2022

This post has been a blocker for me because I wanted to get it done before writing other posts, I know right, stupid. Just write Aegir, it's your blog, you make the rules for it. Tsk.

So yeah, I started going through the photos I'd taken of everything and there were loads. Then I got to July and… nothing. There's not much for the rest of the year either.

What was going on?

Well, these are all the things that have a physical artefact, and a lot of what I made in the rest of the year was on the computer, or a lot of planning and learning for stuff to come later. I made several fonts, did some vector-based lettering, took a hell of a lot of photos and spent a lot of the summer tending to the garden.

So I don't need to worry. It turns out there might be a cadence to my projects based on the time of year. I like the idea of that.

So here goes.

January

I dug out some SketchUp files and exported views as vector so I could draw them with the Axidraw. Kinda fun. The files are a right mess though, you really rely on the Axidraw Inkscape extension to draw the lines in a sensible order.

White ink is a pain. It's OK when doing it by hand because you stop and pump the nib when it needs it, but when it's a machine doing it, it doesn't know when the ink has stopped. And because white ink is a pain, it stops frequently.

February

More lettering. I made a font of sorts to use with the axidraw, it's a set of paths that I put together by hand and make blackletter glyphs when the axidraw is using the right kind of pen. It's also interesting with other pens too.

Gold pens work a lot better than white pens. I really like this. I should do more.

Attempting some traditional effects. The gold pen tended to scrape off a bit. I've since done some other stuff with gold leaf (real and fake) that would work better with this.

I had a play with some watercolour resists and the Axidraw. It was pretty good!

And then, some seriously time-consuming vector shading work. I like how it turned out, maybe a bit 1980's?

March

I bought a laser cutter! But before that arrived, some other things.

One for St. David's Day.

I really enjoyed doing this tree. I used a few things for it, I was using Vectornator a lot at the time as the way it worked made things easier, it's not so good now as they've made it more like other apps. I used some extensions in Inkscape to do the interpolation of shapes to create the shading.

I want to make a doll's house at some point, but I'm starting small and fairly simple. This is 10cm across.

The flower lid box was the first box I made. The dodecahedron was a test of the laser cutter's scoring and paper cutting, and the rounded square object is the second box I was making.

April

Making more and more complex objects.

I wanted to see how the plywood textures would work stacked as pieces. I really like this box. I've made one recently with a similar technique.

The parts, the construction jig and the final result. I made a few like this, I see them as being 3D sketches of vases. Some of the shapes are influenced by concrete shapes in brutalist architecture.

This was the most complex thing I'd made and it took a lot of trial and error. A lot of it was getting the right settings for the laser cutter (many scorched and mangled bits!). The trickiest bit was getting the right angles for the edges, I made an angle jig for a belt sander I have and very carefully sanded the edges down. I made a fair few mistakes, but I was really pleased with the end result.

May

Onto yet more complex things, and then something really simple and relaxing.

I will eventually make a little group of these shops. This second one was pretty complicated to make, the dormer windows and angled shopfront touch a fair bit of planning! Actually the whole thing took a lot of planning. I'm really pleased with how they ended up. I did think about painting them but I really like the tones of the plain materials.

A few illustrations and designs I've done have a common motif of circles inside squares. I did this and the end result looks a lot like something done by Vasarely. That wasn't consciously intentional but I like his work so some influence is going to come through.

June

A few experiments and back to lettering for a bit.

I was wondering about making book nooks which are fun sculptural objects that sit on your bookshelf, about the size of a book, but have a scene inside them. The idea of a lot of them is they resemble the scene of a famous fictional world. I was thinking of playing with perspectives with one. This was part of that testing. I still want to make one, but I've quite a list of ideas.

Purely playing with these. I redrew some letters I already had to see how they'd work at different optical sizes.

July

Heatwave! Clearly I didn't feel up to making anything this month. I took a lot of photos of flowers and insects though.

August

Clearly summer is not the time for me to make things, though I did make a fantastic cake and I got a big straw hat.

Summer is for sitting in the shade outside with a big hat. And making cake.

September

I have lots of photos of the beach and the garden for September.

This is where I really realised the iPhone has suddenly gone crap with macro photos. It used to be so good. But anyway, biscuits.

October

Mostly food! But some ink too.

Not sure what I was planning, but I still have these bits of paper hanging around.

I'd never made quiche before, and I really got into it. I also made another apple cake. It's from The Joy of Vegan Baking by Colleen Patrick-Goudreau.

November

I spent a lot of October and November making some fonts and implementing them and (purchased) layered fonts on this site. I've barely used any of it of course. EDIT: I've redesigned the site and only use typefaces I've made myself now.

A screenshot of a layered font test, and a chunk of a carrot cake I made.

December

Back to making things!

I had this oval frame and back in 2020 I wanted to have monthly designs for it. I got as far as March and then the pandemic happened and it stuck at March for months. I have a monthly desktop calendar and a daily one, so I thought of having a year one. The first design at the top was good, but didn't really have the right feel on the wall, so I changed it. There's something totemic about it perhaps.

I'd seen a few things on Instagram of an embossing technique that someone was claiming they invented. I looked it up online and there was lots of it. You can see from the pictures above the basics of it, I used a bone folder tool to gently push the paper into the cutout. The light is so you can see where to press. The stencil is 1mm acrylic cut out with the laser cutter.

Something I continued with (and how!) in January and February 2023 I started here. I made a 15cm square drawer box with a marquetry top. I did a lot more with laser-cut marquetry after this.

That was 2022

I made a lot of stuff! I'm fascinated by the apparent cadence of me making things over the year. I wonder if that'll be the same this year? We shall see.

I'm so glad I've got this post out of the way.