Category: Other Projects

I got a screenprinting kit for Christmas (thanks, Mom!), and tried it out by making t-shirts for Sean's birthday party. I got some clearance t-shirts at Wally's for only a couple of bucks apiece, and made some Mario-themed shirts for the kids' goodie-boxes. I forgot to take a picture of a finished shirt, but I'll do that soon. Here are a few pictures of the screen itself, that I used to print the shirts.

On Sunday, I finished Carter's blanket. Just like Sean's, it is made from all of her old t-shirts. It came out good enough, I suppose, but not as good as Sean's. In order to make her's large enough to cover her (infant t-shirts are pretty small, even though I had a decent-sized pile), I had to use pieces of a polka-dotted purple sheet as 'filler' between the t-shirt tiles. But trying to sew jersey material to a cotton sheet was a huge pain the rumpus. All-in-all, though, I'm sure Carter loves it - and that's all that really matters.

Carter and I were out at Michael's (the store) last weekend, when I came across some of these wooden-bone dinosaur kits. Does anybody else remember doing these as a kid? A grabbed a stack to do with Sean - ther were about a dollar apiece, and I can't resist a deal like that. We made the Triceratops Sunday night, and had a blast. A brief aside about this picture, though: I think it's hilarious that when I asked him to smile for me, he technically did - but his eyes are still fixed on the computer screen. Heh.

A week or so ago, we carved a pair of Jack-o-Lanterns for the porch. The kids favorite part was pulling out all of the pumpkin guts. They don't often get a chance to get super-messy on purpose, so they really got a kick out of it. Lori and I helped them with some of the actual carving - although we let them do a lot of it. It's rained a fair bit this week though, so they're starting to grow some mold inside. We might have to toss them on the compost heap and carve some new ones before Halloween.

		I saw an idea on the Make Magazine blog, where someone made a quilt out of old t-shirts. By a happy circumstance, I had just noticed three big bags of the kids old clothes that we were planning to give to Goodwill. What you see here is the blanket I made for Sean (Carter's is up next). He asks me to put it on him every night at bedtime, and we talk about the shirts that were used to make it, and what he remembers about them. When I had first finished it, Carter and I were laying under it on his bed and he read us a goodnight story, as you can see to the right.

This is the last of the things I found on those old backup CDs. When I took a roadtrip a few years ago, I took a Batman action figure along with me, figuring I could pose him in funny places, and put a "Batman's Roadtrip" section on my old website. I forgot to snag a picture of him in half the places I visited, but I did manage to get a few - as you can see below. In the first shot, Batman is expressing his ire at the rain that thwarted his planned hike. The second shot was taken at a lake in Arkansas whose name escapes me. The third shot is Batman just chilling at the hotel, and the final two shots were taken atop Mount Carrigain in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.

Yet another discovery made while digging through old backup CDs. This was a little project I had started, but it never really got off of the ground. The plan was to start a webcomic using these action figures. I was going to take photos of them, and then add in speech bubbles and Batman-style action messages and put it all on the web. The good guys you see below were going to be called "The Happy Head Horde". The guy with the red fists was called "Atomic Willy", the guy in the brown trenchcoat was "Handsome Dan", and the bird guy didn't have a name yet. The aliens you see in the last photo were going to be one of their adversaries. They didn't have a name yet, but they were going to be a boy-band from outer space, as you can tell from their juvenile posturing.

Another thing I found while digging through those backup CDs was this image. Back when I was working at CATSAT, a group of guys I worked with used to get together on weekends to launch model rockets. At one point, I took apart an old digital camera I had, and got a friend to help we work out a circuit for triggering the shutter automatically. I tried putting this camera in a rocket several times - I think I must have built a half-dozen rockets in the course of this experiment, and all of them crashed into the earth shortly after launch. But on one launch, I managed to get a single picture before the rocket's inevitable plunge to its dirt destiny. The resolution is low, but the pic is still pretty darn cool, isn't it?