judyonthenet

For those of you that don’t know, Etsy is like the eBay of handmade crafts. People all over the country sell their crafty wares on there. I never bought anything on Etsy before I started planning for my wedding. During the stressful period of planning the event, I found myself gazing at beautiful items on the site (and elsewhere) that were too expensive for my budget. Like beautifully designed invitations or amazingly constructed cake toppers. Eventually, I broke down and splurged on a couple custom items for my wedding. Both Kelvin and Anna assured me it was alright to treat myself, so I shall blame them both for pushing me over the edge!

The first thing I ordered was my hair accessory. I don’t remember how I discovered the blog, but I had subscribed to The Flirty Guide, which is a pretty decent blog of a Bay Area wedding accessory maker, Stacie Tamaki. Her website has a bunch of “flirty ideas”, many of which came from her own wedding. One of those ideas was decorating her dress with kanzashi flowers. Kanzashi are hairpieces traditionally worn by geishas, and they’re decorated with flowers made of folded silk, kinda like cloth origami. I figured a kanzashi hair accessory would be a cute way to add color to my outfit and further incorporate my “Asian autumn” theme.

There’s some amazing kanzashi artists out there, including one officially trained in the art on Etsy. In the end, I went with a different Etsy seller, Regina AKA littlecookie, because I loved her dye work. The gradients on her pieces were beautiful, and she had previously made an autumn piece similar to what I’d be looking for.

Almost the final product (Pic: Regina’s flickr). I made her change the stems of
the second piece to greenand added leaves to better match my qipao.

Regina was super nice and easy to work with. So nice and easy in fact, I ended up ordering a second piece to wear with my qipao… and then I ordered four more pieces for bridesmaid gifts. (Yeah, I was hooked.) Regina was excellent in doing all my little requests; I was very specific with color, positioning, etc. Even after she finished, I asked her to make a couple changes, and she did them with no complaints. I don’t really understand how she tolerated my Bridezilla self, but I’m so glad she did! They came out great, gorgeous and cute at the same time. Some pictures of the pieces in action:

Getting ready before tea ceremony (pic: Anna)

Putting on the veil (pic: FC Wong Weddings)

Cheers at Monkey Island (pic: FC Wong Weddings)

Putting on the blindfold for games (pic: FC Wong Weddings)

Wearing my kanzashi to brunch the next morning (pic: Kelvin)

What’s funny is that Regina puts a little paper with all her pieces, warning the wearer that pieces don’t do well in rain and high humidity. Well, Mother Nature was tired of the dry spell we had for months and made sure to bring it on on our wedding. I wore them anyway, and they never lost their rigidity or shape.

Goofing around for bridal party pics in the rain (pic: FC Wong Weddings)

The pieces were pretty much perfect. I think the only thing I would change would be the backing used to hold the petals. It would have been better if they were a similar color to the piece instead of white, as the backing would be visible in certain angles. I (very nervously) trimmed some of the backing off so they’d be less visible from the front.

Showing aunties the kanzashi (pic: FC Wong Weddings)

The other thing I’d change would be making the second piece for the right side of my head. I never thought about what my “good side” is, so I just stuck the pieces on the left side of my head. But we decided during pictures that my good side was my right side, and there’s so many pictures of the right, accessory-less side of my head! Even for non-posed pics, everything I did, my right side would be the one facing people i.e. the ceremony. It bugged me how few pictures I ended up getting of my hair pieces. (Is that weird? To be disappointed I didn’t get enough pictures of my hair accessories?!) I wish I had thought that through a little better.

The other Etsy item I ended up splurging on was the cake topper. Going along with the Asian theme, I wanted to get kokeshi dolls as cake toppers. It was hard to find authentic kokeshi dolls for this task, but there was a great substitute on Etsy. Teresa, AKA Mikazuki81, specifically makes kokeshi… for cake toppers! Her figures are cuter than regular kokeshi, IMO.

