December Topic!

Welcome to December, everyone!

First of all, apologies to the four voters who were interested in reading what we had to say about the trades and manual labour. I know in my case I was just way too busy to write anything, but I can't speak for my fellow bloggers.

Anyway, the November poll closed with the following breakdown of votes:

• 0 votes: colours, siblings, high school graduation, monarchy, ancestry/genealogy
• 1 vote: travel, writing, coworkers
• 2 votes: chairs

So the topic for this month is chairs.

Contributors: You can interpret this topic any way you want, and you can write as many posts about it as you want (within reason, obviously, not like 200 posts over the course of the month, but I don't think any of us have that kind of time on our hands). When you write your post, make sure you tag it with the topic and your name/blog identifier, so that if any potential readers like you and hate the rest of us, they can find your posts easily.

Everyone: There is a poll for the January topic in the sidebar, and you can vote until the last day of this month. Whichever topic gets the most votes gets written about next month.

High school graduation, siblings, ancestry/genealogy, and monarchy all got kicked off of the poll this month. If you really want to see what we have to say about that, you'll have to suggest the topic again.

Comment on this post or the topic ideas post if there's anything you'd like to see added to the poll in December.

If you give an engineer a gingerbread cookie ...

I was at first a little surprised by the request for a piece on gingerbread houses. The leaves were still changing colours, and the air was warm with the residual heat of summer. Gingerbread and the Christmas season appeared so distant that the request seemed to be incongruous with the current weather conditions. Then two weeks ago came – Winter Wonderland! So, now I am in the right frame of mind to address the subject of gingerbreading.

I tend to get a little carried away with things, and gingerbread is no exception. My fascination with creating buildings in miniature from edibles began
at an early age. I remember a book my mother read one Christmas about a little girl in Germany who wanted a gingerbread ship she saw in a shop window fromSt. Nicholas (spoiler: she got it). This opened my mind to the idea that a gingerbread house needn’t be four walls and a roof, or even a house at all. My head would fill up with a dozen ideas each year I saw the gingerbread house displays at the Festival of Trees.

So far I have made Notre-Dame Cathedral, Cologne Cathedral, a Victorian Mansion, and now (in development) a carousel that will operate, God willing. To quantify how carried away I can get, it took one week to design the mansion, three full days baking 87 pieces, two full days decorating, and close to $70 in candy. For my next house, I will be downsizing I can assure you – as the War Amps say, never again.


Last year I wrote a set of instructions with a pattern for the Victorian Mansion gingerbread house as a donated item for a silent action. Follow this link to the instructions (http://miletus.deviantart.com/gallery/40537107#/d5ldg3a). This guide provides a wealth of information about gingerbread construction, including recipes for the most structurally sound gingerbread and royal icing, many tips and suggestions I have found in my experience, and of course building directions and patterns.


Since there is lots of good information in the instructions, I won’t be touching any of that in this post. Rather, since we are all engineers, I will be focusing on the design process and considerations when creating your own gingerbread design.

Using computer software can really help in planning out your design concept, modeling it, tweaking elements, and ultimately creating a pattern. I would however suggest starting with pencil and paper to sketch out a basic idea of what you want to make.

Sketches of layout/plan and the different faces/elevations of will help guide you in creating a digital version of your design. Once you have a decent idea of what you want, I recommend using a program like PowerPoint to draw out the plan and elevations of the design. It doesn’t matter what the dimensions are – you will be able to change and scale all that later. Just get all the lines down first.

Next you will want to make a separate PowerPoint file and change the page dimensions using the page setup to make the page very big (36” x 50” for example). This should give you enough space to play around and represent your pattern in real dimensions. In your first file, select all of the objects and group them into one object. With both files open, select this from the first file, copy it, and paste into the new one. Now you will scale the group to the size you actually want to build in gingerbread. The scale is determined by your preference, but is ultimately limited by the constraints of the area of the base you will construct upon and the largest size of baking sheet at your disposal (your largest pieces cannot be bigger than your baking sheet). Check the width, length, and height of the entire structure to see if it seems reasonable (take out a ruler to help you visualize).

