests. These are smaller versions of the box I made for my nephew for Halloween. I gave them to the two people in our group who are most active in anti-piracy efforts. These are the only two boxes in the group that are essentially duplicates. Finish is a dark stain rubbed lightly over a light stain and spattered with black in an irregular pattern. Bands are black, interior is light stain.

Middle row:
The Simple Box. It started out life some other color - green, I think - but then got a coat of a yellowish-brown shade called "camel" and a coating of crackle finish. It also picked up some accidental white spatter somewhere along the way. The interior is unfinished, and remarkably the inside lip is free of drips. I kept wanting to do something else to it but couldn't bring myself to it - it seemed perfect as it was.

The Steamer Trunk: Darkish red and crackle finish on the outside, daubed with antiquing stain to give the look of old red leather. Interior is camel. Designed for a world traveler in our group.

TheWhite Crackle Box. This one made the best use of the crackle finish kit I bought. A cream-white layer over a crackle undercoat over a darker shade of brown, rubbed over with antiquing stain.
I nearly ruined this finish when I handled the box while wearing gloves that had residue of the dark stain I used on the Treasure Chests. I had to do some touching-up which is apparent as the thicker white on the left side of the front panel.

Bottom row: The Solids. Solid Black, Purple (which looks blue in this photo) and dark Blue, covered in a high-gloss varnish. The purple and blue actually consisted of multiple thin layers of different shades, dark over light, creating a slightly translucent effect.

Then there are the Applique Boxes:
Top row: The Vine Box and the Flower Box. Both are crackle-finish, white over green in the case of the Vine Box, and white over blue for the Flower Box. The Vine Box appliques are actually split over the opening of the box, and wrap around the back and sides. The Flower Box has a single applique on the front - anything more seemed like too much. Both were then daubed with antiquing stain.

Middle row: The Butterfly Box, the Blueberry Box, and the Snoopy Box. I go into more detail on the Butterfly Box below. The Blueberry Box was an exercise in simplicity: a blue lid and a cream-white bottom, appliques of blueberries on the front and back, wrapping around the sides. The Snoopy Box was red and white in the mistaken belief that only the roof of Snoopy's doghouse is red; turns out the whole thing is. The Snoopy decorations are stickers, not appliques, and are coated with several layers of gloss varnish.

Bottom row: The Pansy Box, the Rose Box, and the Grapevine Box. More cracklework and appliques. The Rose Box is very complicated, with gold trim and multiple shades of white and pink. The rose on the lid was my first applique. The grapevine applique was a pain to get to wrap around.

Here's another view of some of these boxes, showing the backs or insides. Note that there are butterflies and Snoopies within the top two boxes.

I was especially pleased with the butterfly box, which was inspired by this blog entry and was made specifically for its author.
The background sky is several shades of blue, from dark sky blue on the inside of the lid to nearly white at the base - this reproduces the actual shading of the sky. The blades of grass are three or four different shades of green. The sky-and-grass idea actually came from an idea for a chair for my nephews: the "Sky Chair" would create the illusion of sitting on the blue sky with the chair's legs nestled in green grass. The grass and sky, and the butterflies, are also contained within the box.

Finally there are the boxes I call "The Specials". Each of these boxes contains a surprise:
Top row: The Jadestone Box. More on this below.

Bottom row, left and right: the Jewelry Boxes. Cracklework in pale shades with glued-on plastic jewels.

Bottom middle: the Watermelon Box. A light green crackle-finished over a darker green. The resemblance to watermelon skin dictated the inside finish.

The Jewelry Boxes and the Watermelon Box opened to show inside detail. The rim of the Watermelon Box is a pale whitish-yellow that resembles actual watermelon rind. Note the white seeds. The Jewelry Boxes have more plastic gems and glued-in mirrors.

Finally the Jadestone Box in detail. The finish consisted of a base of dark green, washed over with a thin layer of lighter green, washed over with a thin layer of even lighter green...the end result is a milky, translucent shade of green that is different from any of the paints I own. The marbling was applied with a feather (using the techniques I learned while making the Box of Souls) and with a very fine paintbrush, using camel, several shades of white, and several shades of green. I then overpainted some of the marbing with another sort of paint that makes the Jadestone Box very special:
It's the only box out of the twenty that glows in the dark!

So there it is. There's the thing that's been occupying so much of my free time. It was an education, it was therapy, it was a lot of work, and it was a lot of fun. And someday, maybe someone will pick up one of these boxes and say, "What the hell is this?", and one of my friends will respond, "It's a box. Let me tell you about the guy who made it..."

For entries on previous years' work gifts, go here.

