Posts Tagged ‘functional crafting’
Data Tapestries
It is not unusual for me to comment about how much the weather of my surroundings has changed in my lifetime. Beyond my first-person experience, I am greatly influenced by news of ever more intensified hurricanes, increased high-temperature extremes around the world, wildfires, droughts, and flash flooding downpours. I understand that the climate around the globe is changing, and I respect the data that has been recorded for enough years to reveal what is actually happening.
I recently read about tapestries made by crafters using data of the high temperature for each day of a year. That brought me to something called the National Parks Tempestry Project, where I discovered a wonderful representation of many U.S. National Parks and the “tempestries” created by volunteer crafters.
I don’t think the data revealed by the tapestries always looks as shocking in contrast as I’d expect, but it is interesting to compare the color trends from the wide variety of parks in this country.
They have created a beautiful web page for scrolling the large number of images that tell a story in a very different way from basic bar graphs on a page. If you haven’t seen this before, I recommend you click the image above to see for yourself. It’s impressive!
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New Ramp
Our chickens have been politely accepting the replacement ramp Cyndie fashioned out of some spare wire shelving, after her incidental demolition of my original ramp, when she killed the possum multiple times with a shovel back in February. But, the replacement was intended to be temporary, so I have been plotting “Ramp 2.0” for some time.
I’m not sure it will be shovel proof, but I did try to beef it up a little bit. The chickens took a liking to pulling out the sticks in my first version, so I increased the weave to hopefully slow that process.
Initially, I tried grinding notches in the cross braces, hoping to “key” the branches to seat tightly together. It ended up being a wasted effort, as my technique was rather imprecise and the frame branches kept torquing and twisting out of the sweet spots as I wove sticks through.
Since I increased the weave, adding two smaller vertical branches, it became critical that I find sticks that could really flex. The solution came to me after winter storms brought down a massive number of branches from our willow tree this year.
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On a return trip to the tree for more material, I noticed there were some new branches sprouting from the trunk that were destined to be pruned, so I included those, as well. It was very helpful to have the “live” branches, because the closer I got to finishing, the less space there was to angle the branches into the tight bend required.
Gives it a little color.
Since the notched frame branches had shifted out of position, I decided to add some screws to lock things in place after the weave was complete. It is definitely more robust than the first ramp I built.
With that, the new ramp was ready to be mounted on the coop for chickens to test.
I am interested in finding out if they will try to disassemble this one as much as they did the first ramp. Something about little sticks that seemed to just call to the chickens. I don’t think they could help themselves. It was irresistible.
Maybe they won’t like willow branches and will just leave it alone. I have my doubts about that wishful thinking. Then what it will come down to is, whether my two additional vertical branches (the warp) will be enough to discourage the chickens from trying to pull (the weft) branches out.
Worst case, I need to collect more willow branches. Luckily, that tree seems to offer up an unending supply.
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Relative Something 