Teresa, like Regina, was super awesome to work with. She was also incredibly patient with me with the timeline. I contacted her 6 weeks before the wedding, which is within her request of 4 weeks. However, I didn’t give her all the details she needed until less than 2 weeks before the wedding because I was still so indecisive about so many things. Without complaint, she took all my details (even the late ones) and got them on the figures. She sent the cake topper as soon as she finished, and I got them a couple days before the wedding (phew!). And they were so cute in person!

The final product (pic: FC Wong Weddings)

What I thought was weird and initially a bad thing was that the figures are not attached to the base. I worried about stability, as did the person who put the cake topper on the cake (probably my day-of coordinator) apparently. When I arrived to the reception, the figures had tape sticking them to the base. However, this is actually an excellent feature. You can position your figures anyway you want, and people can play with them like toys when they’re off the cake. Basically, I was left with cute little action figures of Kelvin and me once the wedding was over.

The cake! (pic: FC Wong Weddings)

Kelvin likes the cake. If he looks weird, it’s cuz it’s a reflection. (pic: FC Wong Weddings)

Unfortunately, because of the humidity of the day, the cakes were extra soft. The cake topper ended up toppling over, and the bride and groom fell down three stories of cake. Groom was okay… bride not so much. She lost her head!

Oh noes!

You can see the trajectory of the fall kinda in this pic. My mother stuck the
people back on without the base. I saw her do this without knowing about
the fall and had a minor freakout about her messing with my cake
before she explained the situation to me. (pic: FC Wong Weddings)

I contacted Teresa after the wedding for advice on fixing it, and she was super nice with adhesive suggestions. I still haven’t fixed it. I don’t mind my bride’s gained head mobility, so I’ll leave it as is until it bugs me again. These cake toppers are so cute and not-corny, there’s no problem displaying them after the wedding. Right now, they’re chilling underneath our TV!

Handing over the topper to Patty (DOC) for safekeeping (pic: FC Wong Weddings)

While I was initially hesitant with both of these Etsy purchases, I’m so happy I ended up getting them, as they make unique momentos because they’re all custom. If you’re tempted to get something a little selfish for yourself on your wedding, I would say based on my own experience you should definitely go for it! Even after time has passed after my wedding, I have zero regrets about getting them… and there’s SO many things I still regret about the wedding to this day!

New thing I learned today: Miis (avatars on the Wii) were based conceptually off kokeshi dolls.

(This is actually one of our messups. I had a perfect one I saved for myself that got
lost on the way to the reception for display and now it’s gone FOREVER :’( :’( :’( )

For our wedding invitations, I wanted to do them ourselves to make them more personal and to be a little creative with them. (There is probably no better opportunity for DIY projects than a wedding. :P )The theme I decided on once I chose Hakone Gardens as the venue for the ceremony was an Asian autumn, with the Japanese maple (momiji) as my primarily inspiration. I wanted this theme incorporated in the invites, along with clear Japanese and Taiwanese influences. I had toyed with the ideas of more nerdy things, like maybe a puzzle/riddle oriented invite or maybe binary for anything number related, but I stuck with something more traditional and classic in the end. For the nerd/creative factor, I spent it on the inner envelope.

The Inner Envelope
For people who haven’t gotten married or didn’t pay much attention to wedding traditions for when they did get married, wedding invitations have two envelopes: an inner envelope that holds all your invitation parts and an outer envelope that takes the beating from the USPS. We didn’t want to spend too much on the invites, so we didn’t do any reply cards or whatnot since they’re costly and unnecessary. As a result, there weren’t multiple physical parts to our invitation; we opted to have everything online on our wedding website. The inner envelope was purely decorative and to state explicitly who was invited (like you might address the outer envelope to your friend, but invite both your friend and his girlfriend explicitly on the inner envelope… or explicitly leave out people’s kids like we did for our adults-only shindig). I’m sure the first thing everyone thinks of when “paper” and “Japanese” are put together is “origami”, so I looked for interesting origami envelope options online. I found a picture of an origami crane envelope on flickr and a couple sets of instructions on how to make it through Google. I found these instructions to be hard to follow, but Kelvin figured them out pretty easily since it’s a simpler derivative of the regular paper crane, and he already memorized how to make regular paper cranes from years of Japanese-American Sunday school.