Almost Christmas

One more day of work and I'll be off until the third day of next year. Yeehaw.

I may not make it. My gift project is done - I took the wrapped gifts in today; twenty of them didn't even fill a banker's box, and all together they weighed only a few pounds. I just got done making a dessert for our party tomorrow, and I also bought the ingredients for more cookies, because somebody keeps eating the ones I already made. (Well, dammit, they're so good, I can't help myself.)

But several of our clients have decided to pull some typical holiday stunts. Several assets that were due last week for projects that were due this week are now scheduled to come in tomorrow. Well, tomorrow we shut down halfway through the day, have a party, and leave early, and half of us won't be back until next year - maybe. Other clients are trying to set up critical meetings for next week, when most of the people they want to talk to will be out of the office. And then, of course, there's the new client who just materialized. We have to establish all of his customer requirements with him, even though he is essentially serving as a broker for a company in the UK and needs to consult with them about everything. Oh, and he operates out of New York City, which means that during the ongoing transit strike he is spending several hours each morning walking in to work in subfreezing temperatures. By the time he gets in, his UK clients have retired to their pubs to enjoy blood sausages and warm beer while watching a spot of cricket on the telly, and he has to begin the slow international overnight e-mail ballet. Oh, and his project is due immediately.

When I leave work tomorrow I am supposed to turn all this off. It will become Somebody Else's Problem, and much of it will probably be waiting for me, essentialy unchanged, when I get back next year. I need to start thinking about another vacation, and soon.

Death and The Pirate

And like that, it was over.

My nephews were only able to stay for a few minutes. Death quickly dumped the contents of the Box of Souls - glass and plastic gems as well as candy and money - into his black pumpkin candy container, and then asked if the box was for him, too. The Pirate was happy with the chocolate coins and faceted gems and the string of fake pearls and toy telescope in his Treasure Chest. And I think both boxes accessorize well with their costumes.

One note: for some reason my sister-in-law decided not to use any part of the pirate costume I had assembled, with the exception of an eyepatch my mom had bought. (My brother's family just moved at the beginning of September and were too wrapped up with details of the move to worry about things like Halloween, which is why I volunteered to help my nephews get ready.) Here is a photo taken five weeks ago of my younger nephew with the original pirate hat and sword.

Box of Souls is complete

The Box of Souls got its final coat of gloss varnish Wednesday night. By Thursday night it was ready to be loaded up with the Gems of Deeds.
(These are basically the same assortment of glass and plastic gems that fill the Treasure Chest, with the addition of some black, white, and smoky-clear flattened marbles.)
So now I just have to add some candy and maybe a little cashola, and I will be ready to face Death and The Pirate this weekend...and reveal to them the secrets I have been keeping these past few weeks!

Box of Souls marbleizing, Stage 2

As planned, I applied another layer of sponged-on marbling to the Box of Souls to cover up the excessive gray from yesterday's application.
I let this coat dry for a little over an hour and then decided to apply the veining. I had a little difficulty at first, but after a few strokes with a loaded feather I was very happy with the results.
I even applied the veining to the inside - this is a box, and it is meant to be opened.
So now I will let this dry overnight and apply another coat of spray-on gloss acrylic sealer. After that there will be a final coat of high-gloss varnish, and then I'll declare it done!

Box of Souls marbleizing, Stage 1

Having officially completed the Treasure Chest for my Pirate nephew, I am now turning my attention to Death's Box of Souls* to accessorize my other nephew's costume.

So far the Box of Souls has just received a layer of heavily pigmented black paint and a coat of gloss acrylic sealer. At that point it looked good enough to leave as-is, and I imagine that for future projects I will do something that is simply high-gloss black. But the plan was to apply a faux marble finish to this, and I am determined to follow through. Here's stage 1 of the marbleizing.
I am not 100% happy with this outcome: the paint was much thicker than I expected, and the gray dominates a lot more than I had hoped. Plus I committed the cardinal sin of overworking the piece, something I tried to compensate for by overdaubing with black. The whole thing will need to dry a day or so before I give it another coat of gloss acrylic sealer and then apply veining (and possibly additional black daubing.) After that I will spray on a final coat of acrylic sealer and then finally brush on a topcoat of high-gloss varnish, resulting in a total paint thickness of about 1/4". Hopefully the end result will not be complete crap. Stay tuned...

