John Burridge

Ten years ago today, Mark and I had a wedding ceremony.  We couldn't legally be married in the state of Oregon at the time.

We had a website here:  http://markandjohn.blogspot.com/

We got married in our landladies' back yard.  We had friends and family make banners a few days before; the banners showed the banner maker's relationship with one or both of us.

For our wedding, everyone lined  up on either side of the gravel alley by the house, holding their banners, and we walked with our families between the banners.  Everyone followed us through the yard gate, and hung banners everywhere.

I tried my best, and failed, not to go into a bridal daze; thankfully Mark was there to ground me. We traded vows and rings, and then had chocolate cake (they were supposed to have otters on it, but everyone thought they were weasels).  The comment at the time was "Only gay men could eat chocolate cake in white tuxedos and not get them dirty."

There's more pictures here:  Wedding Photos

I can hardly believe it's been ten years; and five years of living together before that.  Yes, there've been some bumps along the way -- but I'm still in love with Mark and I like to think that I'm as good for Mark as he is good for me.

Happy Anniversary, Honey; here's to ten more wonderful years.

Here's a follow-up photo to yesterday's post showing what the eggs look like before I dye them.

I use a craft cutter to cut thin strips or squares of painter's tape.  For the stars, I used a star-punch.  I had the best results holding the tape taut with the sticky side down; this allowed me to lightly touch the punched out tape and lift it out of the punch.  I still had a bunch of tape occasionally stick in the punch, and I'm not sure I'd recommend this technique for intricate shapes.

I've been playing with star shapes long enough to know that the easiest placement starts at one end of the egg and works down toward its widest area.

Once the tape was in place, I used the back of my fingernail to insure there were no lose spots and then dyed the egg.

I air-dried the eggs for about fifteen minutes so that I wouldn't smudge the designs with wet tape.

After they dried, I peeled back the tape.

I'm inordinately pleased with myself for having made a star globe out of cut paper.

This is the latest cutter-plotter project.  I made a panel out of ten sheets of heavy paper, glued them into to halves, and then glued the two halves together.

When I was finished, I posed as one of my favorite Burne-Jones paintings.  (...and on the eight day God made paper projects).

Now all I need to do is add an LED light for the center.

Over Christmas, I made some luminaries. I designed the pattern in Inkscape, then exported it to a Silhouette plotter-cutter. The cutter made cuts in thick paper, which I glued into cylinders.  Add an LED candle and viola!

I posted some pictures in Google Plus, but the photos didn't make it to my blog. Here's what the end product looks like.

Okay; I couldn't resist.


One of the previous fish designs wasn't quite right. So I had to re-do it.










And then expand it.





(No, Julie -- it's a lot of work -- you don't have to make this pattern for me.)

My sister, Julie, likes to make quilts. Like this one:




She received a brand new sewing machine for her Birthday (today! Happy Birthday!) and offered to make a smaller version of the quilt for me. The pattern is made up of tessellated triangles.




 And because the pattern is a tessellation, I kind of went a little crazy.


The next thing I knew I was making all sorts of solar-theme designs, mostly because it's hard not to make solar-theme designs when working with squares and right-triangles.




I thought maybe if I could work with some of the triangles the top of the quilt could look like frothing water. And then I stepped back.



There's probably waaaaaay too many fish.



Oh well.

Just to show you that I'm not a complete cynic when it comes to Valentine's Day, here's some photos of my craft efforts to make a Valentine's Day card for Mark.

One of my recent discoveries is a radial blade. I'm learning how to use it properly, but one of the things it's good for is making straight cuts in the middle of a piece of paper. I used that quality to cut out a picture of a banner from when Mark and I got "married."


I used an empty (sadly) chocolate box as the base for the "card." I envisioned one of those pop-up types of cards that uses 3-D effects. My vision was that the banner would hang just inside a garden gate. I used a different picture from our "wedding" for the gate.


