The Final One… YAAAAAAAAS

So. Last part of my learning project.

I wanted to incorporate elements of both pendants I made before, which makes it difficult, because working with silver is difficult when you don’t have proper casting tools.

When you need to work precisely with silver? Forget about it.

That being said, it was design-wise that these incorperations were made. Still though, let’s do a little recap of what’s been done thus far:

First, I made two pendants out of maple wood, and stained them darker. I used lamb leather as a cord, and tied slipknots in them for readjustment of size. One pendant was arrowhead shaped, and the other…was…coffin shaped? I guess?

So. I like how they turned out – the arrowhead one in particular.

Next was my least favorite part. The silver one. And while it’s definitely the most fun to work with, it’s also definitely the most unforgiving.

I cut out a rough shape in wood in order to cast the silver, melting it in a crucible with propane torches. I used the same lamb leather cord with a slipknot that I used for the previous necklaces.

While it’s not terrible, it most definitely could have turned out better. But I digress – onto the fourth and final pendant:

For this one, I wanted to use a darker wood in order to better contrast the bright silver (colour combinations, yo).

My wood of choice was black walnut. A nice, dark colour, it stains brilliantly and is easy to work with. It’s also fairly durable. This is a colour comparison between black walnut and maple.

It’s sorta cool that you can tell how old the wood is based on the age rings. Those round streaks through the wood – the more of them there are, the older the wood is. Based on that, the black walnut is far older, because the rings are so much closer together.

So what I needed to do was cut this down to a rough shape. Unsure of what I wanted my final product to look like, I just started cutting and waited to see where it took me.

A rectangle. That’s where it took me. Good job, me ^_^

Anyways, next was sanding. As usual, this was both the longest and most annoying part of the whole ordeal.

Regardless, a few hours later, I emerged from my garage triumphant, holding aloft a wonderful piece of sanded wood.

So you remember the next step. Drilling! Yaaaaay!

…except my uncle took our drill to work on stuff. How. Rude.

So my dad decided to be amazing – he took one of his father’s old handheld drills. This thing was actually crazy. 

Crazy drill in hand, I bore a hole straight through the wood. It turned out very nicely. Looks like the old drill still has it ^_^

So. My next mission, as you may well remember, is staining the wood to give it a richer colour.

I knew black walnut was a wood meant to take on a nice and rich dark colour, so I used the same stain that I used on the maple.

The result was… satisfying. Of course, I had to hang it up to dry before I could really appreciate the final product.

Now comes the tricky part. See, as I said before, I’m really incapable of doing complex things with silver without spending an exuberant amount of money. Thusly, I decided to take the wooden part to the hands of a jewelry store, and they put a ring on it. I guess they were fans of Beyonce.

In addition to putting on a ring, they also gave me a metal cord to hang it through, in order to properly get the colour contrast right. All-in-all, while I’m sad I didn’t get to do it myself, I’m quite pleased with the results.

So…yeah. Final product.

I’m pleased with the result, like I said. Black walnut stains to a gorgeous colour, and it looks good contrasted with the silver.

I’ve enjoyed being able to screw around with jewelry and sorta shape things to how I see fit. I like the creative freedom of that. I think that’s why I liked working with the wood as opposed to silver: you have more freedom, since it’s easier to work with.

That said – as always, open to any criticisms. Love you all – have a great summer break ^_^

Contributions to learning and stuff

So the end of an era. And by era I mean semester. And by semester, I mean WOOO BABY WE’RE DONE YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA-

*ahem*

This post is dedicated to how I have commited myself to contributing towards the learning of other people. Here’s the thing, though – it’s really hard to adjust.

If people come to me for help, I can very easily and happily help them with stuff. However, putting myself out there first…that’s where it gets tricky. All those thoughts run through your head

“What if they don’t want the help and get offended?”

“What if I say something stupid?”

“What if? What if? What if?”