*So what in Hell's name is Death's Box of Souls? I have no idea. I'm just making it up, because I can't give a hand-finished box to one nephew and not the other. But as best I figure, Death (in Milton's sense of Death as a weird embodied side-effect of the fall of the rebellious angels) keeps his own private tally of the deeds of every soul, perhaps in, say, a big hourglass full of gems. Each gem represents a deed: white for goodness, black for evil, red for courage, green for generosity, yellow for cowardice, clear for purity of action, blue for...whatever. At the end of a person's allotted days the hourglass is shattered and the accumulated gems are poured off into a box, which Death carries with him when he goes to claim the soul. For souls that make it into Heaven, all of the gems turn to clear when the soul is admitted. But for souls that go elsewhere, the gems are tallied to determine the nature of the soul's fate. Hey, that sort of sounds consistent with Dante's Inferno too, doesn't it?

Treasure Chest and Pirate's Booty

The Treasure Chest is now complete.
The treasure contained within consists of various sorts of colored glass things from the arts & crafts stores, fake plastic coins, a fake string of pearls, fake faceted gemstones, a fake telescope from a Long John Silver's kid's meal, and some gold foil covered chocolate coins.
Yes, I realize that the gold coins have modern markings. I don't plan on worrying about that too much. Interesting fact: as long as this picture was called TreasureChest_Booty.jpg, Blogger would always fail at the last stage of the picture posting. Once I changed it to TreasureChest_Treasure.jpg, it went right through.

I completed my nephew's pirate costume today with a strip of black fabric that when wound around my nephew's shoulder, wrapped around his waist, and secured with a pin, will serve as a sash and sword belt. This will go over a white sweatshirt and random pants and shoes, all topped by a foam pirate hat, plastic eye patch and shiny chrome cutlass. (I have an emergency backup cutlass, a less shiny but less fragile one just in case the main one breaks before the holiday.)

Project update

Just got back from a birthday party in New Jersey. The colors of the leaves have intensified along Route 115 since our trip last Sunday, but since I was driving I wasn't able to get any photos. The two rest stops along Route 80 where I pulled over specifically to get photos of trees did not have any trees whose leaves were showing much color.

The crackle finish did not work out on the Treasure Chest. Maybe I applied it wrong. Maybe I didn't apply enough basecoat. Maybe it isn't designed to work over the stain that I used on the wood. In any event, I know that there's no project that, with sufficient effort, you can't turn to crap. If I try again with the crackle finish I may wind up with horrible results - may as well save it for a Christmas project I've got planned. I think maybe I'll give the Treasure Chest a coat of satin-finish varnish, apply a foam base and foam liner, and call it good.
Note the sloppiness in the black bands. Not much I can do about it now. It actually looks much worse in this photo.

Another bit of sloppiness worked out for me. I got some of the wood stain onto the closing hasp, and now it has an antiqued appearance.
Note the black spatter on the wood. That was intentional. I should have used a toothbrush and my thumb, but I got lazy and used a short-bristled brush and my forefinger. Still, it looks good, and will look better under varnish.

The Box of Souls worries me. I could easily mess it up at the marbleizing stage. I suppose I can always cover up any disasters with black paint and a layer of gloss varnish and it will look fine. We'll find out soon.

Painting under the influence

When you've just had two 12-ounce mugs of wine and the thought occurs to you that this would be the perfect time to lay down the base coat on that box-finishing project that you're planning as a sort of Halloween present for your nephews, should you listen?

One nephew is going as a pirate - he's getting an antiqued treasure chest full of diamonds, rubies, sapphires, and coins (clear, red, and blue flat marbles from the arts & crafts stire, and some pirate loot from the dollar store.) And the other nephew, who is going as a blank-faced version of Death, will get an onyx-finished box with capitals on the sides, filled with red, white, and black Soul Gems. (Guess where those came from.)

Heeeeere we go....

UPDATE (11:48 PM): Progress report:

Stage 1
The unfinished boxes, and the kits that will be used for finishing them. The Hot Wheels Skulls and Pumpkins are in attendance, as well as the Best Damned Fruitcake in the World. I'm buying it now because it sold out in time for Christmas last year. I actually bought a 3-pound pack a few weeks ago, but we've already eaten two of the 1-lb. fruitcakes. Note the third 12-ounce mug of wine on the right.

Stage 2
Treasure Chest is finished with a lovely light stain - I'm tempted to leave it like this. The Box of Souls (what the hell kind of box would Death walk around with, anyway? - sheesh, me and my damned egalitarian instincts) in its first coat of thick black paint. More than six ounces of the wine are gone.

Now I juat have to wait 2 hours for the first coat to dry, and I've finidhed my box of wine. Which means I'm probably going to bed. Even the Cartman marathon on Comedy Central won't keep me up. Maybe if Sammie is online I'll have a drunken chat with her...