The crane envelope requires a square, and to make an envelope of invitation-ish size, you need a square that’s over a foot in width. If we had lots of money and free time, it would have been nice to get pretty Japanese washi paper and cut them to be the appropriate sized perfect squares, which is not trivial. Unfortunately, we had neither of these things, so I searched for places that sold large origami paper that I could obtain within the week to make the 6-weeks-before-wedding deadline. (Yeah, I kinda procrastinated on this.) My best option appeared to be 13 3/4″ origami paper squares by Yasutomo. Red is one of the available colors, and I figured a red envelope would be nice to make it more Chinese-y. I called all the local Japanese stationary shops around San Jose, but the largest paper most of them had was 9″ wide. Luckily, Yasutomo happens to be headquartered in South San Francisco, so I gave them a call to see if I could find a local store that carries these. They tried to locate a store for me using their system, but it must be a really archaic system, because they needed zip codes to check who had what. But it’s not like I know every stinkin’ zip code in the South Bay! They told me there was a store in San Francisco called Paper Tree that picks up products from them regularly every week, so they’d definitely be able to have the paper I was looking for in stock within the next couple days. I gave them a call, and sure enough, they already had the paper in stock. Ten packets of it even! So they set aside ten packets of extra large origami paper for me to pick, and my friend Rodney (also one of the groomsman) picked it up for me. They even gave us a 10% discount, which was real swell of them.

Big origami paper

This origami paper was the most expensive component of the invitation, simply because Yasutomo does not sell extra large origami paper packets in one color. You have to get their packet, which has 6 reds, 6 blues, 6 greens, and a single each of gold and silver metallic. With each packet costing ~$7, that’s like over $1 for each red origami paper, since all the other colors are worthless to us. We used a couple of the other colors for practice, but needless to say we have a ton of blue and green left. (If you need extra large blue or green origami paper, feel free to contact me :P) The paper is the thin, cheap-feeling plain origami paper kind, but in hindsight something thick like washi paper probably would have been a pain to fold 60 times. Paper held together just fine, and the dye/ink never came off the paper onto our fingers. Kelvin is much better at me in origami, so he did the majority of them. If any of my guests got a crappy crane, it was probably folded by me. Because of how time consuming it was to fold 60+ of these, I recruited some of my work buddies to help out. Thanks Mike and Ted!

Kelvin shows his appreciation for origami.

Mike, Hoang, and Ted making or practicing to make crane envelopes.

To make the envelopes more Chinese, I purchased a double happiness stamp and gold archival ink from Paper Source. It’s not as nice as embossing it, but given the time crunch, I was still pretty happy with the result. The stamp can be weak from certain angles, but bold in others. The bad part of stamping is getting it even and not messing up the stamp. Kelvin was particularly awful at this, so I did most of the stamping, but I still had many off-center or double-printed stamps. If it had been easier to get more origami paper, I would have been more particular, but that wasn’t really an option. I also learned from this that stamp ink apparently takes a while to dry, even though we supposedly had one of the faster-drying ink brands.

This one is about to be stamped.

For writing the invitees names on the inner envelope, I used a gold ink pen that I bought from Mitsuwa. The resulting writing is very nice, but the pen is kind of a pain to use. It seemed to like to leak ink a lot above the tip, so we’d often end up with ink on our fingertips. Occasionally, the pen would barf up a glob of ink. Thankfully, we only ruined on envelope this way.

The final result is a red crane envelope with gold touches. It’s got a nice envelope flap that you can tuck underneath the crane. The envelope apparently isn’t the most intuitive; I watched several of our friends almost rip our envelope figuring out how to get the invitation out. The color and feel of the envelope also reminds of red envelopes that Chinese folks use to give our money gifts.