It’s for sure difficult to discern where and how the assistance should begin, and where and how it should end. When you throw yourself out for assistance before it might be needed, you risk offence, you risk acting like a fool. Especially on a social media platform – everyone can see what you’re posting, and everyone can and will fact check you. That’s been proven time and time again.

That said, I did try. Mostly on Twitter, as again, commenting on other people’s blogs is just something I was afraid of doing. It gets to the point where I think to myself:

“You need to say something more meaningful than just: Good job! You’re doing great!”

However, I think I’ve learned over this semester that while those words can sound empty, sometimes they’re all a person needs to help motivate them.

Anyways – enough of that. Here’s some of my Twitter posts:

https://twitter.com/strumkreutz/status/828998302817398788

https://twitter.com/strumkreutz/status/829164926342094848

https://twitter.com/strumkreutz/status/849463391634812929

And while they’re not in great numbers, here are some comments I’ve made on others blogs:

https://twitter.com/strumkreutz/status/829165457949077504

http://prntscr.com/evt2il

http://prntscr.com/evt2lg

I won’t deny that it’s hard to adjust to actively making comments on others. I know I could have done it more, but it’s truly a scary thing. It’s not something that I expected to be scary, it just sort of.. is.

That being said – this was a fantastic semester. I learned so many new things, and I got to be a goof around every beautiful person in my class and nobody cared. Anyone who can deal with me is a top-notch person in my book ^_^

Was good learning with everyone. I hope to see you all again ❤

Stage 2 of 3 – The plot thickens. As does the material.

SO. Here we are for the second time around. Next weekend this is gonna culminate in a giant explosive ball of awesomeness. Or it’ll suck. Who knows?

My first attempt at jewelry went fairly well, if I do say so. You can check that out here, if you feel so inclined.

But anyways, for my second attempt at making a piece, I decided to make use of silver as my material rather than wood. Since this is just a start, I largely wanted to make something similar to what I did in the first place, with wood. Just a nice, simple piece, hung by a leather cord, with a knot tied to make the cord and pendant parallel.

I went about this by using a small kiln, with two propane torches on the sides. It was a kit I ordered off of Amazon. It served me quite well, all things considered.

Starting off this magical journey of melting metal, as well as ordering the kiln, I ordered some casting silver. Essentially, it’s tiny little balls of silver, hence where it gets the name “grain”. So I had the material and the way to melt it. So, how was I going to be able to cast it?

See, that’s where this gets a little silly. Based on general research (specifically this video here), I figured that I’d be able to use wood as a mold. To be honest, however, I really didn’t have a ton of options for being able to cut, glue, carve, etc. So what I ended up doing was taking a dremel tool and cutting out a shape for the silver to mold to. It, ah, was a rather crude way of doing things, but I didn’t exactly have a lot of options.

 

So, after polishing things up, making sure the mold was decent, I went for it. Silver liquefies at 961.8 °C, so I had to leave it in the kiln for a while. You can see here – the grain is still in a fully solid form, and the crucible is still it’s native black colour.

So. You gotta leave it, right? I stood by, idly watching away, growing older and older by the minute. Of course, it didn’t actually take that long to melt – I just hate waiting. After giving it around 10 minutes in direct heat, I decided to give pouring it a go.

 

Thanks again Dad for the stellar camerawork, and for making fun of me for my pouring skills. Personally, I just think he’s jealous. Not many could pour with the deftness that I possess. Or something like that, anyways.

So the silver… actually turned out not too bad. The wood, unfortunately, suffered a darker fate, being burnt beyond repair. The sacrifices it made shall not be in vain. So – my fallen wooden comrade not forgotten, I turned my attention to the silver itself. Like I said – it turned out not too bad.

So – my fallen wooden comrade not forgotten, I turned my attention to the silver itself. Like I said – it turned out not too bad.

 

 

It’s a fairly good piece of metal. The flaky bits on the top of it are the melted slag from the silver. All they required was some grinding. And cooling. That silver was HOT.

