make beautiful things

speaker cabinet from discarded wood

photo hanging system above desk

form-fitted box from discarded box

fix-um! 3 amps up and running!

j asked for a loft, so after pricing loft kits, we decided to build one. it took one weekend to round up materials and tools. and then a saturday to build. this is the first wood project i have done since the lamp in seventh grade shop.

now we have an 8’x4.5’ loft over the door that is holding something like 600 pounds. in the end, it cost just as much as the kit, but it feels good to do things for yourself. i got some new tools and experience thinking about structure.

next, i found some pieces of wood discarded from the crate-building shop at work. it looked like a good dimension for a pedal board. a few days later, i found some medium density foam. it took 3 hours to build and 2 days to stain. the pedals are affixed with industrial strength velcro, and the best part is no cables stick out to get snagged on anything. it fits very nicely inside my vintage hardshell samsonite.

loft holding up

i have been making good on this goal. mostly in the category of culinary delight.

for example, on lunar new year, the best dumplings i ever made included:

eggplant
carrot
turnip
black mushroom
green onion
garlic
sesame seed
ginger
purple cabbage

the excess became a black and white fried rice with fried tofu wedges.

i’ve been experimenting making chocolate goods from unsweet cocoa. a really accurate hot chocolate last night: a/b’ed against a high-end new york chocolatier’s (lacking only cornstarch, apparently). and a very successful approximation of a european spread we dubbed ‘pnutella’.

two eggs, yolks broken and furikake rice seasonings cooked on ‘2’ until solid with an ever-so-slightly gelatinous surface (to approximate the texture of sushi), is my new favorite snack.

i’m on pace with two originals/ week this year.

i had a thought once. that if i made one beautiful thing everyday, then it wouldn’t be long before my world was full of beautiful things. that night i fashioned a lamp from a bicycle wheel. for a couple months, although it was exhausting, i made things, which were occasionally elaborate and took several days, but the spirit was that i engaged constant creativity. and was bent on completion.

i constantly make lists, and have these lists pooling in the corners of desk shelves and messenger bags. so that if ever i were to not know what next, i could begin to clean until some old clunker of an idea put me into furtive late night reverie.

well, i’ve been traveling a lot, and stacks of papers makes for tedious moving, so much of what almost-was is now lost to landfill and compost. but now that i’m stationed, for at least a couple months, in a household, i’d like to begin again.

light fixtures, stitching projects, new recipes, a painting, and as they bleed into my other goals: packages, instruments. i’d like to make 50 beautiful things this year (and share them). that is one per week with 2 weeks vacation. hopefully i can do better than that!