it's snowing!

Well, not really, but I'm pretty sure this is the next best thing. You can make your own personal snow flurry with paper snowflakes, wire, and a headband. Brrr!

the Tinkering Studio in the SF Chronicle

The Tinkering Studio was featured in the SF Chronicle recently. We made the front page, no less!

You can read it for yourself here.

glowing cupcakes!

I made these flourescing cupcakes for a friend's birthday. The secret ingredient is quinine.

cardboard bearskin rug

We wanted to create a cozy fireside lounge in the Tinkering Studio, so naturally we had to make a cardboard bearskin rug.

You really can make anything with cardboard.

coathanger chandelier

The Tinkering Studio threw a DIY tie (versus black tie) party recently, and I was in charge of decorations. This is a chandelier made out of plastic coathangers that I made for the party.

spoon chandelier

Lightworks for Brightworks

I was an artist-in-residence at the wonderful school Brightworks
this week. They had asked me to do some metal working with the
kids, and I decided I wanted to work on a chandelier made out of
spoons for the school. I brought lots of spoons (both metal and
plastic), and a few tools, including a heat gun and a propane
torch. Plastic and metal are really fun to play with when you heat
them up, and spoons were the perfect way to introduce this idea to the kids.

We used the heat gun to bend plastic spoons into all sorts of interesting shapes.

The torch was great for bending the metal spoons.

The kids were also super interested in cold-forming the metal spoons by clamping them in the vise and shaping them with a
hammer. Ben wanted to make a spoon with a 360 degree twist in the
handle. This was his first attempt, using the vice and a hammer. He
discovered it was challenging to get the spoon handle to do a full twist without breaking.

Ben tried again, this time with the aid of the torch.

Success!

After we tried bending and twisting the spoons, we welded some of
them together

After the kids went home for the day, the adults got a chance to play.

The finished spoon chandelier! The kids decided the colors reminded
them of sunsets and sherbet. It certainly casts a lovely warm glow over the welding studio.