The process was arduous and long. From burning my hands sanding it (yes, through gloves) all the way to drilling a hole through it for the cord, it sure took a long time. Whaddya know, silver is harder to sand than wood. Go figure.

But yeah. The finished product, with and without the cord:

 

All in all? I’m…okay with how this turned out. Yeah, there was no shortage of effort put into it, but I feel like when I work with wood, I’m able to mold it more how I want. Metal is pretty unforgiving in that aspect.

So, that said, next weekend, I’ll be finishing this up. Not this pendant – it’s done – I mean, the final project I’ll do. Since I tend to gravitate towards pendants, and seeing as how I’ve done wood and silver thus far, I’m thinking a combination would be cool. A main body of good, decorated with silver. That said, any thoughts are welcome. Have a good day, and thanks for reading ^_^

 

An Airplane in the way, and what coding could do.

My title is apt, I promise you.

SO. A project on Scratch. Zero creative juices. And a dream.

These are the things young Storm set out with in order to create something of incredibly non-worth. Some would say his goal was to create something so utterly worthless that it would transcend the Rules of Nature and become something that could truly only appreciated on another plane of existence.

Something that could only be appreciate for how worthless it was.

So… I created this. A pure Mahvel of coding genius if I do say so myself.

Okay, but in fairness, Scratch is pretty cool for learning. Giving you access to basic coding processes without having to learn HTML is an excellent middle ground. I’d personally recommend it for an introductory step, perhaps at a late elementary-early middle school level. Prior to that, coding really isn’t that necessary of a process to learn, in my opinion.

However, Scratch carries with it the downfall of being simple and accessible – it loses real value once you’ve spent a few hours. It has a very finite limit of things you can do on it to learn. Granted, you can do some really cool stuff, but you can do cool things with any limited tool.

All-in-all, I liked it. It’s not particularly challenging, nor is it very intrusive. Scratch is a nice calm ride in learning how to code ^_^

Virtual Reality – Gaming isn’t the only thing it could be good for

Virtual Reality (VR) has been a fairly interesting subject during the last few years, as it’s only begun to develop in earnest. It began with the Oculus Rift, and then Sony and HTC threw their hats in after seeing how much traction Oculus got on Kickstarter. Oculus had a fantastic Kickstarter campaign, raising, through 9 522 backers, $2 437 429 dollars. Soon after, Sony came in with the Playstation VR, and HTC soon after with the HTC Vive.

Suffice to say, VR is a rapidly expanding market with gamers. But what about educators?

One VR device that seems to be tailoring itself more to businesses is the Microsoft Hololens. The Hololens is less about gaming and fun, and more about replicating the experience that has been seen is so many movies thus far. You know when you’re watching a movie, and there are holograms everywhere, like in Iron Man or the Avengers? That’s what Microsoft is trying to replicate.

As seen in this short video (taken from the homepage of the Hololens), the Hololens is much more about professional use, and could see huge value in giving more realistic examples to people. Using a device like this, you could give opportunities to practice something like…say, a surgery. You could use the Hololens to replicate performing surgery on someone. The applications of a device like this are incredible.

In the classroom, a Hololens could be used extensively to give more realistic examples of practices. I, personally, am the kind of person who has a hard time picking something up, but when I’ve got it down, I’m usually good from then on. The Hololens could be used to practice activities before actually doing them, and that, I think, is one of the more practical applications.

Of course, this is only speculation up until now. Virtual Reality has come a long way, but it needs to keep going before it’s really picked up. Once it gets there, though, I believe it’s a technology that can be used by everyone, not just educators.

A bit late, but it happens. My thoughts on Carol Todd in the class.

It was kind of a surreal experience when I first found out that she was going to be with us. I kept thinking “woah, like, that Carol Todd?”. Regardless, I appreciated the opportunity to listen and talk with her quite a bit. I think she’s able to provide good insights on the situation that, otherwise, might not have been brought to light.