I made two paper columns to hold up the front. Paper has a lot of tensile strength, and when it is folded, that strength can be used to make the paper accept a light compressive force (see what happens when you live with architects for four and a half years?).



The banner was a little too big, I think; next time I'd scale it down. But I did like the effect of seeing the "yard" through the gate.

The best part about this is the whole thing folds down to fit inside the chocolate box. When it's opened, the scent of chocolate ghosts through the room. As my friend Cathy Fylling would say, "La; love; true love; ha ha!"

Today I started to think about our holiday card. This year there's a lunar eclipse within hours of the winter solstice, and I wanted our card to be about that.

I folded blue construction paper into quarters. I used a ruler to find the center of the quartered paper, and then used a compass to figure out where to cut a circle out of the paper and some circular slits. Then I got out a white piece of construction paper and cut out a white disk. I colored part of the white disk black and fit it into the slits in the blue paper. I cut an arc-shape out of the blue paper so I could write legends on the white paper disk.

Viola! Instant move the disk and see when the eclipse takes place (in universal time). I moved the white disk through the eclipse cycle and wrote the time of the beginning, total and end of the eclipse in the arc-shaped window.

I showed Mark.

Me (holding up eclipse dial holiday card): "See?!" (moves white disk)

Mark (mixing pie crust dough): "Hmmm. It looks geometric - it needs to look festive."

Thank goodness for reindeer punches!

Me (two white paper reindeer leaping over the moon window later): "See?!" (moving the disk to the full eclipse position)

Mark (cleaning pots and pans): "That's more festive, but you're going to have to include an instruction manual with that card or no one is going to get it."

Me: "But. But... (points) I put little arrows around the rim of the dial..."

Mark: "I thought were were just going to send pictures this year because you didn't want to do craft project cards."

John: "Well. Yeah... I was thinking of that when I was using a craft knife to make all those little slits... which is why there aren't too many...."

Mark: "See; why don't you make a few for the folks you know will like them?"

Me: "But it's the eclipse!"


Sigh. Maybe I can just print out a link to NASA's Eclipse Web Page.

What's better than Spirograph ?














Lego gears, an LED, and long-exposure photography!













I think it may be time to make a photo harmoniograph.

I'm working on a seasonal photo.

I'm not sure how well it's working.


















I have three favorites.

















But I may re-shoot this if I can use a pipe-cleaner for the body.

This morning started out as a bothering kind of day involving working around other people's schedules and telephone menus -- and very likely a sick switchboard operator, given how long after eight AM the "our offices open at 8" message greeted me.

Now I'm working on some special awards for the Wordos. For the Most Stories Sent Out to Paying Markets, I'm working on an icosidodecahedron. I'd hoped to make some of the faces have postage stamps on them, but the paper I used is probably around 20 pound weight, and the tabs bent when I tried to slide them into eighty pound construction paper. I'm thinking the icosidodecahedron will have a "crown" of stamps.

The rains are gearing up and we may have a thunderstorm tomorrow. I'll be glad; Mark has sanded down the kitchen door so it will close, but the crack in the wall probably won't close up until we get enough rain.

Whoo! Quite a bit of thunder and lightning over Eugene today. Flashes visible by day. Loud rumbles lasting five seconds. Traffic control lights knocked out of commission flashing red in a steel sky. It was a tea and toast kind of day.

So I took out compass and paper and constructed Golden Rhombuses. (OK, I got the first two wrong... but the third one worked.) You can build a Rhombic Triacontahedron with Golden Rhombuses.

To build the rhombus ... get a compass, a ruler, and some paper.