Once you are happy with the size you have scaled your plans to, check the dimensions of your smallest pieces to ensure they are not unreasonably small. Generally, no piece should be narrower than an inch (the taper of any triangular pieces excepted). You can go narrower than this if the piece is relatively short and you watch the piece during baking like a hawk so that it does not burn. Small pieces should always be baked together on the same sheet so that they are all done about the same time. Working with small pieces can also be frustrating – they are hard to handle and are especially prone to breaking. If using such pieces, bake more (2-5) than you need in order to replace any pieces that will inevitably break. About 3/8” is the narrowest I have ever gotten away with.

Now it is time to represent your structure in the pieces that will make it up so that you have piece-cutting templates. Follow this link to my pattern (http://miletus.deviantart.com/gallery/40537107#/d5ko94k) . Using the dimensions of your plans, reproduce the shapes of the panels with autoshapes. This is most easily accomplished by tracing new autoshapes directly over the plans and them moving them to somewhere else on the page. This method can only be used directly for shapes where panel is in the plane of the page. For example, if you have a North, South, East, and West wall, these will be in the plane of the elevations you drew. But if you have a sloping roof, you will need to use the dimensions from the plan (overhead) as well as an elevation. To draw sloping pieces, draw all of the horizontal edges (those that do not slope) using the plan as a guide. Then, draw all of the sloping lines using the dimensions of elevations (side views) that illustrate this sloping roof. Alternatively, if you are fine with trigonometry, bust out that calculator and start working out angles. You need to keep in mind that baked pieces have about 1/4” thickness, and this needs to be accounted for where pieces meet (e.g. if a box is to be 5” x 4” in plan and 3” tall, the long sides can be 5” x 3” while the shorter sides should be 3-1/2” x 3”).

Since it can be difficult to mentally visualize the entire structure and all the pieces it will require, I recommend making a cardboard mockup for complex designs. If you made an error in the dimensions or missed a piece that is needed, this will become obvious when making such a model.

An alternative to drawing plans and elevations in PowerPoint and building a cardboard model is 3D modeling with something like the free software Google (Trimble) SketchUp (link to download Google SketchUp here). Using SketchUp, you can draw out flat pieces, extrude them by 1/4" to give them thickness, and move or rotate as needed. You will be able to get a very good feel for how your creation comes together. Any aspects of your design that you may have overlooked in the 2D world will become very apparent in the 3D model. This can save you the frustration of when half way through building you realize that you missed part of the roofline in your design. Follow this link to download of my 3D model (http://miletus.deviantart.com/gallery/40537107#/d5ko8mv).

Like drawing in PowerPoint or other drawing programs, dimensions in your 3D model are not important at the start. Once you are happy with the way your model looks, use the scaling feature to expand or reduce your model to suit the dimensions of your base (the upper threshold is that no piece can be larger than your largest baking sheet). As before, check the dimensions of your smallest pieces to ensure they are not unreasonably small. Now, take down the dimensions of the pieces and draw them out in PowerPoint. By left clicking on a line or autoshape and choosing the “Size and Position…” option, you can enter the exact dimensions of the piece.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter whether your dimensions are tidy (eg. 4-1/2”) or not (eg. 4.39864”). Since you will be making a pattern electronically and using this pattern directly on your gingerbread as a tracing/cutting template, dimensions are not important.

Depending on the structure, you may need to consider using internal supports to add stability to your design or support edges of certain roof elements. For instance, the cone roof of the tower of the mansion needed a few triangles of gingerbread inside to support the roof panels during construction. The tower walls themselves needed octagonal pieces at the top and bottom to keep the narrow pieces in the proper arrangement during construction. Such constructability and stability concerns are more readily apparent if you try to make a mockup model first.