I believe that, as long as you’re not forcing your opinion unto someone else, then it’s okay to have that opinion. This extends wide in what it can mean, from talking about sexuality, religion, or the more unfortunately poignant topic, suicide. So I asked Carol: “Some people are of the opinion that suicide is a selfish act. What is your take on that, and furthermore, those who believe that?”. Paraphrased for the sake of cleanliness.

Carol did not seem opposed to that line of thinking; rather, she more or less responded with an opinion that somewhat echoes my own. Opinion is just that: opinion. So long as it’s kept to yourself, it doesn’t do anybody harm. And furthermore, the opinion that suicide is a selfish act is not a particularly unbelievable one. Life gets better 99% of the time, and that 1% is reserved for situations such as terminal illness. However, my writing is only reflective of what I have experienced in life so far. Being that I’m only 18, I’m sorely lacking for experience, and I appreciate argument or other opinions, as a matter of fact I rather like argument. Just so long as it’s done in a respectful fashion.

An interesting question was posed to me by our professor straight after – Katia Hildebrandt asked me “What if somebody is considering suicide because of a mental illness?”. My gut response was “oh that’s a hell of a question”. Once I took a bit of time to think it through, however, I find my general opinion to be as such:

Yes, mental illness is as serious as physical illness. I think of this as fact, rather then opinion. The two topics should be treated with equal care and seriousness. However, there remains one key point: mental illness is generally not terminal. When I say this, I refer to depression, social anxiety, or other illnesses that cause an individual to… have difficulty getting out of bed in the morning, so to speak. While they are serious indeed, they are not terminal illnesses, and I believe that to be the key point.

Now, I have no idea how I’d behave if I discovered I had a mental illness such as… schizophrenia, for example. Bi-polar disorder. These are illnesses that I don’t know how I’d react to having them, because as far as I know, they are not illnesses that simply get better. Now, while you could define that as terminal, Wikipedia would say otherwise, saying that while yes, part of a terminal illness is that it cannot be cured, the other key part is that it is “reasonably expected to result in the death of the patient within a short period of time”.

Regardless of how I’d behave having an illness like that, all I know is what I am. That’s all any of us know. And in knowing who we are, we can treat others with due respect. That, is my opinion.

 

Omg he actually did something

And by did something, I of course mean my learning project.

Now, I went into this process with one video at my back, but at the same time, I only really watched the video to help with the mental process. I didn’t want to go into this not knowing anything of what I was doing. While I have worked with wood before, I’ve never worked on anything small and delicate. The last thing I made was a table.

And, yes, I have the silver, but I didn’t have the necessary tools to safely melt and cast it. I could have winged it, but messing around with 961.8 °C molten silver unsafely didn’t sound like a lot of fun. To me, at least.

That said, let’s get into what I used. If you don’t care about the process and just want to see the end result (and judge me harshly), that’ll be at the bottom of the post.

Materials:

Maple wood – it’s inexpensive, fairly hard and durable, and makes for a great color.

Calf leather – I bought this already in the form of a cord. Leather-working is cool, but it’s not something I’m really willing to do. I chose calf leather because it’s very durable for the size.

Danish Oil-brand Golden Oak stain – I chose this particular stain because A: the color was lighter, and I wanted contrast from the black cord. B: As far as I know, oil penetrates the wood more than a gel, so it would result in a more even color.

Tools:

Clamping table – I used one similar to this table, albeit a lot less fancy. Was used in lieu of C-clamps.

Jigsaw – I preferred this saw over a circular saw because I was able to make far more precise cuts into the wood.

Circular saw – I did use this for the initial cuts through the wood, since the blocks were so large. This dealt with that a bit easier.

Wheel sander – I was a bit limited in sanding options, but luckily my dad had this old one in the shed. I think it ended up working out pretty well.

Hand sander – Just a simple sponge hand sander in order to smooth out the piece and buff out any burn marks.

The Journey:

Ooooh boy. This one took a little learning.