A batch of envelopes waiting for the stamp ink to dry

The Invitation
The size of our invitations were limited by the size of our envelopes, and our design was limited by our lack of money. My coworker April helped me out A TON, primarily by taking me to the local paper chain, Kelly Paper. It’s a giant warehouse with tons of different kinds of paper, but most of it is for office printing. They have samples of just about every paper they have that you can take for free to try at home in your printer, and their salespeople are super nice and helpful (at least the guy named Jesus working at the one I went to happened to be super nice and helpful).

The thickest paper I could find was a paper weight of 80lb, which is kinda thin for an invitation. I wanted an ivory toned paper with a brown background, and Kelly Paper happened to have these sheets of dark brown cover paper (I think it was called Classic Columns or something) that was also 80lb. An 80lb paper glued to another 80lb paper felt invitation-like enough for me, so we went with that. What’s great about the sheets is that they cut to the size you want for you, and it costs the same regardless of number of cuts. So I was able to get ~100 brown cards of the right size for the cost of 3 or 4 sheets, which were a few bucks each. This was particularly great for us, since we needed an atypical size for our special crane envelopes. For the ivory paper, I found one that had nice grains/fibers in it, giving it a very natural tone. I forget the name of the paper, but it’s by Evergreen and the color was “birch”. They not surprisingly also supplied envelopes, so I bought the cheapest box of A8’s I could find.

Most of our materials

The good thing about going to an office supply store is that everything is cheap. The bad thing is that everything is in bulk. Using the envelopes as an example, you can get 10 packs of A7.5s from Paper Source (they don’t have A8s, so I’m just using A7.5 as an example) for $4.50 each. So for ~$30, I’d get 60 envelopes. At Kelly Paper, I got freaking 250 envelopes for the same price. The cheap-o envelopes are thinner, and you can only get white, but who cares? This is for the outer envelope that takes the beating from the postal service. Now, if for some strange reason I need another 190 envelopes… well, I’ve got them :P It’s very handy for things like printer messups.

Total spent at Kelly Paper:
Ivory, fiber-y 80lb cover 8.5″ x 11″ paper – 250 sheets – $26.57
A8 plain white envelopes – 250 envelopes – $29.61
Brown 80lb cover paper stock – 3 or 4 large sheets cut into ~100 pieces of the right size, plus a bunch of leftover scraps – $24.15 – Actually, this number seems high. I got this from my credit card bill cuz I lost the receipt from this purchase, so I’m wondering if I bought something else when I got this. But let’s assume it cost this much for now.

So for about 80 bucks, I got a ridiculous amount of paper and envelopes. Keep in mind, each sheet of ivory paper makes 2 invitations, so we only used like 40 pieces of paper for the invitation. We had quite a bit of leftover brown paper as well. We used all the brown leftovers and some ivory paper for programs later. We actually ended up wasting quite a bit of the ivory paper when we print the programs because we made a printing mistake on the entire batch… regardless, we still have a bunch of ivory paper left. Very cost-effective choice for materials.

For the actual invitation design, I wanted to have momiji leaves on the invite. We looked at images of momiji leaves on flickr for inspiration. Kelvin took one of the images (this lovely picture from flickr user * Yumi *, to be exact) and, with some Photoshop/Illustrator magic or something, made it into a nice, artsy graphic in bright red and orange colors. Printing on the grainy, ivory paper in an inkjet meant the print would bleed a little bit, but this turned out to be a good thing for the image, as it made it look more like brushwork. Kelvin printed two invites on each sheet, including marks to show where the paper needed to be cut. Printing our own color images was definitely a money saver, as doing color in a print shop isn’t cheap.

Pre-Kinkos invites

Because the ink tended to bleed on the paper we got, we didn’t want to print the wedding text ourselves, and we didn’t have access to a good laser printer. We put the print layout in an Adobe Illustrator file and took it to Kinko’s. Black & white printing was insanely cheap; I think like a few cents a sheet. The pricey part was having them cut the paper for us. We borrowed a paper cutter from April, but amount of cutting required would still be time-consuming, so we opted to have Kinko’s do it. Man, what a rip. It’s like $2 per cut, and Kelvin didn’t line the invites on any of the paper edges or put the invites next to each other, so we needed to make 6 cuts. The bulk of the Kinko’s cost was in the cutting, and their cutting was totally gimpy! They didn’t follow our markings very well, and the edges weren’t totally straight or parallel. Plus I think the guy would cut too many at once, as a handful of invites had mangled edges or weird clamp imprints. It was still usable, but for some cards that were really off, Kelvin had to recut them on the paper cutter to make it straight.