Now that you have a pattern for all of the pieces drawn up in PowerPoint, group the objects for each piece. Open another PowerPoint file, this one with Letter sized slides. Copy and paste the templates from the large file into the smaller file, arranging them to fit on the Letter size pages (you can move and rotate them, but do not scale them). For any pieces that are larger than a single page 1) double check that this piece does not exceed the dimensions of your largest baking sheet, 2) put the template on two pages – you will be able to join the pieces with tape later. Put a text box with a unique number on each piece, and possibly with a short description and/or an arrow depicting the orientation (e.g. which direction is up). These markings will help you identify which pieces are what as well as tell you which side is the top and bottom of the template. Follow this link to my pattern (http://miletus.deviantart.com/gallery/40537107#/d5ko6pk).

Finally, print the Letter size PowerPoint file using an inkjet printer (Do not use a toner laser printer). After cutting out your templates, brush canola oil onto each piece until the paper is imbued and turns translucent. Wipe off the templates with a paper towel to remove the oil. Now the pieces are ready to be placed directly on the gingerbread and traced around with a knife (the oil prevents the paper from sticking to the gingerbread). If a toner printed pattern is used, the oil will end up dissolving the toner, either making a mess or causing the toner to disappear. Instead of using toner printed patterns directly, trace around the paper patterns onto wax paper and use the wax paper templates instead.



Armed with your design, now you need only build it. Follow the directions in the Victorian Mansion instructions I gave to fill in the gap between design and fruition.

If you are concerned about the intellectual property of your design, you probably shouldn't post it online for all to see. I'm not sure if this is an uncanny coincidence, or the sincerest form of flattery, but I noticed this photo below on the Saskatoon Festival of Trees site this year. Hmmm...



Unfortunately, I won't be entering a design with the Festival of Trees this year. I am much to busy with my art courses to attempt such a time consuming project before the end of November this year. However, I may be able to take a stab at the carousel over the holiday. Hopefully I have been able to encourage others to try their hands at making their very own gingerbread design. Happy building!

November Topic!

Happy All Saints' Day, everyone!

The October poll closed with the following breakdown of votes:

• 0 votes: siblings, high school graduation, monarchy, reunions, ancestry/genealogy, chairs
• 1 vote: -
• 2 votes: writing, colours
• 3 votes: travel
• 4 votes: manual labour/skilled trades

So the topic for this month is (in what I consider a somewhat hilarious last minute upset) manual labour/skilled trades. Obviously these aren't quite the same thing, but they are pretty closely linked.

Contributors: You can interpret this topic any way you want, and you can write as many posts about it as you want (within reason, obviously, not like 200 posts over the course of the month, but I don't think any of us have that kind of time on our hands). When you write your post, make sure you tag it with the topic and your name/blog identifier, so that if any potential readers like you and hate the rest of us, they can find your posts easily.

Everyone: There is a poll for the December topic in the sidebar, and you can vote until the last day of this month. Whichever topic gets the most votes gets written about next month.

"Reunions" got kicked off of the poll this month. If you really want to see what we have to say about that, you'll have to suggest the topic again.

Comment on this post or the topic ideas post if there's anything you'd like to see added to the poll in December.

101 Things in 1001 Days

Superfluous Backstory

Early in the summer of 2006 I went through what I'll call a bad breakup for simplicity's sake. The following month I lost a friend to cancer. I spent the summer in rough shape at a job that I hated, and suffice it to say that by the time school started again at the beginning of September I wasn't exactly ready for it.

I don't remember exactly when I found the Day Zero Project, but whenever that was, I was apparently ready to start climbing out of the pit I'd found myself in and start setting goals for a brighter time in my life. I dropped two classes to finish the university term in one piece, met a new boy, and made a list of 101 things that I wanted to have done by my 23rd birthday in September 2009.

The Project

The Day Zero Project website looked a lot different when I first found it. At the time there was an About page and a list of people's 101 Things in 1001 Days blogs.

