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Build it and they will come
Monday, 10 April 2006 15:20..Or at least get very excited.
We had a great round of construction for MDFF on Sunday.
The star of the show was my latest invention: The Removable Mushroom Top.
See, we built these big mushrooms last year out of 5 gallon buckets, and circles of plywood and stuffed fabric on top. They looked great and were a huge hit last year. People loved them, sat on them, tumbled off laughing, and even broke a couple of them (the ones that were made out of big plastic flower pots, tho, not the 5 gallon buckets). Anyway, they were an overwhelming success, but had one problem. The circular plywood tops were held on to the bottom of the buckets with drywall screws, and they were pretty stable and reasonably tough, but- they took up lots and lots of room. The ~20 we built last year took up a whole lot of poor Lisa's craft room, then filled up a whole bunch of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
number12's bus, then wound up at Kal's where they ate most of his attic storage.
And we wanted to make more for this year.
So I redesigned the concept and created "Giant Mushroom 2.0". In this design, the tops are held against a template, four holes drilled, and via four carriage bolts, attached to the bucket with nuts that can be removed and the whole top taken off for storage. The tops then take up much less space, and the buckets stack up fitting into each other. The carriage bolts, once the first nuts are tightened, dig nice and deep into the wood and stay even steadier than I'd thought they would. (I had a thought of gluing them in place) Then they protrude out of the bottom and fit into the matching holes that are drilled into the buckets.
So when I showed Kal the prototype for the new mushroom top, he became very very excited indeed. I'm not saying he had to change his undies or anything, but he sure had a lot of happy thoughts going thru his head. As he had been taking down last year's mushrooms from his attic and viewing first hand how much space they ATE, he'd found himself wishing for just such a thing. That very morning he'd been sighing to Viv how much he wished that we could somehow redesign the mushrooms so that the tops were removable.
And what's more, my idea for retrofitting the old ones into the new configuration wasn't nearly so difficult as I'd anticipated. So now ~30 giant mushrooms take up just a little more space than the three that we didn't refit.
We also played a mighty round of what's come to be a Maryland Faerie Fest tradition: The great Storage of Stuff Shuffle Game.
The MDFF is acquiring a growing amount of stuff that *has* to be stored somewhere. The object of the game is to find better and better reasons why the stuff shouldn't be stored at YOUR house. Unfortunately, as people and departments and various locations start to assert themselves as better places for certain activities, well, it becomes harder to get rid of things if there's a real good reason for them to be at your house.
But it seems that everybody who played yesterday won as stuff that had been stored got built into things, and those things take up less storage than they did before, AND less storage than they did previously.
We had a great round of construction for MDFF on Sunday.
The star of the show was my latest invention: The Removable Mushroom Top.
See, we built these big mushrooms last year out of 5 gallon buckets, and circles of plywood and stuffed fabric on top. They looked great and were a huge hit last year. People loved them, sat on them, tumbled off laughing, and even broke a couple of them (the ones that were made out of big plastic flower pots, tho, not the 5 gallon buckets). Anyway, they were an overwhelming success, but had one problem. The circular plywood tops were held on to the bottom of the buckets with drywall screws, and they were pretty stable and reasonably tough, but- they took up lots and lots of room. The ~20 we built last year took up a whole lot of poor Lisa's craft room, then filled up a whole bunch of
number12's bus, then wound up at Kal's where they ate most of his attic storage.And we wanted to make more for this year.
So I redesigned the concept and created "Giant Mushroom 2.0". In this design, the tops are held against a template, four holes drilled, and via four carriage bolts, attached to the bucket with nuts that can be removed and the whole top taken off for storage. The tops then take up much less space, and the buckets stack up fitting into each other. The carriage bolts, once the first nuts are tightened, dig nice and deep into the wood and stay even steadier than I'd thought they would. (I had a thought of gluing them in place) Then they protrude out of the bottom and fit into the matching holes that are drilled into the buckets.
So when I showed Kal the prototype for the new mushroom top, he became very very excited indeed. I'm not saying he had to change his undies or anything, but he sure had a lot of happy thoughts going thru his head. As he had been taking down last year's mushrooms from his attic and viewing first hand how much space they ATE, he'd found himself wishing for just such a thing. That very morning he'd been sighing to Viv how much he wished that we could somehow redesign the mushrooms so that the tops were removable.
And what's more, my idea for retrofitting the old ones into the new configuration wasn't nearly so difficult as I'd anticipated. So now ~30 giant mushrooms take up just a little more space than the three that we didn't refit.
We also played a mighty round of what's come to be a Maryland Faerie Fest tradition: The great Storage of Stuff Shuffle Game.
The MDFF is acquiring a growing amount of stuff that *has* to be stored somewhere. The object of the game is to find better and better reasons why the stuff shouldn't be stored at YOUR house. Unfortunately, as people and departments and various locations start to assert themselves as better places for certain activities, well, it becomes harder to get rid of things if there's a real good reason for them to be at your house.
But it seems that everybody who played yesterday won as stuff that had been stored got built into things, and those things take up less storage than they did before, AND less storage than they did previously.