Inkjet vs. Laser

With the printed portions done, next was more manual labor. With more help from coworkers (thanks Hoang and Ted and Mike!), we pasted the printed ivory portion on top of the brown card stock. We were using double-sided tape with glue stick to adhere to the two pieces, but I underestimated our usage of tape, and it ran out. We ended up using only glue stick for some the invitations, but the glue stick held pretty okay, especially for a glue stick.

Some finished and unfinished invites

This was it for our invitations. We took our invites and stuck them in our crane envelopes. Perfect fit!

Invitation and inner envelope together

The Outer Envelope and Postage
Okay, this part wasn’t very complicated, but still a little time consuming. I printed each envelope using my inkjet printer (no friggin’ way was I gonna hand address each envelope like is recommended from some wedding etiquette guides), and I stuck a heart stamp on each one. Well, the stamp is a dude carrying a giant heart… not sure what that means really, but it was the only good heart stamp the USPS had. I took a finished invitation to the post office, and they said I could get away with one stamp each invitation! The second post office I went was hesitant at first, but they measured it and realized it’d be no issue. I also had invitations I needed to mail to Taiwan (even tho no one from Taiwan except my father was coming), so I stuck all of those invites in a couple giant envelopes, got exact postage from the USPS counter, and mailed it to a family representative to distribute to relatives.

Conclusions
While we were trying to keep the invitations cheap, all the materials (paper, adhesives, printing, stamps, etc.) still cost us about $170 for what ended up to be around 65 invitations. That’s pushing $3 an invitation, which isn’t exactly bargain basement but not as costly as having someone else make and design them. This is ignoring the fact we have a ton of crap leftover. If you consider it by exact cost of materials per invitation (one origami paper, half a sheet of ivory paper, etc.), it’s easily under a dollar per invite. I’m pretty happy with the final results, especially how last minute we did everything.

My advice for future brides:
- Look online for inspirations. Etsy, Craft, and flickr were particularly inspiring.
- Don’t bother with reply cards. They’re costly, wasteful, and the only people who get to keep them are you and the inconsiderate jerks who don’t RSVP. (A huge portion of your guests will NOT RSVP, regardless of how easy you try to make the RSVP process, paper or no paper.)
- Educate yourself on the different paper types to know exactly what you want. If you’re fancy-shmancy, read up on print types as well.
- Buy in bulk, especially paper that can be used for other things in the wedding. Programs, name cards, table numbers…
- Check out office supply stores for bulk materials.
- Check with the post office for the exact cost of mailing an invitation.
- Ask your friends to help. Friendship = free manual labor = awesome.
- Don’t do things last minute, especially for DIY stuff! I don’t even know why I bother saying this since I never listen to this myself…

Kelvin’s contribution:

steps and you’ll make less mistakes!

New thing I learned today: The paper weight number is how many pounds 500 standard sized sheets of that paper weighs. “Standard size” varies with the type of paper, like text (25″ x 38″) versus cover (20″ x 26″), so 80lb text paper is not the same thickness as 80lb cover paper.

Last week, my old purse officially bit the dust when one end of the strap completely snapped off. I knew it was eventually going to happen; the leather had been fraying away at the ends the last few weeks. It lasted almost a year and a half, which is okay considering I only spent $20 on it at Kohl’s and I put a ton of crap in it. I got another purse from Kohl’s last weekend, this time bigger, but still in the low 20s in price. (It’s kinda like this one, but not exactly. Same brand and extra crap, tho.) The downside of the new purse is that there’s no top flap, so anybody could reach in and grab stuff. There’s a zippered middle section, which seems like a good place to put pricey electronics.