(I apologize in advance – my camera on my phone is a bit wonky sometimes, so some pictures will be bad quality.)

So, first off, I took a chunk of wood. This was the chunk of maple I had to work with.

Neat, huh? So my next step was obviously cutting it down to size a bit.

Next, I didn’t want to be sanding until this semester was already over, so I cut this piece down some more, and then wedged a chunk of it in between two other pieces in order to cut it, thickness-wise. (Ignore the burn marks from the saw – it’s been a while)

After getting a sizable piece, I began to work on it, with lines to help guide me towards the end product. I had already tried this without using lines. The result was…not good. At first it was looking like a human head, and then a teardrop. I think it was mimicking my emotions. /s

So yeah. That one was a failure. However, as seen above, I had two pieces of wood to work with. And work with them I did. The second one I tried turned out a lot better out of the sander, with the only kerfuffle in my plans being that the sander left quite a few burn marks.

So I had to sand it with a hand sander. Honestly it wasn’t that bad – since the pendant was so simple in design to begin with, sanding wasn’t that much trouble for me. After sanding it – and once I was satisfied with where I had gotten it – I drilled a hole through the side. The design permitted me to do that, and it made putting a cord on it monumentally easier.

So, after drilling the hole, the final step was needed. Staining. I needed to stain it. So, I did! :D! After staining, I hung it on some…metal twine? Just something that could fit through the hole that wasn’t the actual cord. I’m not sure how well a stain would show on black leather, but I didn’t want to take any chances.

I should mention – I woke up the next day and figured – I really think I can do better. The pendant had turned out fairly well, I’d like to say, but I figured I could do a lot better. So I made another. …and completely forgot to document the progress. This is a good and bad thing, however. I mean yes, it was the point to document it, but the reason I forgot to was because I was so engrossed and focused on completing another pendant. When I remembered to take some pictures, I had already finished it.

My general inspiration for the second pendant was that I just wanted to make a more intricately designed work than the first. Who knew that making wood intricate took more work. And by work, I of course mean sanding. Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaay sanding.

While I hung the second to dry, I figured I’d do a little experiment. I stained the first one twice, trying to look for any color difference. There was some – just not much.

So, having completed the actual pendants, I needed to do some work with the cord. Using black calf leather, I tied slipknots through both of them. I like the aesthetic of the slip knots, and being able to adjust the necklaces at will gives them a more dynamic feel. It was either that, or do one of two things: either make it big enough to fit over your head (which would look dumb with the designs I used), or retie the necklace every time you wanted to take it on or off. Yeah no. Not doing that.

An interesting note – you might have noticed that the hole drilled through the second pendant is straight through. This is because I didn’t trust the drill not to split the wood if I tried to drill through a side so thin. Plus, the sturdiness wouldn’t be there with such small parts holding it on. So I tied a basic…uh, knot? I don’t know what it’s called – my mom showed me how to do it. It’s basically just a knot that turns the cord 90°, allowing the pendant to remain parallel to the cord.

Overall, I’m really freaking happy with the results. I think they look pretty good.

Of course, I’m not closed to other opinions. If you have any ideas for what I could do with wood in the future, let me know!

…but don’t tell me that I used the wrong tools. They were all I had. Nerd.

Ideas? I love ideas! YAY!

Alone and fruitless

I check YouTube for more thoughts

And I find some gold

 

How’d you like that? Hmmm? Hmmmmm? Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm?

But you’re not here for my amazing haiku skills – nono. You’re here about

STORM. WHERE’S THE JEWELRY. YOU SAID YOU’D BE FABULOUS. I’M WAITIIIIING.

Fine, fine, jeez. I’ll give you another update on what I’ve been doing. Strangely enough, the haiku I led with actually alluded to what I’ve been doing. I have the idea planned out for the necklace made of silver – that has already been said. However, I figured I needed some more progress here. So I thought – why just limit myself to metal? Let’s make a pendant out of wood, too!

