Generel talk about creative experiences

[FelixSH]

Let's talk about our experiences, when we try to do someting creative. I find this interesting, writing about it, but also reading about the problems and achievements of others.

I finally have time for something fun, so I decided to write something. Should be something short and sweet, maybe five pages. I'm now four pages in, and it will probably increase to, dunno, 10, maybe 15 pages?

This isn't a complaint, it's just such a weird experience. I have an idea, think it will be short, and underestimate it by, uh, a factor of five? That long story I wrote should have been done in 20 pages, and ended with 70 or something. But I guess that is a general thing with projects, isn't it? That you completely underestimate them. Would just be nice to be done with something in an afternoon, instead of one week.

But it was fun to write, so it was a good experience. There are so many ides, and it's nice to work one out, finally (even if it is one I got only two days ago, just another backlog).

 

[Torzelbaum]

I don't know if this is really the best place for this but somebody did post something somewhere which made me think of the following video:

 

[FelixSH]

It's a good video, I enjoyed it.

 

[Violentvixen]

Oh hey I actually do have something for this! I'm generally not a creative person, I much prefer to solve problems than create but I do try to do something creative every now and then.

This activity is perhaps a bit more guided than qualifies for the thread, but my spouse and I signed up for a class at the local makerspace to make our own resin and wood serving board. We were invited to bring any small non-porous materials we wanted to embed in the resin, so I brought a geode we smashed open at work, the remaining pieces of it were cool but I didn't really know what to do with them so they'd just been sitting around the house.

The instructor provided pre-cut pieces of wood to choose from, we were the first couple to get there (it was a "date night" class which was cute) so we got first pick. Then we cut/sanded the pieces down further and assembled a mold to hold the resin (I got to use a nail gun! It was stressful!). Here's our pieces all prepped:

Next we choose the color of the resin and how much to add. Filling it to the top and making the surface flat meant the resin wouldn't end up being clear since you'd need to sand everything again at the end. I will note a professional can dedicate a lot of time to getting it perfectly clear, but that wasn't going to be this class. Only filling it partially would leave the resin clear, but then you wouldn't have a flat surface for your board. We opted to fill ours all the way but several people in the class decided to have an uneven but clear surface.

Since our wood had a lot of cool natural curves to it and the geodes would be in there we decided to go for a mossy green/murky river color. Here's me pouring the resin:

Then we wait! The class was two sessions with a week in between for curing, although the instructor noted that it really only takes a day or two, that was just hard to schedule so they went with a week gap. At the next class we removed the molds (the instructor handled some of this since it needed the more intense table saws), sanded everything down and sanded everything down some more. Then more sanding with higher grain papers. I understood why they didn't expect people to get clear resin surfaces. Apparently to do that you need to get to something like 10,000 grain sandpaper, after an hour and a half of sanding and incrementally increasing the grain we were still at like 600! Here's me sanding and you can see some other people in the background. There were four groups in the class which was a nice size.

And here's a closeup of the geodes, we put them in a curve of the wood as if the current had an eddy there and had deposited the rocks. I quite like how it came out!

And the final product! After finishing it you need to oil it with food grade mineral oil for days to soak in, we're almost done with that portion and ready to use it.

It was a really fun project and glad I did it! They have a lot of other classes and I'd definitely try another one. Sadly they're pretty pricey (this was a Christmas gift for my spouse) so it would probably be an annual thing, but I really loved that we ended up with something we made ourselves and can use.

 

[Kirin]

That is super cool! I bet it’d be a lot of fun to make one of those.

 

[FelixSH]

That's awesome (and totally in the spirit of this thread). I'm glad you had fun.