Emmett Makes Stuff

I love to make things: I sew, tinker, cook, knit, crochet, and fix things. And I always love learning new handicrafts!

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Applet that generates an outline for crocheting a mathematically-accurate sphere.

I made a thing! Well, sort of ~ it’s not a physical object, it’s a webpage...applet...thing. But I’m really proud of it! I coded with JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and LaTeX. It’s still in beta but I’m setting it free for now!

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Rigged up a tripod to hold up the grow light for veggie sprouts at my friend’s house. Craft wood pieces, electrical tape, and twine.

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View the brochure in PDF.

A project I did in a Landscape Studies class, when I was first introduced to the MacLeish Field Station that Smith runs up in Whately, MA (or Conway, or Deerfield, depending on which map app you’re using).

I drew each of the lichens from photographs, then scanned the images and shrank them down. The brochure looks like a standard bifold, but unfolds completely to reveal the map and lichen specimens on the inside.

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My favorite laser-cutter project ever.

There’s a (permanent) installation of local geological specimens in the floor of Smith College’s MacLeish Field Station, where I intern. The rocks represent over a billion years, one quarter of the Earth’s history, and all came from within 100 miles of the field station. They’re arranged in the floor in an approximate timeline. I spoke with the geology professor who curated the installation and did some research to produce a sign and brochure for the exhibit, “Rock of Ages.”

I created the sign by tracing over photos of the specimens in Adobe, then exported .dwg files to assemble the rest of the sign in AutoCAD. It was then “printed” with a laser cutter on some salvaged pine shelving.

The brochure was my stubborn lasp gasp of doing design in MS Word instead of a real design program, but for all that I think it turned out fairly well. ;-) The interior of the brochure is a timeline with information about the individual specimens; the pages of the brochure give an overview of geology and list resources for the curious.

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We were at an animal shelter thrift store...Claire got my cat a sweater...we decided to do a sweater photo shoot...and then I decided to make a cheesy holiday card. Woops!

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Another book by my friend Dane! It’s getting printed right now, so I only have digital images, but we’re super excited about this one! Once again, I did the page design and layout and typesetting for the book.

Book of Solace is both an elegy and a guide to coping with grief and hard times. In Dane’s words, “A series of short poems and meditative readings about grief, fear, sickness and loss. Stuff to hold on to. No promises. Just a guide to getting through.”

You can pre-order the book here ~ it’ll be printed and in the mail within a week or so! Also check out the first book in the “series”, The Social Justice Warrior’s Guide to the High Holy Days, which I also designed (my post about it).

Image explanations and some minor design geekery below the break.

Keep reading

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Some photos of the physical book! =)

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Jewish Calendar!

tl;dr ~ I made a Hebrew calendar for the coming year 5777, wanna buy it?

Hey all!

I recently got really interested in the Jewish/Hebrew calendar. Like, REALLY INTERESTED. (It’s amazing! It’s a lunisolar calendar so the months are actually related to the moon phases but the years average out to the right length! It’s got 7 leap years every 19 years! And instead of a leap day the leap years have an entire leap month! SO BRILLIANT!!!!)

Anyhoo, after getting excited and reading lots of things about the Jewish calendar, I decided that I really wanted one for myself. But alas, the internet only offered me calendars organized by Gregorian (i.e. standard Western) months, which is not what I was looking for. After, admittedly, a rather cursory search, I said “Screw this!” and decided to make my own. (Logical conclusion, right?)

I wanted to include Gregorian dates, but to have those be secondary to the Hebrew dates. I included Jewish holidays as sourced from hebcal.com (bless their open-source hearts). I used Hebrew, transliterations, and English for all of the features. Some twenty-odd hours of labor later...

Above is a sample calendar page, and below is a zoom-in on a couple days. (Heads up: I decided to organize things right-to-left like the Hebrew language.)

After all that work, I decided “Why keep this to myself? Might as well see if anyone else is interested...” So it’s for sale!

$8 for printed, unbound (+$2 shipping if you don’t live in Northampton, MA)

$10 (+$2 shipping) for printed and bound

$5 for a PDF version (print versions include a PDF)

Full disclosure: this is kind of a beta run of this calendar, so it’s not perfect. I wasn’t able to find vowels for all the Hebrew (I included what I could find, but some holiday names are missing the vowels and other markings); and there’s no art, just the calendar pages and a simple cover. Next year’s will be much fancier! ;-)

(Btw, if you’re a Jewish artist and interested in making art for a 5778 calendar, let me know!)

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Another book by my friend Dane! It’s getting printed right now, so I only have digital images, but we’re super excited about this one! Once again, I did the page design and layout and typesetting for the book.

Book of Solace is both an elegy and a guide to coping with grief and hard times. In Dane’s words, “A series of short poems and meditative readings about grief, fear, sickness and loss. Stuff to hold on to. No promises. Just a guide to getting through.”

