Author: eilatann

Documenting…

A miscellaneous stuff-I-made post with some things that were on my camera.

Pencil rolls, watercolor tins, little notebooks with watercolored gradient paper, hand warmers.
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Handsewn kits for friends filled with tiny useful objects.
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Hypotrochoid trivets made with the Spirogator app.
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Rendered some gifted beeswax from an Oakland beekeeper, sent these back in return! Elusive teeny tiny lip balm tubes found here.
beeswax

A quincunx (because that is a cool word!) made with my brother from office supply store materials.
bean machine

Coaster experiments in Processing.
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Rainbow coatrack made at/for Walrus.
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Making is messy. <3 20140412_085755

Coconut and Olive Oil No-Sugar Granola

I love this olive oil granola recipe, but was doing “no added sugar November” and got curious if granola could possibly be tasty without sugar. I followed the suggestion in this recipe to use egg whites for the crunch that cooked sugar usually creates. I didn’t have high expectations and was honestly rather boggled that it turned out delicious (and several friends agreed, so it wasn’t just my sugar-deprived brain!). The coconut oil seems key, it gives it a rich, toasted-coconut flavor. And because it’s homemade, it’s not dry like the store-bought kind.

As you’ll know if you’ve ever made granola, it’s a very flexible recipe! Substitute your favorite nuts/seeds/fruit/spices.

granola

Coconut and Olive Oil No-Sugar-Added Granola

Makes ~11 cups, ingredients below cost ~$12 total (for the organic version even!)

  • 3 ½ cups rolled oats
  • 1 ½ cups sliced almonds (or your favorite nut)
  • cups unsweetened shredded coconut
  • ½ cup raw pumpkin seeds
  • ½ cup flax seeds (ground or crushed – apparently you can’t digest these as well whole!)
  • ½ cup sesame seeds
  • ½ cup chopped dried dates
  • ½ cup extra virgin olive oil
  • ½ cup virgin coconut oil (the kind that actually smells like coconut)
  • ½ cup unsweetened applesauce
  • 2 tablespoons grated fresh ginger
  • ½  teaspoon kosher salt
  • ½ teaspoon ground cinnamon
  • ½ teaspoon ground cardamom
  • 2 egg whites
  • 1 cup unsweetened raisins, dried cherries, dried apricots, or dried cranberries

Preheat oven to 300 degrees F. Toast sliced almonds on a baking sheet in oven for 3-5 minutes or until lightly toasted (watch them carefully! They will go from beautifully golden to burnt very fast). Pour into a large mixing bowl immediately after taking them out of the oven.

Mix all ingredients except the eggs and raisins in the bowl with the almonds. Whip egg whites in a small bowl until fluffy. Mix egg whites into granola. Spread onto baking sheet and bake for about an hour or until golden brown and crunchy, stirring every 15 minutes. Transfer to bowl and toss with raisins.

Serving suggestion: serve with yogurt or milk and fruit of your choice (bananas, strawberries, sliced apples, grapes, blueberries, peaches, pomegranate seeds…)

Old Machines

Tools that are just so beautiful you don’t even care what you’re making! Bernina 731, around 50 years old and still works perfectly. It opens in lots of clever ways to give you access to the mechanisms inside. Only downside is it’s a bit heavy to transport!

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What my parents did to encourage me in STEM

I hear and read this question all the time: how do I get my daughters/kids interested in STEM? (for those who haven’t heard this acronym before, it stands for “Science, Engineering, Technology, and Math,” sometimes expanded to STEAM to include Art).

I generally agree with most of the advice given: access to interesting, hands on materials, encouraging curiosity and exploration, exposing them to inspiring examples and role models.

However, as a teacher I sometimes wonder about the effect on kids of labeling some activities more “stemmy,” and therefore more awesome. Looking back, I feel incredibly grateful to my parents that I don’t recall a single thing I did as a kid being labeled one way or another.

I am by some definition a STEM-kid success story. I have several degrees in Computer Science, and another from MIT in a technology research program (Media Lab). I now teach programming and electronics and am thoroughly immersed in making things in the world of computing.

However, as a high schooler and younger I was mostly the kid that would probably make the parents asking the STEM question panic! I wanted to be a princess for most of my young childhood and forced everyone around me to role-play as various members of the royal family. I loved reading novels and making crafts. I enjoyed computers, but mostly used them to write dramatic fantasy stories, look up origami diagrams and pictures of bunnies, and make art (I still think Kid Pix is the best piece of software ever written). In 9th grade, my dad encouraged me to take a programming class. I hated it and dropped it after a semester.

So how did I end up in STEM? In college, after starting out as an industrial design major and dabbling in psychology, I took another programming class and got hooked. Fast forward 10 years: I’m still in love with the field, and keep discovering new intersections with my other interests, from crafts to education.

Sooo…what’s the point? I feel like my parents gave me room to pursue my interests without stressing out about how STEM they were.

When I hated that first programming class (I can tell that story another time!), my computer scientist dad said “sorry you had a bad experience!” and helped me drop the second semester of the class. He never pushed, but continued to invite me to different kinds of tech events.

When I asked for a sewing machine around 10 years old, my mom got me one for my birthday. As an adult I learned that her very traditional homemaker mother had taught her to sew with the idea that she would follow a similar life path to her own. My mom “rebelled” and became an electrical engineer, yet was completely supportive of her daughter’s (my) interest, to the point where it didn’t occur to me to question it. I spent many happy hours making doll clothes, and taking the darn thing apart every 20 stitches or so when it tangled horribly. Now I’m quite comfortable taking apart all kinds of machines, and I have a much better intuition for solving engineering problems that require understanding complicated topologies, and how flat pieces turn into curves.