1. With the ruler, draw line AB.
2. With the compass, draw a circle centered on line AB. The center of the circle will be point a.
3. Draw an identical circle centered where the first circle intersects line AB. The center of the second circle (also where the first circle crosses line AB) will be point b.
4. The two circles will cross each other twice; once above line AB, once below line AB. Use the ruler to draw a second straight line over these two places. The straight line will cross line AB at point c. Point c will be the mid-point between points a and b.
5. Draw another identical circle centered on point c.
6. Open the compass wide (I like to double it) and center it on point b. Draw an arc above and below line AB. Place the compass point on the other side of the first circle and draw another arc above and below line AB. This will create two points directly above and below point a on line AB. Draw a third straight line through the three points (the two sets of arcs and point a). Where the new third line meets the first circle is point d.
7. Center the compass on point c and open it until the pencil touches point d. Draw a circle. The forth circle should cross line AB just to the left of the center of the first circle (which isn't labeled in these instructions). Call this point point e.
8. Use the compass to measure the distance from point b to point e. Using this distance, center the compass on point c and draw a fifth circle. Where this circle crosses line AB, mark points f and g. (The whole point of drawing five circles and three lines is to get the distance ad and be, which can be used to create a Golden Rectangle)
9. Where the vertical line crosses the third circle (running through point c), mark points h and i.
10. Draw the rhombus through points f, h, g, and i.

Voila! Now you have the proper polygon to make a Rhombic Triacontahedron!

We went to the Oregon Country Fair. The Fair started out as a renaissance faire, then turned into a hippy fair, and now it's a kind of annual Eugene (and local area) weird/alternative fest. On the fun side, the fair's in a woods, there's lots of geometric sculptures, creative entertainers, crafts, alternate power, parades, art and costumes. The creative, friendly, atmosphere can be exciting and restful at the same time.




On the not-quite-so-fun side is that the fair seems to be two miles long, the paths can get quite choked with people and dust, the art is prohibitively expensive, and some --er-- costumes are more about personal expression than imagination. Loin-clothes (or socks) and nipple-clamps. I think I have the definition of a "drommer boy" now. That's all I'm saying.



The weather was cooperative, starting out cool and not getting too hot in the afternoon. We walked around, but really didn't see anyone we knew right away. Mark liked a kinetic sculpture -- the "Hippypotumus," a six-person bicycle float with an articulated head and jaws (and blinking eyes). I kept seeing icosidodecahedrons everywhere, and found a Eugene artist who welds them out of stainless steel (sorry, honey, I got his card and someday when I can afford it, we'll have Platonic Solids in the garden).

Much later in the day, I ran into Damon Kaswell and Loreen Heneghan. Loreen makes lovely masks out of fabric, wire, spangles, and sequins. And hats. One hat (with ears) looked like a Beatrix Potter design. She had a whole troupe of Jellicle Cat masks.

The other friend I ran into was Steve, who makes really cool kaleidoscopes with oil and beads.

Oh yes. I wore The World's Most Fabulous Shirt -- it's a shirt covered with little squares of iridescent diffraction gratings. Usually, I hear about twenty disco-ball jokes in a hour, but I guess the purple iridescent scarf I wrapped around my hat made me look like I was on Gay Safari (I had many more attractive, shirtless guys complimenting me on my clothing than I can remember for quite some time). Anyway, I love the shirt, and about forty new best friends love the shirt, and I love that something as easy as wearing a shirt (OK, it was a little too warm in the afternoon) can make so many people smile.

And I think smiling is what the Oregon Country Fair is all about.

A couple of days ago, Mark Wyld introduced me to the sculpture of George Hart, a mathematician and sculptor. Many of Hart's sculptures are based on the icosidodecahedron (the same shape that is on a soccer ball).


After seeing a sculpture made out of old floppy diskettes, I thought, "I can do that." I looked at the geometry of how the cuts were made. Then I created a mitre-box for cutting perfect squares and slicing them at a 36 degree cut on a small craft paper cutter (using blue painter's tape). If you look at the square, you can see where to put the cuts and how far the cuts should go.


Three or four hours later... I slid the last blue square into place. Looking at the icosidodecahedron, I thought, "Wow. Cool." Then I knew I had to pose like Albrecht Dürer with it.

