Author: Rachel

Altoids Tins Art Ideas

Apparently you can do almost anything with an Altoids tin. If you look on YouTube you can find EDC, Survival kits, 3D printed watercolor palette inserts (I need to try that!), “wallets”, pocket stoves (!), digital cameras, flashlights. Obviously some of those ideas take more work and parts than others. But the creativity is endless!

I found a workshop by Peg & Awl (I mention them a lot lately!) where they were making tiny pieces of art the size of vintage tins. I haven’t gone out to find any vintage tins, but I have a few tins around (once I eat all the mints!) so I am working on making small art in tins, that I can give as gifts. It fits nicely into my Steampunk and Maker kind of vibe.

Tiny Tins

I used to despair that all I like to draw is “little art”, but I guess there are lots of ways to use art that small for things anyway.

Some little mushrooms I painted, to go into the art tin.

A big (and much closer) art inspiration is Natto Soup (Becca Hillburn). You should check out her books, art, Discord, YouTube, Insta… she is prolific, cheerful, helpful, and always striving to make better and more accessible art. I am going out of my way to put some links in here because I don’t know why anyone would read a blog if it didn’t point them to interesting content.

So here are Five Specific Hopefully Interesting Links

2025 – New blogging?

I don’t know if I will post more blog entries in 2025, but I know these things:

  1. I am not a fan of this WordPress blog any longer
  2. I am glad I own this domain, and the others, but I’m sure not doing much with ’em.
  3. Do I need new hosting?
  4. Would it matter?

Anyway, I have been doing a lot of creative stuff lately! In 2024 I :

  • Grew some herbs
  • Learned to make ink/pigment/watercolor from natural berries and things
  • Learned to alter the ink/pigment/watercolor by changing the pH
  • Documented all my ink samples in a ring-bound card catalog
  • Learned to make paper
  • Bound a little book filled with homemade paper
  • Learned to carve erasers into rubber stamps.
A porcelain watercolor palette filled with red juice from a red cabbage
The same juice after altering the pH with soap, lemon juice, etc!
Sample cards showing all the inks I made from various plants!

I have been very inspired by a website called Peg & Awl. I wonder what other websites are there to inspire that I haven’t found yet? The internet is a big place, but sometimes it feels like all I do is check social media! And here is this blog post, not on social media, but in my little cul-de-sac of the web. Let’s enjoy the freedom we have to create the internet we want – while we still can.

New Ideas

Lately I have been working on:

  1. Making my own ink from wild plants and fruits and berries.
  2. Making my own paper from junk mail
  3. Working on binding my own journals.
  4. Learning Javascript.

I think I’d like to make a new blog, and stop using WordPress. Maybe I would post more if I did that.

The Do’s and Don’ts of Spaceship Repair

So there is this Very Exciting Book that just came out (August 16, 2022) by Richard Roberts called “A Spaceship Repair Girl Supposedly Named Rachel“. You’d better believe I already read it, and you can find my review on Amazon, mine is the really excited review under the name “Rachel”.

Since I am also supposedly named “Rachel” this book interested me. Ok also, I am actually pretty much “Rachel”. Loosely. It’s a long but true story that I can attest to. No really, I swear on the six eternal beating hearts of the ice worm that inhabits the mist between the far moons of Jupiter. Or I would, but I don’t swear.

ANYWAY: this is a boring Earth blog, so I’m going to tell you all the best repair tools I know of and here is a big list of links, like you used to see on blog pages in the late 90s. Eat that, Algorithm.
These may be Amazon links etc., but I don’t have an affiliate link program – buy them in your little local hardware store if you can, and just use these links to read more about the products and make sure I didn’t make them up.

Sugru: Sugru is amazing stuff; it’s like plastic? it’s like glue? But you mold it with your hands, and it sticks to anything and makes it permanent yet flexible. But it doesn’t last forever, so if you buy some you pretty much need to use it within six months. I think it will last longer than six months if you keep it in the fridge but don’t quote me on that. Actually if you quote me I will be delighted, but it might not be a true fact. Here is a link.

Apoxie Two-Part Resins/Clays: This stuff is SO STURDY that you can mold/repair outdoor all-weather yard ornaments or make actual ship repairs with it. I mean car repairs. SERIOUSLY it will repair a real car. Then of course buff and paint it if you want it to look pretty. Here is a link.

Evil Ted’s molds: These don’t repair anything. These make whatever you are making look Extra. They come in “Hero” and “Villain” and “Steampunk” and “Cyberpunk” what more do you want? You can use them with several brands of air dry clays, and so they are light for costumes/affixing to things that don’t bear much weight. Here is a link.

Garden Velcro: This is just a big spool of green Velcro that was created to tie up your tomatoes, so you have to hunt for it in a garden supply store/garden section of the hardware store, and maybe can’t find it all year around. But it’s awesome for attaching anything to anything else/cables/organizing stuff. I use it all the time for holding up Christmas decorations (or basically anything you want to Velcro to something else). Especially Christmas decorations because it’s green, so you don’t notice it if you hide it in pine. Here is a link.

Nano Tape: You may have seen all the clickbait ads where someone is putting a mason jar on a wall with tape, and, great googlie mooglies this stuff actually works. I bought a roll for everyone I know for Christmas and ended up with a lot left over, but currently I am using it to secure a very big socket extender to my wall outlet. I do shove it back in place sometimes, but it’s been there years and hasn’t fallen off the wall. Here is one example.

Insta Crates: You know how you need to lug parts and whatever around in a crate, and then you take them out and use them up and have a bunch of crates stacked in the corner under a sheet and then the cyborg hides snacks in there and forgets them and it smells after awhile? Well anyway: You can get COLLAPSING CRATES. These are especially awesome to put in your car trunk because they take so little space, until you need them to take up space. Here is one example.