However, it doesn’t have another zippered section (aside from the “secret” pocket all purses have) where I can put all my miscellaneous small loose junk nor card holders to put miscellaneous cards and stamps. I don’t want to put those things in the big zippered section as they may scratch up whatever handheld I put in there, and I don’t want to put them in the main, large, open sections where they’ll be impossible to find and may fall out if my purse is knocked over. This missing feature was driving me nuts, so I did something about it. I really liked the zippered front portion of my old purse, and since I’m trying to recycle more and be more crafty, I decided I’d make a similar section for my new purse, with help from my old purse.

My old purse, with one end being held together with staples :\

I wanted the card holders from my old purse, so I seam ripped it out. While I was at it, I also took out the zipper. I cut out some of the lining from the back part of my purse for more fabric of the same color, and I saved the metal rings and leather strap. You know, in case I ever needed to make any bondage stuff in the future :P

What’s left of my old purse.

My plan was to make something like a basic zipper coin purse, with the cardholders on one of the sides, and sew that into the inside of my new purse. Not exactly complex, but whatever… it works for me. I found these ghetto instructions on making a zipper purse, but it’s not the clearest tutorial, so I winged a lot of it. (Not that there’s much to “wing”… zipper purses are pretty easy.) Anyway, that’s my excuse as to why mine came out kinda gimpy. There’s some nicer instructions on how to make one here, but I didn’t find this until later. I wanted my zipper on the top anyway.

I realized the fabric I cut from the lining of my old purse wouldn’t be enough to make a zipper purse with, so I had to find some other material. I had some leftover black fabric from I don’t know what; I’m guessing it’s scraps from when I made ninja costumes a couple Halloweens ago. The inside of my purse is a dark brown, so black was the closest thing I had. I cut out two rectangles large enough would encompass the cardholders.

Two rectangles of black cotton fabric and the cardholders from my old purse.

I pinned the cardholders to one rectangle and sewed along the edges of the cardholder with my sewing machine. There’s an extra stitch on the bottom because there was extra fabric hanging out and it was bothering me.

With the inside side facing me, I ironed ~1cm of the top edge towards me on both fabric pieces. I laid the zipper down with the zipper pull on top, and I placed the ironed edges along the zipper, with outside side facing me (meaning you can’t see the cut edges which are folded in). I pinned the fabric pieces to the zipper. I had the zipper pulls pulled past the fabric so that the zipper would be flat, and the pulls wouldn’t get in the way of sewing the fabric.

Using my sewing machine with a zipper foot attached, I sewed the fabric to the zipper.

One side of the zipper sewn.

Both sides sewn on to the zipper, shown from the back.

I pulled the zipper pulls back to the middle and left the zipper a little open. This opening was needed to pull the purse right side out. I aligned the two black rectangles as evenly as I could, with the inside side facing out, and pinned them together. I sewed the edges avoiding the zipper parts. I did this since I wasn’t sure how to deal with the zipper, as I was worried about bending the needle.

Purse completely sewn, still inside out.

Because I was paranoid my construction wouldn’t be enough to keep the zipper together (though I’m sure it would), I did a criss-cross stitch very slowly over the zipper to make sure it stays shut.

Ignore the loose threads everywhere, please.

With all the sides completely sewn, I trimmed the edges a bit, cut off the excess zipper, turned the purse inside out, and voila!

The fabric by the ends of the zipper are wrinkled cuz the zipper was folded over when I made the seams. Oh wells.

The hardest part was definitely attaching the small purse to the insides of my large purse. I had to hand-sew this, since I wasn’t taking my new purse apart for kicks. My hand sewing is terrible; I have no form or technical stitch. I couldn’t turn my large purse inside out, so I had to sew inside the purse, which cramped my hands. It’s dark in there, and all the material and fabric is dark colored, so I couldn’t see anything. There’s also a lining on the other side of the lining I’m sewing on, which is lining to another purse section, so I needed to avoid this. So I’m “hand sewing” (randomly poking the need in and out) blindly, in a cramped space, with little material support since I’m “holding” the lining by pulling away an adjacent lining. I don’t know if that last sentence made any sense, but basically, it was freaking hard.