That's all you really need, though. The project is exactly what it sounds like: you give yourself a list of 101 things to accomplish over the course of 1001 days. Why 1001 days? Well, it's longer than a year (it's 2.7406 years), so you have plenty of time to set up something like a trip overseas or to win NaNoWriMo. It's also shorter (hopefully) than some hypothetical "before I die" point in time that will allow you to put things off indefinitely. The idea being, as far as I'm concerned, that if you really want to do something, you can put the plan in motion within two and three quarter years, or at least be more mindful of accomplishing it at some later date when you're working your way through other goals.

The goals should be realistic but also stretching, so for example nothing like "skydive from the edge of space" but also nothing like "blink at least twice per day."

Tips!

Since I started my first list at the end of December 2006, I've worked my way through two of them and started on a third this June, which I'll wrap up in March 2015. Over the course of that time I've learned a bit about how to actually successfully accomplish what's on the list. Mostly I'll try to use examples of stuff that has been or currently is on one of my own lists. The following tips are in no particular order.

• Set definitive goals.
  This one is surprisingly easy to get wrong. A couple of my lists have included things like "#29 - Write a poem every week." or "#28 - Floss." While these are probably good things to aim for (I don't write poetry anymore), they're also really hard to track over the course of 2.75 years. It's way better to set goals that can be crossed off after under half a dozen actions or so. For example, I still have "#22 - Read at least five books dealing with Canadian history." but I've gotten rid of a lot of other stuff that isn't just one single discrete activity. There are still a few things that are a little too abstract, but I'm getting better at not doing this.
  
  
• Keep the list handy and visible.
  This one is also kind of tough. After a lot of trial and error (I don't even remember where I kept the first list, so obviously it wasn't anywhere prominent), I finally feel like I have a good system for keeping my list somewhere where I can see it. I've been using Toodledo to keep track of all my to do lists for the last few months and it's been extremely useful. All of my current 101 things are listed in Toodledo, and I also have an item to review my 101 in 1001 list that recurs every month. Plus, I set up a blog that only I can see where I keep track of the different items as I complete them.
  
  
• It's ok to change your mind.
  When I made my first list, I was still pretty close to/struggling with the faith I grew up in (Roman Catholicism, for anyone who wasn't previously aware). So I had a few things like "#35 - Go to confession." I always hated going to confession, so that was definitely a stretching goal for me. But the fact is that by the time I got to the end of those 1001 days I didn't really care to maintain that faith anymore. Similarly I finally gave up "#20 - Make a zine." because I figured out that if I really wanted to make one I would've done it already. In some ways this can kind of feel like failure, but I like to look at it as a sign of progress and change.
  

Final Thoughts
While the 101 Things in 1001 Days method/project has treated me fairly well over the years, I think that my current list is going to be my last, mainly because 101 things is a lot of things. Half the time I feel like I end up including things on my list just to fill it out rather than because they're things that I really do want to do.

At the same time, though, I feel like a set of mediumish-sized, mediumish-term goals is a really good thing to have. I may instead try a list of 71 Things in 71 Fortnights, or something like that. About the same length of time, but a smaller number of items. That way I'd still be pushing myself toward things that I want that are outside of my normal set of actions/behaviours/whatever, but I could be a bit choosier about what those things are.

If any of you try this out, let me know how you fare!

Writing Essays, or On the Power of the Shitty First Draft

Hi everyone! The topic I'm covering for this month's skill-share is essay writing. Since this is a pretty big topic to discuss in one post, I'm thinking more specifically I'll talk about getting to the actual writing part of the process.

Writing essays is hard. I'm sure that anyone who's tried writing essays has found themselves sitting in front of a blank document, cursor blinking accusingly as the minutes pass and YouTube gets more and more appealing. I still do this, and I've written a lot of essays in my time. (And watched a good number of depressingly procrastinatory YouTube videos).

So what helps make writing essays less stressful? Less intimidatingly, overwhelmingly blank page-y? Well, it turns out that NaNoWriMo has gotten something right in their concept of the "shitty first draft" - once you get *something* on the page, even if it's god-awful, you can then improve it. It's difficult to edit thin air into an assignment.