I think next time I'll use more tape to make better cutting guides (and cut the squares first using the guides instead of marking out squares with a pencil).




Looking down one axis, you can see how the opposite pentagons are flipped. Hart pointed out on his page that this is six cubes exploding. If I make another, I think I'll choose a different color so the finished project doesn't look like a Cubist representation of a hydrangea. Maybe (if I get some help) I can make some more for Special Wordos Awards.

Yesterday I started to make a shrine by cutting out an oval hole from an eggshell.  I'd seen pictures in an art book and I thought it would be fun.  I used a box cutter to score the shell and eventually popped out a window into the shell.  Then I had fried eggs.

Cutting out the window left some rough edges that I managed to sand down a little after washing out the inside of the egg.

So now I had a mini eggshell shrine -- or, more accurately, a pyx or reliquary.  I looked through my jewelry box for things that could fit inside an egg. 

And then the following realization sideswiped me:  I'm building a shrine to something out of a craftily-cut egg shell.  But what do I want to enshrine?  Did I really want to enshrine a Disney pin, faux-medieval coin, or LED earring?

So that leaves me a photo of my family.  Grandma?  No -- I'd had an elaborate arts-and-craft Viking good-bye for her, which would seem to be undone by putting her into an egg.   My family?  No -- a static image of my family would be a shrine to the moment they were frozen by the photo. 

In a sarcastic moment I considered putting a small mirror in so I could sing "Me" to the Isis-Istarte chant; but that would be a shrine to my own Neo-Pagan Irritation. 

I could paint the inside of the egg in shades of darkening blue, like Vigali Hamilton does with rock sculptures.  Or black.  Mark would like that: a shrine to empty nothingness. 

I kind of like that, too; except that I would look into the blackness of the egg as a medatative focus or a tool to scry into the future.  A shrine to meditation seems a little too ironic.  A shrine to the future?  I can see myself dusting a shrine to the future, which sounds like a Laurie Anderson song.

So if you see me, one eyebrow slightly raised, a crinkle in my forehead, looking off-center at a small object, you'll know that I'm pondering its symbolic resonances.  And if it will fit inside the egg.

A long time ago, when I lived at Arcosanti, I learned how to find True North from Tomiaki Tamura by using a plumb line, string and a drafting compass. If I'm remembering correctly, Tomiaki tacked a small nail into a slab of concrete (there are a lot of flat slabs of concrete at Arcosanti).

I'd always wondered where North was in relationship to our house. I'd done a quick and dirty siting off of Polaris (which is a little off of True North, but will get closer and closer until something like 2093, at which point it will get farther away again). But using the sun is supposed to be more accurate than using just Polaris.

Two weeks prior, I created a work space. I used a drill guide to drill a perpendicular hole into the side of an old crate. Then I pounded a long nail through the guide hole. The idea was to have a completely vertical gnomon coming out of a level flat plane. Then the clouds rolled in and I couldn't test my box until today.

In practice, my nail was a little bent, the drill guide was cheap, and not only was the box old, but it turned out the side that I wanted to use was slightly warped. All of these add in little measurement errors.

I already had a notion that our local solar noon happens around 12:20 PM, Pacific Standard Time (1:20, Pacific Daylight Time). So around noon daylight time, I set the box on the ground in our back yard. Our yard is pretty catty-wumpus, so I used a photographer's level to even out the top (this is when I discovered the top was a little warped).

Next, I used a loop of thread and a yellow colored pencil to draw a series of circles centered on the gnomon. Ideally I would have marked the place where the tip of the nail's shadow touched each circle; but my first circle was too big. I managed to draw a second circle that was even with the shadow. I drew a third circle that I hoped would give me another reading, but it was too small, and the shadow never reached it. Source of errors: having only one set of measurements, changing the angle of the pencil may have created an imperfect circle and the thread may have stretched or moved the gnomon.