This is where the purse/pocket thing is going.

I only sewed one seam along the top. The rest of the zipper purse should be adequately supported by resting on the insides of the large purse.

Look at my crappy hand-stitch job! Argh!

And now, my finished product!

In this photo, the purse is rotated from the previous picture.

Now I can stick coins, card, stamps, random small unimportant objects into this zippered compartment. So what if it’s not on evenly and the inside edges are fraying? It’s functional and sufficiently contains small junks. My new purse is now officially adequate for my needs. Yay. This took me an evening to do, not the hour or so I spent ripping my old purse apart. I could have just cut parts out and then glued them to my purse, but no, that’d be too easy :P

Materials:
Old purse (cardholders and zipper) I was going to toss out – $0
Leftover black cotton fabric, 2 ~6×7″ pieces – $0
Black thread

Total cost: $0

I’m not sure where Kelvin heard about them (probably from some tech or DIY blog), but he’s been wanting to take classes at a place called TechShop. Currently only located in Menlo Park, TechShop is basically a place where nerds can play with large, dangerous tools, be creative, and make cool stuff. You pay for membership and access to their machines, but a lot of them require safety classes so you know how to properly use them. Kelvin was particularly interested in the laser cutter, so he dragged me with him to take a class last Saturday. I wasn’t fond of not doing nothing on a Saturday, but whatever… maybe I’d learn something.

TechShop is located right off 101, very close to the exit. It’s in a nondescript area of old office buildings and warehouses near the bay. When you first walk in, there’s a front desk to the right where you sign in, and to the left, a small room with random materials and tools you can purchase. There’s only 3 chairs in the waiting area, and a display with random brochures of tech-nerdy stuff sits in the back. The class we were taking, How To Cut Plastic, Wood and Paper with the Epilog Laser Cutter, cost $30 a person with no materials fee. Kelvin signed us up the day before online through their website. The class has a capacity of 5 people, and when all 5 showed up, our instructor, Laura, led us to one of the back rooms that held the Epilog laser cutter.

Walking towards the back of the building, you pass by a very large work area with a bunch of tables to your left. The far wall is covered with boxes of donated junk and scrap material for potential projects. To the right are small rooms with fun-sounding labels, like “3D-Printing Room”. Past the work area is a workstation with several computers, probably with software for the computer controlled machines. Past the computers is a lounge area with a small kitchen, where you can microwave your lunch or munch on complimentary popcorn from their popcorn machine.

The room with the laser cutter is pretty small, with the laser cutter in one corner and a desk with a computer against the wall and adjacent to the cutter. A large whiteboard is hung behind the desk, and the wall has all sorts of laser etching and cutting samples. The first part of the class was a mini-lecture. It started off with Laura giving us a tour of the machine. We learned about the important things we need to do to properly set up the machine and what (expensive) parts get damaged easily. Next, we sat around the worktable in the middle of the room to go over the printed material given to us. We learned about safety procedures, like what to do if your project bursts into flames. There’s a list of approved and not-approved materials, with some weird approved ones being edible (chocolate!).

For the second half, we spent time trying out the machine. Using CorelDraw (which is what they use to send images to the laser cutter), Laura made a simple design: an oval with some text in the middle describing the current machine settings (DPI, power settings, etc.) plus a couple small shapes to demonstrate the difference between etching and cutting. As example material, Laura used cardboard leftover from cereal boxes in the break room (hence the lack of materials fees). After she sent her design to the cutter, the machine etched and cut shapes in the cardboard. The oval is supposed to be cut out, but it wasn’t cut all the way through on Laura’s try. Each of the students took turns messing with settings to see how the results change. As we waited, we could watch the laser cutter or go through Laura’s binder of cut/etched samples. The laser cutter is pretty neat; even though you can’t see the laser like in the movies, watching the cutter burn in shapes into the material is fun to watch.

