Project Saturday – the lathe is here!

The lathe is here!

It’s a new to me Rikon 70-100 mini lathe with 6-speed manual adjustment. And it’s sitting in my kitchen right now because we got home late last night and I still need to buy castors for the table. The table is some sort of industrial shop table with holes for a table clamp and bench dogs. The lathe came with an extension bed to turn it from a 15″ to a 40″ lathe, two fulls sets of gouges/chisels, every different kind of chuck I might want, all the little tools and wrenches it needs and random accessories like a face shield, a telescoping magnet grabber and an old school Stanley no 84 brass folding rule. It also came with a table grinder to sharpen the chisels, a set of buffing pads and wax, and a honing stone. All for $450. What a deal!

Bet you can’t guess what I’ll be doing tomorrow.

Project Saturday – Alphonse Mucha Menu – Part 1

Ever since discovering these cute little Alphonse Mucha dinner party menus I have been trying to figure out how to turn them into a giant wall-mount menu. This is partially a way to add some class to our little married student housing apartment, partially a desire to make the food more of a centerpiece at the dinner parties we like to have every now and again (something that regularly surprises me about inviting guests over is how little attention they actually pay to the food itself), and partially because we have a massive white wall in an odd corner of our dining area that is the first thing you see when you walk in the front door; obviously, it needs a little spice.

It took me a while to realize that the reason I couldn’t find giant poster prints of these pieces the way you can get basically any of Mucha’s other work is because they were originally printed on small pieces of cardstock (think 5×7″ range) in a pack of 10 for domestic ladies to use as… menus for dinner parties. As good modern technology is, getting a lithographed 5×7 to look good at 22×30 is just not something we’re capable of.

Hello world! – It’s Info Dump Wednesday!

Welcome to Basically Everything!

I’ve wanted to start a blog for a while now–or maybe a few blogs. One about my life as a furniture designer and woodworking extraordinaire, one about all the foodie adventures that my husband and I get into, one about the mind-blowing revelations I’m always stumbling on (and have to share!) about how people work and what makes them tick, and at least a half dozen more pursuing my infamous Projects (with a capital “P”!). Because we all know there just really isn’t enough space in a Facebook caption to do justice to the 10 hours you just spent on your recent love affair with *fill in the blank making-technique*. On top of all that, my husband and I just found out that we are pregnant with our first baby! That’s a whole new world of learning and growth, and I can’t even begin to imagine what knowledge and insights that path will bring me. I intend to make that journey part of this blog, too.

In order to keep all these topics and directions afloat and at least a little structured, I’ve decided to post on one topic per day, 6 days a week. Here’s the schedule:

Foodie Mondays –