Then I waited. The shadow made an elliptical path along the top of the crate and inched toward the east side of the middle circle. Another source of error -- I'm becoming farsighted, and I had to take off my glasses to be sure I was seeing the second point correctly; this didn't occur to me when I marked the first point. When the shadow came into contact with the circle, I took off my glasses, marked the place, and got out my compass.

I used the points where the path of the gnomon's shadow intersected the circle as the center of two other circles. The two points where these circles intersected defined a line which pointed (assuming that all the errors canceled each other out) to True North. I used the nail and a pencil to get a site line and placed two iron stakes at opposite sides of the yard.

As I had suspected from my earlier siting off of Polaris, the house and the local streets are squared up with the cardinal directions (assuming, of course, that my eyeball measurements are accurate). This means that one could use the street curbs in our neighborhood to tell when local solar noon is. And our house.


Oh -- Janet Hart gave me a good suggestion. Ideally, I could use a magnetic hiking compass to take a magnetic north reading and find out how many degrees apart magnetic north and celestial north are. Then, whenever I felt like building my own personal Stonehenge in the backyard, I could line things up with a magnetic compass.

Even on a cloudy day.

Next time, I will have to see about getting an unwarped piece of wood, an extra-straight, extra-long pipe (longer gnomon equals greater precision) and I'll have to figure out a way to use lasers!

Here's what happens when geeks go to the beach in January and it's 60F with no wind.

I decided that I needed to make a Viking Ship to say goodbye to Grandma. (I think if we'd been able to be at her grave site I'd feel less strongly.) So I gathered craft tools. After about ninety seconds of research, I decided to make a keeled and clinkered hull "dragon ship." I figured I'd forgo cutting out cardboard planks and use a sheet for each side of the hull.



For the keel, I cut out identical shapes and glued them together to hide the cereal box printing. I also cut out some dragon shapes for the head. I didn't want to paint the ship, so I relied on different layers to get the idea across.

As I was cutting out the shapes, I remembered all the Viking decor she used to have around her Ash Street house -- mostly pewter longboats. I'm trying to remember if she used to wear a Thor's hammer (I think it was called a "Norwegian" or "Viking" cross at the time) or if that was one of her friends.



At first I thought I'd be able to use thwarts to help give the ship a classic longboat shape, but they didn't really work. If I'd had more time (and patience) I suppose I would have built the ship the proper way, as it took about an hour of fiddling with the cardboard hull to get it to stay ship-shaped.

Typically, there was a Wagner soundtrack going on in my head.



After gluing the wrong shape sides to the keel, I ended up trimming the excess cardboard from the hull off (while it was still attached to the front of the keel under the dragon's head). I used some heavy clips to keep the hull halves in place along the keel while the glue dried.

For some reason I kept going back to Grandma's Ash Street house in my mind. She used to have a windowsill of knick-knacks, mostly ceramic owls that at one time had been filled with skin product. For some reason I remembered her in one of her lavender sweaters (with a braided knit going down the front).


To widen the boat, I ended up putting a kind of thwart system in post-hull-construction. For my purposes (having a boat that would float long enough to be a virtual pyre), it worked; but if I wanted an actual floating model I would have sectioned the hull more. I added some ballast (big old nails) along the keel to keep the boat upright in the water.



Once the boat was glued together, I used some duct tape along the bottom to keep the hull parts attached to the keel while I widened the boat more with some more thwart parts. The tape kept the boat from leaking too terribly. I also cut out some shields and a picture of Grandma. In this picture, she's drinking her second-favorite social drink, Scotch (I think her last drop of the stuff was when she was 95 or 96). Her favorite drink was probably "half a cup of coffee (but only if you're getting up)."


I put some paper bits into the boat, filled up a wading pool, placed the boat in the water, and lit it. My inner pyromaniac would have liked bigger flames (I couldn't find any rubbing alcohol), but I think it was more in Grandma's character the way the flames quietly and efficiently consumed what needed to go.

"Goodbye Grandma," I whispered. The boat sank quickly into the cold water with a hiss.