Many people think the fronts of cars look life faces.  There is even an entire Flickr set devoted to car faces!  Well, ever since I saw my house for this first time, I thought my house look like a face.  The windows are perfect eyes and the garage looks like a mouth.

I needed to put my anthropomorphic house theory to the test. (Yes, I had to look up how to spell anthropomorphic.)  For Halloween, I decided to use my house face palette to create a scary face.  Adam and I …

I purchased a dome chair from a big box store last year and it didn’t hold up very well.  The chair part ripped and fell of the frame.  Since the frame was still left intact, I didn’t want to throw it away -so I reused it to make a new chair.  Using duct tape (the best duct tape of all – Nashua 357), I created a new frame for the chair.  This project was quick, cheap, and easy; it used less than $10 in materials and only an hour of …

The SheekGeek office doesn’t have very good lighting and because of this, working on things at my work desk is always tough.  I’ve tried a lot of different solutions to this problem such as the lighted helping hands set-up, sitting a small fluorescent light on top of my parts organizer, and even hanging the lamp from a couple of the bins on the top row of the parts organizer.  None of these provided a good solution.  The fluorescent lamp was rather blinding, and with every solution, my hands cast shadows …

After baking a cheesecake, my husband cut off the top to the lemon juice container.  It turns out that the resulting plastic container creates the perfect jug-like instrument.  Because it is plastic you can easily squeeze the “lemon” to create different sounds.  Just like a real jug instrument, you can also add water to make different notes.  I wonder if you can add holes to create a ocarina-like instrument?  Perhaps that will be another post…

The Rocketry of Central Carolina (ROCC) hosts rocket launches using their rocket pad for rockets from 1/4 A motor size all the way up to gigantic K size motors.   Adam and I have gone several times just to watch the launches, and a few times Adam has launched his own rockets.  I much prefer this to the times he used the car battery to launch a few homemade rockets at our home.  Watching rocket launches is free and a small donation is recommended if you use the ROCC launchpad.  See …

Now that some time has passed, I am able to reflect thoughtfully and professionally over the Maker Faire that was held in Durham on Sunday, April 25th.
From a teacher’s perspective, four makers in particular presented things I just “need” to have in my classroom.  This is my wish list:

Classroom Visits for “Scrap” from the ScrapExchange
Leatherbound Books
ShopBot Tyro
DIY Multi-Touch Screen

Find reasons and more information about each of my choices after the jump.

Viovio has been described on blogs and websites as being one of the best quality photobook services available. Because of this reason, I decided to try their services and overall I am pleased with my experience.

This is the first part in a two part series about how to design, build, and finish a simple woodworking project.  This part focuses on the design and build of the project.
Jessica and I tend to collect a lot of books.   I mean a LOT of books.  When one of those cheap 7ft tall particle board bookcases we had finally bit the dust, and fell on me, I decided we would only get solid wood bookcases from now on.  I also decided that it was probably best that the bookcase …

Everything about the Ikea Alex made it a perfect addition to our home office – except its color. After a few coats of black spray paint, some mod podge, and damask styled scrapbooking paper, I had myself an Ikea Alex hack that looked perfect for our tastes.