UPDATE 2 (9:51 AM, 10/15/2005): Woke up bright and early after about six hours of sleep. Last night I sloppily painted black bands in the grooves on the Treasure Chest - I've never been very good with straight lines. This morning I touched up some spots on the inner rim of the Box of Souls and applied the second, darker stain to the outside of the Treasure Chest, leaving the inside a more golden color.

Stages 3 and 4:

Now the Box of Souls needs at least 24 hours to dry, and the Treasure Chest needs at least 2. Maybe I'll clean up my workspace (a.k.a. the kitchen table, and in fact the entire kitchen) and read up on how the crackle finish for the Treasure Chest will work.

The ornaments of 2003

We have a tradition of exchanging presents within my group at work. In the past my offerings have ranged from homemade chocolate chip cookies for everyone to different gifts that all cost exactly $3.99 (and these ranged from motorized toy cars and light-up yo-yos to a giant fish pillow.) But last year I decided to do something a little more personal.

Lee Valley sells an unfinished wooden ornament ball that offers semi-endless possibilities for customization. These are fairly small - about 1 and 5/8" - so painting designs on each one is a bit of a challenge, but one I decided to take on.

Miniature art has always fascinated me, and I decided to see what I could do. I made over two dozen individual ornaments in a little more than three weeks. I would usually work on three at a time, each one carefully held in a housing made by turning one of those little doll-sized tables that is placed in the center of a pizza to keep the lid from collapsing on it upside down. (I always wondered why I was saving those things.)

I have very bad eyes. I am terribly nearsighted, and without my glasses or contact lenses I am almost blind beyond about six inches, but (until recently) I have (had) excellent vision within those six inches. (In the past year the farsightedness that usually accompanies advancing age has started to kick in, and I cannot focus within three inches of the surface of my eye.) So for four to six hours at a time I would sit hunched over my ornaments, my bare eyes just a few inches from the surface, carefully painting one of several designs that I gradually standardized over the course of my project.

I striped a couple like peppermint candies, coating them when dry with a high-gloss varnish that gave them the look of glass ornaments. On some I painted a miniature landscape, dark blue sky over snow-covered hills with trees and falling snow, in an oval image that created the illusion of concavity, almost as though the ornament were a snow globe with the image inside. One was turned into a dreidel with the help of a friend's woodworking shop and some online dreidel lettering.

Others I called Escher spheres, after the famous self-portrait by M.C. Escher made from the image in a mirror ball that he was holding. These Escher spheres were completely white at the bottom to just below the midline of the ornament; from there on up they were dark blue again. On them I painted snow-covered trees and a starry sky. The idea was that these were like little mirrored ornaments being viewed from deep within a snow-covered forest on a clear night by an invisible observer.

Two designs I was very pleased with are shown below. The first is a wreath, made from two shades of green paint brushed in semi-straight lines along a path that was always turning clockwise. Red berries were then dotted on - possibly with the point of a pin, I don't completely remember. The wreath itself is about 3/4" across. (Note my thumb and forefinger for scale, but keep in mind that they are about 3/4" farther away than the center of the ornament. This is poor man's digital photography: I am holding the ornament by its hanger on the bed of my scanner.)


Ornament 2003: Wreath

Another nice design is the snowman. This is not one of the better snowmen; all of those were given away. The "coal" was again (probably) applied with a pin. (It might have been a toothpick.) I had to buy a two-ounce container of orange paint just for the snowmen's carrot noses. The blue background circle is a little over 1" in diameter.


Ornament 2003: Snowman


The white snowy-looking stuff is special snow paste that comes in a small jar at the craft store and looks like marshmallow paste. It dries with a beautiful texture and is quite hard. The sparkly effects are from some other craft stuff that came in a kit with a small jar of snow paste and some Christmas-oriented paints.

Both of these designs are from a single ornament, which also had a crappy-looking third design of a snowflake on it. All of the ornaments had at least two designs on them. You could see how all this took a bit of time. After each four-to-six-hour session I was unable to focus my eyes for at least an hour; each eye was independently focusing on some nearby focal plane, and this had the effect of making me feel like I was wearing somebody else's glasses.

The best ones I gave away to my friends at work, packing them in too-small pasteboard boxes wrapped in ribbon with handmade tags tied on with pieces of gold elastic.

People liked them, I think. I don't know how many of them realized how much work went into them. Just over a month later, one-third of the people I gave them to would be gone, but that is a story for another time

This year I've decided to do something less creative and personal, but still fun. In terms of dollar value this year's presents are much more costly, but in terms of time and physical effort the cost is much less. I hope people like them. But since some of the people I work with visit this site from time to time, I won't say what this year's present is just yet. Not until after our department's Christmas party!