I feel like I’m falling back into the STEM trap in the way I am describing some of these things, as though these seemingly unrelated activities were justified by turning out to have some connections to engineering. I was trying to make the point that my parents were totally okay with them not going that direction, and this gave my siblings and me a really important kind of freedom. My sisters went into art, animation, music, film, fashion. One brother went into philosophy and education, the youngest two love cooking, art, poetry, writing, sculpture, music, video games.

Just to close, I absolutely disagree with people who say that it’s a true meritocracy, and girls who are interested will just find their way into STEM fields on their own. There are a lot of barriers along the way, including toxic culture, societal expectations, and the sorts of toys marketed to girls vs. boys. That “inspirehermind” ad literally made me cry the first time I saw it (GIVE HER BACK THAT POWER DRILL RIGHT THIS SECOND WHAT ARE YOU THINKING?!!!!!!) (and the Youtube comments are even more painful).

Also, I think I’m understating here how much my parents were role models and examples of gender equality, beyond exposing me to different activities. They didn’t actually show me all that much of what they did at work until I was much older (“they work with computers or something”) but it was their casualness about it all that made a world of difference.

I guess I’m suggesting: definitely do expose your kids to lots of interesting tools, materials, ideas, and people. But then don’t panic too much if your kids have lots of interests, and they don’t seem very STEM to you.

Also, if we’re bringing shop class back to the 21st century, how about home ec, too?

 

Coptic bound photo album, craft cutter embossing

I made a tiny coptic bound book to use as a photo album only to discover that it puffed up in a not very nice way once I glued all the photos in it. After examining some photo albums and investigating techniques online, I realized that they include an extra layer in the binding to accommodate the thickness of the photos. Here are some photos and notes on the technique that ended up working for me.

Bonus: I just got an adorable Polaroid Zip, a little printer that prints on a sort of color thermal photo paper (no ink) via Bluetooth from your smartphone, so I made the album the right size for its sticker photo paper. I’m not sponsored by them or anything ;), only mention it in case this sparks a fun idea for someone who has one too. I’ll add that they are not perfect, the photos have to be fairly high quality to come out well. Grainy photos (eg. taken somewhere poorly lit) don’t print well at all, worse than they would with a regular ink and paper process.

Bonus 2: a nice embossing technique I learned from the aforementioned CCSF bookbinding class.

final open close up

Fold cardstock in half with the grain:

fold in half

Score a line about 1/8″ from the folded edge, fold that edge over and glue it flat:

score fold over

Cut into folios the size of your book then collect into signatures. Each signature contains two folios. The outer one has the extra paper at the fold. The inner one is simply folded over.

contents of signatures

all the signatures

To make an embossed cover, I used a craft cutter to cut out adhesive backed magnet sheet and adhered the letters to the bookboard cover. Pencils lines help get it straight! Then I covered it all with decorative paper and used a bone folder to smooth the paper gently around and inside the letters.

cutting magnet sheets on silhouette zoomed out name on magnet sheet

name on cardboard

glue cover paper

cover paper inside cover

I forgot to take a picture of the cover before I put it all together so this photo skips ahead a bit but it shows the embossing. Your design or lettering could stand out a bit more on with a solid color for the paper, but I was going for subtle and textural (or at least I say that now :).

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Poke holes in each signature with an awl, using a folded template to keep them all the same.

punching holes stack of signatures with holes

Use a paired-needle coptic stitch to attach signatures and covers. I’m going to recommend this tutorial because it is super gorgeous.

adding the first signature

final spine

Here’s the finished book again, just awaiting being filled with photos:

final open close up

Multimeter how-to

Here’s a little printable how-to booklet on using a multimeter! It’s not exhaustive of course, but is hopefully a useful and not-overwhelming start for troubleshooting circuits. Illustrations focus on paper circuits.

1432950678889Multimeter pictured below is the Etekcity UT120C and I like it so far, it’s nice and small and has its own case which this booklet fits into.

1432950762081My process at the moment is to draw things in ink, scan them, and then wrestle with a few different programs for layout. For this one I used Pages, Preview, and Pixelmator.

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The cursive font is called “The Only Exception” and is from Kimberly Geswein Fonts.

Paper Doll Designer

I’m working on a new digital fabrication app called Paper Doll Designer, now with a tool for programming designs (beyond changing parameters as in the Spiro app). It uses Blockly for the programming blocks and Paper.js for the graphics.

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You can print the outfits out, and I’m working on adding registration marks to the exported images so you can also cut them out using a Silhouette cutter.

From the process side, I’m really really excited about moving to web apps, because needing to install the Spiro app seemed to be a bit of a barrier for folks, and there were a lot of requests for a version that works on tablets (this one does, to my surprise without me having to do anything extra!) I’m still learning HTML/CSS/Javascript and it’s amazing how everything I know about how to write cleanly structured code goes right out the window when I’m working in a new environment and language, but it will get better!

Inspired and informed by:

Arduino Error Bingo

Idea born of observing students feeling like they had failed when they saw an error message, and having difficulty persuading them that breaking things is often so much better for learning than getting it right the first time. With this, getting an error is a win! As it should be.

Download below, design and execution by my colleague Becca Rose. It has turned out great with our students! Share and enjoy (click on image for PDF version).

arduino bingo