Getting started
This is Making, my new blog to document my various making endeavors.
It seems a truism that the grass is always greener. Having a career in digital work, I have long been enamored with making things with my hands. At various stages of my life, I've had some exposure to a fair share of techniques and disciplines – woodworking in my father's basement wood shop, metalworking shop class in junior high, and a handful of college electives, including glass work, jewelry metalwork, and woodworking. Since college, however, my creative life has primarily been lived on screens.
This changed to some degree in late 2015, when we bought our first home. A top priority after moving was building a fence to keep our dogs secured in the backyard.
In the intervening years, I've had a bunch of opportunities for DIY work (including building more fences with my dad, as the existing, aging wood fences couldn't always hold up to Utah windstorms).
The DIY work picked up speed in 2020 with the pandemic. Being home all the time gave me the time, and the impetus, to tackle things that I'd been putting off or simply came up..
Don't get me wrong, house projects are gratifying, but they don't always scratch that creative itch.
So I've been thinking about more creative pursuits for some time. Far too long, honestly – a friend once opined that if you've been meaning to do a thing for a long enough time and haven't done it, you're probably not going to. So, in some way this year I've begun to prove him wrong. I've been dreaming up projects but not starting them for years and years. I've been following maker YouTubers (primarily Adam Savage / Tested, Simone Giertz, and more recently Laura Kampf). But it's time to get busy and be a little more intentional.
What do I expect to post here? There are a few projects I have underway, so there will be updates on those. I picked up a 3D printer a few months ago (perhaps the impetus for finally beginning). So, expect 3D printing, model-building, maybe painting. I would expect to see infrastructure work from time to time. And I'm sure I will still have home DIY projects from time to time.
I don't particularly expect a large readership, but if you are reading this, well, thanks! You can subscribe if you'd like to stay up to date and receive emails when new content is published.