You can pre-order the book here ~ it’ll be printed and in the mail within a week or so! Also check out the first book in the “series”, The Social Justice Warrior’s Guide to the High Holy Days, which I also designed (my post about it).

Image explanations and some minor design geekery below the break.

The middle image shows a spread in InDesign ~ the books get simply staple-bound, and this makes the middle pages stick out. We’ll get them trimmed, but I wanted the outside margin to be clean throughout, so I moved the pages over veeery slightly, depending on where they were in the book, to accommodate the trim.

The bottom-left image is our copyright page! Dane and I are very excited about it, being all fancy and official and stuff. Bottom-left is a page showing an example of the citation format we used in the book, inspired by the citation format used in Maggie Nelson’s Argonaut.

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Rainbow cat ears I made for my headphones ~ I literally just started crocheting on my headphones and made it up as I went along, so woops! no documentation of this one. I don’t even know what yarn this is because it’s a scrap I got from a friend.

They’re a little droopy. I could wire them to make them more pointy, but I think they’re cute the way they are.

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Plot marker I painted for a friend’s community garden plot. Acrylic paint on mystery scrap wood.

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Bookshelf!

I’ve only been living in an apartment for a little over a year, but I very quickly overflowed my bookshelf. When I realized how expensive bookshelves are (why?!), I decided to make one myself instead of buying one.

The finished dimensions are about 4′x4′1″x10″.

This ended up being a much simpler project than I expected ~ I thought I was going to have to get some metal corner braces or a long strip of wood to put diagonally across the back, but I ended up deciding to give it a try with just screws holding it together and found that it didn’t need any additional support. (Probably helps that I have a wall on one side and a small shelf on the other, but it also stood alone very solidly.)

Details of materials/tools followed by more images below the break.

materials

two 6′ 2x10 boards, unknown wood, trimmed to 4′ (the 2nd and 4th shelves)

one 12′ 2x10 maple boards, cut into three ~4′ sections

four 4′ 1/2x2 pine strips

standard 2″ decking screws

tools

circular saw

electric screwdriver (Philips head & 1/8″ drillbit)

my dad acted as clamps/vise/etc. =)

Above, laying out the shelves and affixing the first vertical support. Below, a close-up of what each joint looked like (two slightly offset decking screws). Bottom, the completed bookshelf before it got loaded up.

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Sketch of my little wooden musical frog.

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I made this simple logo-thing as a sort of visual pun on Spoon Theory and being a spoonie—seems like some days all of our spoons just get lost to the wind, like dandelion fluff.

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“Catcher in the Pie”

My local library has an “Edible Books” competition every year, and this was the item that me and a friend brought. Credits to Rowan for the pun, the pie, and the baseball; I made the catcher’s mitt.

The mitt is made of ladyfingers dipped in watered-down molasses, with chocolate laces. I assembled it in a bowl with the vague idea that it would dry out and hold its shape...nope. I ended up basically having to reassemble it on top of the pie. Oh well. I’m pretty amazed/proud of how perfect the ladyfingers+molasses texture is! And molasses went well with the apple pie, too, so win.

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Things I make when the kids I’m watching are weirdly well-behaved...

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Zipper Replacement

A friend of mine got the zipper pull on his coat completely squished (something I didn’t even know could happen to zipper pulls), and the thing completely fell apart. Since apparently it’s impossible to buy just a new zipper pull and put that on, I offered to completely replace the zipper. This is the first time I’ve sewn a zipper, so it was a bit of an adventure!

I decided to take a bit of a shortcut and sew the new zipper to the inside of the jacket instead of embedding it in the seam as the existing zipper was. So I started by cutting off the old zipper, as close to the seam as possible.

I pinned the new zipper into place. Zippers, I’ve learned, come in increments of 2″, so I had to get a 30″ zipper to replace a 29″ zipper. So once I pinned the new zipper on (starting from the bottom, because the bottom zipper stop is the fancy important one), I cut the extra off the top.

I sewed a straight seam up on both sides ~ no need for a zipper foot, because this isn’t an invisible zipper and the fabric was rather bulky besides. (In fact, in a couple spots I had to manually crank the machine to get the needle to puncture the fabric!)

When I was a couple inches away from the top, I used a spare bit of the zipper tape to create a new zipper stop on each side. It’s not the neatest job, but it’s secure and it does the trick.

Tah-dah!

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Soft Snuggly Blanket

I finally finished my blanket! It got put on the back burner for the Bevo blanket, but here it is! I used some purple yarn that I had lying around to make a bit of a border for it.

yarn used: Bernat Soft Bouclé

hook used: 10mm

gauge: 10st/4″, 10rows/4″

stitches used: single crochet

finished size: 57″ x 64″

project on Ravelry

[two more photos below the break]