There's a lot of advice out there for writing essays, and countless writing guides will tell you that outlining helps in the writing process. This is certainly true for some people, but I know others who swear by simply sitting down to write whatever comes out of their brains, and then tackling that mass of roiling words, attempting to wrangle the glob into something intelligible. In this way, I think that it's useful for everyone to approach writing an essay as something that doesn't have to be perfect when you start.

Whether you're writing a detailed outline or starting from scratch, the first draft should be bad. I mean, if it's got some good ideas in it, that's fine. But your first draft isn't the place for using the backspace key excessively - you should be putting words on the page, not taking them off of it! Instead of searching for the perfect word, use the one that comes to mind first. Often, once you've tried to turn off the voice in your head questioning your choice, you'll find that the first word that comes to mind *is* the right one. And if it isn't, so what? You can go back and change it, but at least the basic concept will be there to work with.

So I offer this piece of advice: no matter how solidified your ideas are, when you start writing, do it as a  very tentative part of the process. Don't edit as you go, don't overthink it, and don't expect to be able to hand it in the next day (unless you're an insanely quick and skillful editor!).

I found that my essay writing skills were very much improved by the practice of writing for NaNoWriMo, even though the things I was writing for that novel had absolutely nothing to do with my schoolwork. The practice of putting down words - any words that could possibly work - to page helped immensely in shutting off the voice inside my head that criticized as I wrote.

Here's to the shitty first draft! The giver of a point from which to start, the shabby placeholder, and the reassuring piece of work to say "yes, I can get something done" when you're doubting your abilities and your deadline is rapidly approaching. Whether you outline like Tolkien, or fly by the seat of your writerly pants, expect your first draft to be just that - the first of several.

Cosplay 101 and why I love it.

I am by no means an expert when it comes to cosplay, but it is definitely one of my passions.  I have always been a fan of dressing up, and/or playing a character.  At the same time I consider myself a builder and/or a maker.  I am always building something, or thinking about how to build something.  I am also a pretty shy guy.  With such a combination cosplay is a great way for me to put my creative side to work, and to go outside of my comfort zone, all whilst having a good time!

Cosplay - The building and displaying of wearable art! ~ Dictionary of Me
Or from wikipedia - Cosplay (コスプレ kosupure?), short for "costume play",[1] is a type of performance art in which participants don costumes and accessories to represent a specific character or idea.

The thing I really love about cosplay is that it can be so many different things to so many people, and that it combines so many skills and passions.  Some people do it to play a character, others to show off something they made, and others to be goofy, or make a statement.  It can be a thrown together build, or something that someone worked on for months or even years.  I love it all.  (Except people who just buy costumes, or insert 'sexy' in front of any other word and make that their costume)  Cosplay is about art and creation, and I love seeing what people make, and how they make it.  Just like a home cooked meal, a homemade costume is always better.

I have only been into cosplay for the last few years... or have I?  Looking back on it, I have been dressing up my entire life.  My parents were awesome about costumes when I was growing up.  My mom would sew costumes for my brother and me; anything from cowboys, to start trek, even the headless horseman one year.  My dad always helped getting us outfitted with props too.  We still have a set of wooden swords and shields back at home, which he built so my brother and I could be knights.  So, I was blessed to grow up in an environment where building and wearing awesome costumes was the thing to do.

While it used to be that Halloween was the big dress-up event of the year, I am now a year round cosplayer.  It is one of my main hobbies, and takes up much of my free time.  It is a great hobby, as it combines so many of my other hobbies: drawing, designing, building, and painting are all things I like to do, that can all be part of making a great costume.

As I have gotten more and more into cosplay I have done a lot of research and development (including many unfinished projects).  I figure you can break all costumes down into roughly 3 groups: clothing, armour, and props.  Here is a brief summary of some of the materials and methods that are used, and what they are used for.  This is by no means a complete list.  Possibilities really are endless; I am constantly learning new and unique methods from people all over the world (yay internets).  

