I was making a Companion Cube ornament for a geeky Secret Santa exchange, and I had enough clay left over to make one for myself too, so… new ornament!
(I used Sculpey III, and the Portal 2 cookie cutter set from ThinkGeek to cut out the pieces)
Category: diy
There’s this tree in the back yard that grows almost horizontally for the first eight feet or so, and then, just before it hits the fence, it goes vertical. Lucy has always liked climbing that tree and watching the world go by next to the fence.
Within the last few months, though, she decided it would be great fun to just jump over and go exploring. Unsupervised explorations are not on my list of allowed activities, though, so I built a little addition to the fence.
This worked for about a month, till she tore the netting and started jumping the fence again. So I tried something sturdier within the frame.
Nice and sturdy, but she decided to just go over it. That fix didn’t last more than 24 hours! So now I have to be a total meany and block off her access to the tree entirely.
Still, better a meany than splat-dog in the street.
I’ve rearranged almost all the furniture in my loft and my poor dog doesn’t know what to do with it. She’s figured out where her bed is, at least.
I’d been thinking about doing this for a few weeks now. I have new housemates, and the one directly below my “office” (it’s an attic loft, spaces are designated by furniture arrangements) has been running the bathroom extractor much more than the previous one. The roof vent for the extractor is right above the office, which means that when it’s running, I can’t record. So I’d been thinking of moving the office to the space catty-corner from where it had been, which just happened to be the “bedroom”; unfortunately, it couldn’t be a straight swap, because there’s a column in the office corner that makes that space smaller than the rest of the corners, so I had to move three corners… bedroom to “dining room/spare bedroom”; spare bedroom to office, dining room to open space in the middle of the loft, office to bedroom.
While I was going to be moving stuff around, I figured I’d try to make myself a better recording booth. Several months ago I built a frame for a booth out of 1″ PVC pipe. It looked ok just by itself, but when I covered it with soundproofing blankets it got a bit saggy. It ended up being a glorified dog house for Lucy. Then I had another idea. Pegboard sheets (I can get 2′ x 4′ sheets at the hardware store) covered with acoustic foam tiles, attached in pairs with binder rings (which I had been using to hold up the blankets in the first booth). The tiles came at the end of last week, and I finished attaching them to the pegboards Friday afternoon. I used adhesive spray, but I think I’m going to have to go back with a hot glue gun, because a few have already come loose. I’ll need to test it first, though, to make sure it won’t melt the foam.
I started off with eight pegboards, which made a 4′ square. On the floor inside I laid four interlocking rubber mats (like you see in children’s playrooms), but once I had the four panel pairs up around it, and the mic inside, I found it a bit cramped, so I added the final two mats (which I’d been saving for blocking knitting projects) to make a 4′ x 6′ little room, and hung two of the sound-blocking blankets across the spaces between the pegboards.
I’m quite chuffed. I need to get a small table, and a second monitor to go with the secondary keyboard and mouse I already have, so I’ll be able to leave the laptop outside the booth, but still be able to read off the screen, and control it from inside. And maybe a little stool instead of the chair.