Once everyone had their turn, the class was over. Even though there were only 5 students, the class still went an hour over its initial 1-hour estimate. I don’t think anybody was in a rush though. I like that the class went at a relaxed pace, and I thought Laura was very good at explaining things and very patient with questions, which were easy to ask because of the small class size. Overall, we really enjoyed the class. Laura mentioned she would be teaching a class about digitizing images for embroidery later this month, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to be taking that. Kelvin wants to take one of the metal welding classes.

So now, Kelvin and I are seriously considering become members. The laser cutter has a lot of potential applications I’m thinking of using for maybe wedding favors or invitations, so once we figure that out, we’ll probably join for a month. They offer daily/trial (currently $30 and can go towards monthly membership), monthly ($100), and annual ($1200) membership options. For couples or families, you still need a membership for each person, but they do offer corporate and family discounts. (TechShop suggested the corporate account option for us, which is where 3 people get membership for $150 a month, but only two people can show up at a time. Anybody interested in a TechShop membership later this year? :P) Membership gives you access to all the machines available at TechShop, assuming you’ve taken the necessary classes. They weren’t many people this Saturday afternoon, but Laura mentioned things get more hectic during the holidays and Burning Man. However, you don’t need a membership to take the classes they offer, and classes range in cost from $30 a person to $60. Currently, the only TechShop location is in Menlo Park, but according to their website, 9 more locations are opening all over CA and in a few other states this summer.

I’m pretty excited; even if we don’t come up with any sort of useful application, I’m sure it’ll be fun to make randomly cool stuffs.

New thing I learned today: The founder of TechShop is Jim Newton, who is a veteran in combat robotics (including BattleBots) and was a science advisor for the third season of MythBusters.

Kelvin being Kelvin, of course he had to come up with some really wacky idea to out-crazy everybody’s crazy hats at Ravi and Jess’s Crazy Hat Party. He wanted some sort of head sucker, so I thought he was going to make a Half-Life Head Crab hat or maybe a Metroid hat. It turns out he wanted to make a hat where a dog is chewing at his head. His initial sketch:

And with Kelvin being Kelvin, he had to make this thing at the very last second. Ignoring my advice to start the night before, we bought all the materials at JoAnn’s and got home around 2:30ish, with the party starting at 7PM. He was supposed to be done by 6:30PM, but he was half an hour off his target. Regardless, I’m impressed with what he came up with in that 3-4 hour period, considering he had no patterns and very little time to make mistakes. I still would have preferred he started earlier so we could iron out some of the details.

Materials:
1/2 yard of black 100% cotton fabric (a few square feet used)     $4.00
50″x60″ Northpoint supreme plush throw, light brown color (less than half used)      $9.99
Black buttons (2 out of 3 used)      $1.99
3 9″x12″ squares of felt (red, black, white)      $.60
12 oz. bag of PolyFil (very little used)     $2.59
Black thread
Scraps of tan suede from Andrew’s puppet material
Andrew’s glue gun and glue
Total cost: $19.17

I was really hesitant about him using a throw blanket for material instead of other fabric. You can’t predict how they will unravel. Sure enough, when he cut up the throw, fuzz got all over the living room. The material stayed intact tho, and Kelvin was right in that it was appropriate for a plush dog.

Kelvin made relatively little mistakes in making the hat. He started off making a small black inner cap to stick the dog to. This cap was made from scratch and his own made-up pattern, which I thought was unnecessary since buying simple caps is easy PLUS I have actual hat patterns. Obviously the rest of the dog was his own made-up-on-the-fly pattern, tho he did use an Afro-Ken doll as a reference for the body. I think there was some initial problem with the teeth, but he fixed that. The eyes were stuck on using twisty-ties. I helped make the ears :) I had to wear the hat with dog partially sewn on as he stuffed it.

Amazingly in the end, it did look like a rabid dog of ridiculous proportions was eating his head. It’s far from perfect tho. The lack of time caused there to be some holes in a few locations on the dog due to rushed stitching, and the teeth and blood could have been a lot better looking. There’s a bunch of uncut thread, and there’s brown fuzz all over the black cap from the throw material. Still, not bad for <4 hours with no pattern or instructions. We’ve affectionately named him “Chopper“.