First up is clothing.  Almost every costume is going to have some sort of clothing article, and some are all fabric.  I have very rudimentary sewing skills, and as such I generally have to use existing clothes to make my costumes.  Thrift stores are often a good resource for finding cheap clothes.  You can also find lots of useful clothing pieces online, with prices from very affordable to very pricey.  If you can sew, it really opens up what you can do.  If you are sewing your own clothes, you can easily modify existing patterns, and add/remove necessary details.  Or maybe you know someone who can sew; work with them to create that fancy dress, or sharp looking uniform.

I have always had a passion for armour, and much of my costuming effort goes towards building armour.  There are so many ways to build armour, from actual real armour to completely fake armour (that looks real!).  There are numerous groups that still make real armour out of metal, leather, and wood.  Most costume armour is fake however.  There are many ways of building armour using cheaper and lighter materials than steel.  The three main categories that I see most often are thermo-forming plastic, pepakura, and scratchbuilding.

Thermo-forming plastic is basically using heat and often vacuum pressure to form various types of plastic into a desired shape.  In it’s simplest form, someone could use a heat gun (or even a hair dryer) to heat plastic and bend it into a desired shape.  Getting more complicated you could use (or build and then use) a vac-form table.  Such a device can heat a large sheet of plastic, and form it over a mould using a vacuum.  This is how people make storm trooper armour.   It is also how the movie makers made storm trooper armour, and it is a common manufacturing method for all sorts of products.  This method yields lightweight armour that can be easily duplicated.

Pepakura is the Japanese word for papercraft.  This method uses computer software (called Pepakura) to flatten 3D models into 2D shapes that can be printed out from any home printer.  The flat patterns can be cut out and assembled into a 3D object in the real world.  Paper armour is not going to be very strong, so a healthy coat of resin is added to the model.  Once the model is hardened with resin, filler materials like Bondo, can be added to the model.  The filler is used to help smooth out models and add details.  This method will yield a unique set of armour, and allows the builder to shape it to whatever level of detail they desire.  It is a popular method, as models for the armour are often readily available straight from video games, or from 3d designers on the web.  It is the closest thing to a Lego set for building armour; you get the instructions, and just have to build it.

Scratch-building is a pretty broad category.  When scratch-building, people can use almost any material to build armour.  You can sculpt a model from clay or foam and build a mould, then cast it.  You can cut up cardboard boxes and foam floor mats and piece it all together.  You can build a pepakura model, then use a vac-form table to make endless copies.  This method allows you to make exactly what you want, and it can be as simple, or as complicated as you like.

Props are just an extension of the costume, and will use the same methods.  Props can be anything from a giant sword, or fancy gun, to goggles, pouches, belts and tools.  They are the finishing pieces that can help define your character.  The things that can really make a costume are the details, and props are often those details.  Other details come out in the paint and trim work.  A flat paint job is pretty boring, but highlights, grime and battle damage give your costume an authentic look.

As I have learned more methods and techniques for building costumes, my projects have improved, and my ambitions have grown.  I started with costumes like Mal Reynolds from Firefly.  This was a completely found costume, where I simply bought everything I needed and pieced it together.  Then I went onto being Doctor Horrible.  Much of this costume was pieced together from items I bought as well, though I did modify the boots, and goggles to fit the costume.  Then I got really ambitious and built some armour from scratch.  The armour is a space marine scout from Warhammer 40K.  For this costume I built pretty much everything.  The coveralls I already owned, along with the boots and goggles.  But I built the armour, and weapon, and have added little bits to it over the years.  In other builds I have learned how to build moulds and cast objects.  Jeff and I made Steam Fleet badges for a group of us.  These badges were some of the little details that really made our costumes.  I have learned many new things whilst building costumes, and many of these skills are useful outside of costuming as well.  My costuming experiences have also taken me to cool places and events from the Calgary Comic Expo to DragonCon in Atlanta.

Cosplay is a great hobby for anyone, as it utilises so many other skill sets; there is something in it for everyone.  If anyone ever has questions about an ‘impossible’ costume, feel free to ask me about it, as I would love to help make it real!

Well this is really long, so I will limit the pictures.