craft | squishy lab

When 2 nerds marry each other, there’s no choice but to take it to the next level. The Apple contingency was especially enamored with the Apple IIe Wedding Reception Assistant, complete with ASCII wedding cake art. Since my first foray into the joys of programming was writing BASIC in the third grade, we had to incorporate this somehow.

My husband Nathan is from Atlanta, which inspired the casual southern theme for the reception. Nathan has fond memories of catching fireflies so we thought it would be cool to capture that feeling at the tables, but with an electronic twist. We found these really neat itty bitty incandescent bulbs that made wonderful “fireflies” which I animated using custom picaxe microcontroller firmware. Nate and I worked together to design and construct an original PCB cut on his homemade CNC router.

uh oh… now do that 15 more times.

Over the past year, I’ve been obsessed with bags and bicycle hats. The small zippered pouches were especially fun because they present an interesting spatial challenge (how to complete with a zipper and lining inside out to flip right side out through a small hole in the lining). I finally learned how to use the serger my mother in law Karen gave to me (totally easy…don’t know why I let it scare me) to properly finish the cap portion of my hats. I used muslin to cheaply prototype my hat pattern. The last item at the bottom is a knitting bag I made for my mom last Christmas.

Prototyping hat patterns: