I Spent a Year Making a Bed

How’s that for a click bait title? But I really did spend almost a year on this with most of that time eaten up teaching myself how to do marquetry and inlay work. As I mentioned before, my first attempts didn’t go well and I spent a lot of time searching for advice on how to do this particular style of Art Nouveau work that almost nobody does anymore. Sanding and finishing metal and wood right next to each other also proved difficult and I’m not...

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Eating the Void: On Making a Raw Café Gratitude Chocolate Hazelnut Pie

I have a small collection of odd cookbooks that have, for the most part, gone unused which is probably a good thing. One that’s collected dust for years is I Am Grateful: Recipes and Lifestyle of Café Gratitude. Friends who have been to this oh-so-California restaurant say that’s it’s good while simultaneously a parody of itself. As the intro to the cookbook notes, The Café Gratitude menu gives you the opportunity to start practicing saying somet...

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Saturday Tweets: Eating Crickets and Making Coffee

..., and Fireplace Hearth and Mantel http://t.co/2vkxERYxbq — Root Simple (@rootsimple) October 14, 2015 Kelly declares that–thanks to global warming–pants are now completely optional. #glassishalffull #donaldducking — Root Simple (@rootsimple) October 14, 2015 Seeing stars, again: Naval Academy reinstates celestial navigation http://t.co/gZlGOpxjJa — Root Simple (@rootsimple) October 14, 2015 How to tell if supermarket produce is organic in 2 second...

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Misadventures in Laser Cutting

...l wood box. Laser cutters can also cut entirely through thin materials so that opens up more possibilities to do things that would be difficult to do by hand. I’m intrigued, for instance, with the possibilities for making three dimensional folding paper cards. You could also use the laser cutter for screen printing, making stencils, wood inlay or marquetry. Many thanks to the knowledgeable staff of the Octavia Lab!...

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