Goo Gone: If you are like me, and a little crazy when it comes to sticky residue, you need Goo Gone. It will remove, well, the sticky residue from old tape, or price labels, or basically it removes any gross film from any surface. It’s great stuff. I don’t know why I keep having the spray bottle part break when I buy it, though, and end up transferring it to another bottle with no label that I have to keep remembering what it is. I live an exciting life. Here is a link.

Actually I could go on, but this is already a long blog. Apparently I have just enough patience to write about one blog post a year. Sorry about that. Maybe I will come up with more. Thanks for reading! Let me know if you buy any of this stuff and it works for you.

Happy 2020

Just a post to say: in 2020 I will try to update this with more content. Remember that tiny Anchor podcast I tried in November? I’m not done with it. But it’s going to evolve into a different form. Now that I’ve made this “resolution” on New Year’s Day, I can hold myself accountable!

I also said all of last year that I would draw more, and that sure didn’t happen. I did code a lot more, but that’s my day job – and I don’t really want to do more of it when I come home at night. I’ve decided that for now, this is ok. But I do want to have more projects in the evening: when you come home from work and “spend time” without purchasing any progress on anything, that’s a bad investment.

I spent today trying to delete portions of this domain that I don’t use. Hopefully they’ll be replaced with “Good Content” this year.

How to Study Hard

Today I’m writing from the Cleveland Game Dev Meetup. This month we’re meeting in the Mayfield Public Library.  Strangely, both times I have come to a Meetup, my GPS has tried to tell me the destination doesn’t exist.

I’m listening to someone explain how Construct 2 is a great platform, and comparing it to Pulse. I wanted to ask someone his opinion of Ableton as a music DAW. But I’m not really getting any code written! I have to admit, I haven’t really touched the Unity tutorial I started last Meetup, and it has been a month. Now that I’m done with my code bootcamp, WCCI, it feels weird to not be working hard on anything in the evening after my day job. I really need to pick up some side project.

You’re right, I did not finish Identiflora yet. I was originally going to work through it as a .NET project, but now I’m not sure if that is the best idea. (Did I say this already? I feel like a broken record.) So in lieu of really “working on the big passion project”, I am working on some smaller things.

I still feel like I should be learning on CodeEval, but it is admittedly pretty dry. So I am excited that I just found Codingame – it is like CodeEval, full of problems to solve using your coding skills, but these are couched like games. It’s really a fun concept, even if it’s still hard work. Speaking of “hard work disguised as a game” I am also enjoying Human Resource Machine by Tomorrow Corporation, the same game company that made World of Goo. In Human Resource Machine you program (using a pseudo coding language) people to take certain integers and drop them into certain boxes – yeah you are really doing the same loops and if/thens that you would be learning in CodeEval, but giving it game trappings makes it fun!

I guess not everything can be made easier and into a game. I really enjoy listening to J. Vernon McGee. He is gone now, but his radio program is now a podcast, and it takes you through the whole Bible, verse by verse, over the course of five years. I once heard him say (and I think he was quoting but I don’t recall whom, sorry),  that if you are having a hard time with a Bible passage, because it is dry and hard to understand, you have to moisten it with the sweat of your brow. Hard work is hard work! But it leads to deeper insights.

That goes for coding too.

 

A Few MVC SQL Tips and Tricks

I have been working with Visual Studio 2015, MVC .NET and MS SQL lately, and ran into several things that I had to keep looking up over and over, so I thought there may be someone else out there in the same boat.

Note: These are all tips for working code-first in Visual Studio.

  1. In your Model, say you want to have a table’s Primary Key auto-increment. Sure you add [Key], but you also need to add this: [DatabaseGenerated(DatabaseGeneratedOption.Identity)]
    auto_increment
  2. Here is a handy snippet you need to add to Global.asax in order to add more than one controller to your project:
    Database.SetInitializer<YourProjectContext>(new DropCreateDatabaseIfModelChanges<YourProjectContext>());
    In my screenshot, the name of my project is IceCream. If you don’t know the name of your project context, it should just be the name of your project with “context” on the end. I know that’s pretty basic, but as a new coder, it sometimes throws me. Global.asax is located at the very bottom of your Solution Explorer.
    if_model_changes

Launch House Game Dev Meetup

I have made and sold art for years and still have a hard time (sometimes) calling myself an Artist. So I feel almost funny being at a game development meetup when I have never even tried to make a game. It isn’t “impostor syndrome” it’s just, I’m not sure if I am passionate about it. Not sure what I bring to the proverbial table. But I am here today, at the Shaker Launch House, with about 10 other people working on their own games. I don’t have a specific game idea to work on, but I brought art supplies and am working through some Unity 3D demos. In fact, I watched a lot of tutorials yesterday on beginning game development, and they said the important thing is to “start making a game out of what you can do” as opposed to “start with a great idea”. If you start with a great story to tell, and it is leagues out of your capacity to tell it, you will get stuck and quit. If you make a game that is just “two dots moving” (or..something), then you can actually finish a thing and then move on to the next one with one complete project under your belt (and experience).

My favorite games are ones with interesting characters and stories, and honestly, most of them are 2D not 3D. (In fact, I still like interactive fiction/text adventures.) But Unity does 2D as well. I should learn 3D since I sculpt and I’d like to see if I can print something in 3D. So many skills overlap!

I’ve always wanted to write and illustrate stories and books – art books? nature books? field guides? story books? I just love books. I did not really think about making games (I feel like all of my friends have always wanted to make games). I’m still not sure it is my platform, but I really want the experience of learning new things. And good games tell stories.

IMG_1158
Launch House Angel?