So began the search on YouTube. Fortunately, I found an awesome video pretty quick. In the video, to summarize, Dudebro (yes, that is my name for him) makes wooden pendants with fairly little equipment. A sander, a drill, some carving tools, and a band saw. This appealed to me since, while I do have a good interest in woodworking (not due to skill – I just like it) I don’t have much equipment. So this was perfect for me.

I love both the look and simplicity. Perhaps I’ll try to throw in an overlay, in an effort to make it more personalized, but don’t count on it. I might not have the time, but if I do, I’ll definitely see what I’m able to throw out. Either this weekend or next – I’m excited.

The difference between digital and personal identity? No. The Similarity.

Here’s the thing – I’m a fairly online person. I may not have a huge name for myself on Twitter or Facebook, but I definitely do a lot of stuff online. Recently I’ve picked up Final Fantasy XIV. I play League, Smash, Pokken Tournament (#pokkenevo) – the list goes on. Younger me would have no questions at all about my digital identity, because younger me thought he was cool and could act the way he wanted. Nonono, that’s not how it works.

Having been an online gamer for most of my life, and playing fairly popular games, it’s pretty hard to find a way to identify yourself within the crowd. To put it in perspective: as of September 13, 2016, League of Legends owner Riot Games estimates they have approximately 100 million active players each month. THAT’S A LOT OF FREAKIN’ PEOPLE. And to try and distinguish yourself amidst a crowd like that, well, that’s an honor reserved for those who play at such a high level that it doesn’t even seem plausible to put in as much work as they do.

So in a giant online community like that, you wander. You kinda have nobody who knows you, save for a few friends who you like to play with. That’s not so different from a personal life, and I think that’s really what we’re trying to focus on. Online and offline lives sometimes have a cleft put in between them, in order to better distinguish yourself, to create a new life for yourself, or just because you wonder what’ll happen. The issue with separating your online and offline selves is that you become rather bi-polar in regards to your life. It damages you, and causes you to start fearing things you normally wouldn’t.

Of course, this is only my personal experience. Everybody goes through it in their own way. However, I can’t help but feel that separation of online and offline has the potential to be a positive influence. Moderation is what makes almost anything okay. An act such as asking a student to turn in their phone is an act of laziness, because it removes a situation that the teacher has to deal with. Is this okay if it became a distraction? Of course. But that’s not the point.

The point is that we don’t actively promote a connection of life. I feel that a student should be allowed to text in class. They should be able to spend time engaging in their personal life without a teacher breathing down their neck. The idea and practice that I think we should put into play is that we need to make them want to engage in class more.

If a student engages in class, does the work, but wants to text a friend, I say that’s fine. If they’re interested in the work being given to them, and prove that they’re fully capable and that they will do it, it’s fine if they want to watch a YouTube video. Connectivity is a thing we need to promote in classrooms, but in order to do that, we must first inspire interest. If students are legitimately interested in the class material, then spending 10 minutes of class responding to texts is perfectly fine.

Of course, this is just my opinion. I’m unsure of how many share it, and I’d be delighted to know. Feel free to criticize, agree, or completely destroy my opinion. I’ll welcome it all ❤

 

B r u h. What’s up? -update

So, you mind be wondering what’s going on with my personal learning project, given the lack of updates. WELL FEAR NO LONGER, MY FRIENDS! For I, the great and wonderful Storm, am here to giveth you much-needed information!

…

Basically, I’ve ordered metal to be shipped and it hasn’t gotten here yet. That’s basically it. In order to make up for the lack of posts, however, I’m planning on making multiple articles of jewelry (metal or otherwise) next weekend, where the metal should (SHOULD) be here. If it’s not, I really don’t know what to say. I’ll update further at that point.

So yeah, this is really it. Just a quick little update to let y’all know where my jewelry-making adventure stands. I’ve got some great plans. Now I just need the materials. A full video on the process will follow, explaining what exactly I’ve done. (Fear the jewelry. mwah. hah. HAWHAW!)