MSRaynsford

Friend of a friend, and amazing artist, Ruth  got a pyrography kit for Christmas and she's done some lovely artwork on the top of some wooden boxes. These slowly filtered through to my facebook fee and I have commissioned her to draw me something fancy on the tops of one of my boxes. In the meantime I figure I could do some copies of her existing artwork, like a wood burnt print of her original. Of course it will never be as good as the originals but it is a good way to make copies quickly.

Cakes: I've made a lot of cakes for Dinkydoodle Designs , the BB8 cake  was a particular high light, but there was also the flying carpet , the theatre royal and the washing line . It all kept me very busy and usually with very short turn around times. Maker Faires: We attended most of the maker faires/Makefests in 2015 as Just Add Sharks and usually built something new and interesting for each one. Edinburgh, Newcastle, Halifax, Liverpool, Manchester, Bristol, Brighton and Derby. Each one also required a stock of kits that took several days to prepare for. Commission Work: The commission type projects just seem to get bigger and more involved. Whether it was designing new kits like the pendulum wave (which went through 3 iterations and still didn't work), pint glasses or faffing with other peoples artwork  (which has ultimately turned into 50 sets so very worthwhile) it was all rather time consuming. There are a dozen projects here I'm still not allowed t

My 12 months are over. I failed to complete 12 very large projects which was entirely predictable from September onwards. It turns out having over 100 customers relying on you for laser installs and support really eats into your time. It's great that Just Add Sharks is so busy I just have to reconsider what I can actually achieve in my spare time now. Here is a round up of the 9 big projects from last year. Tomorrow I'll do the honourable mentions because I have at least a dozen large projects that didn't quite qualify for a monthly place (I'm still not sure what metric I was using to gauge that) Project #1: A 3D printer : assembled from a kit it wasn't the most complex build in the world but it did take a lot of time to get running correctly. Shortly afterwards the hot end died and no more was heard from it. It's still waiting to be fixed and it's gathering dust in the garage. Project #2: Open Source Laser Cutter : I made one of our Blackn

The final pattern from my space filling fractal puzzles. This time I used the dragon curve , the same as the original pattern. You have to get creative at the corners to prevent any overlapping, this is definitely the hardest of the three. I ended up redrawing this puzzle 3-4 times to get the scale right for the board and drawing it all from scratch created hundreds of 90 degree arcs that crashed inkscape on multiple occasions but it's done for now and all that's left is a little bit of tweaking.  On the backside I've been using Hershey text (single line letters) to label the puzzles, it's super fast to cut and it looks great. I'll be releasing the files for these 3 puzzles and putting them up in the shop at the same time, so stay tuned.

The second of my space filling fractal puzzles is based upon the Peano-Gosper curver . It's the same size as the last puzzle but it is harder to do because the shapes form more angles.

Boing Boing recently featured a puzzle made from a space filling curve, it looked pretty good so I took the opportunity to convert my space filling Hilbert curve into a similar puzzle. I'm thinking about listing this in the web store, it's a challenging puzzle because all the pieces look the same.