Superstorm School!

It's been a hectic week. School started on Monday and I have classes Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.

I have discovered a perk of NOT attending a private school: flat rate tuition. I am taking 18 units (well, 15 until my independent studies section is approved) for the price of 6.1-12 units.

Say what?

At AAU, the same number of units would run about $14k.

I have also crashed my first class, ever. In all my years of college, I've never had such restrictive enrollment. Typically I just enroll like the first day enrollment opens (community college and AAU worked this way). This time around it was tiered enrollment. I could enroll in up to 7 units at orientation, then I had to wait a month to enroll in up to 15. Then a week after that I could enroll in up to 19.

Unfortunately, every single class I wanted was full by the time my enrollment time for the second round came up. I had just checked class enrollment levels half an hour prior to my enrollment time. I logged in at 1 minute to 5 and by the time I entered the class numbers, all of my classes were full.

Eventually I got enrolled in some classes. Some that I really didn't want but I had the units. One of the classes had an instructor that was half an hour late, swayed back and forth and had voice modulation issues. I had a severe case of motion sickness by the end of class. Here's a sample of what I sat through.

The next night I saw that there were 5 seats open in the Gerontology class I really wanted. I made the bold choice to try to crash that class even though I had another class at the same time. Well, apparently everyone else had the same idea. There were 65 seats in the class. The instructor had already given 8 add codes out and was capping enrollment at 75 students. A total of 90 people showed up. I was totally making myself sick with trying to decide to sit it out and see what happened (hoping a bunch of people really didn't want to study death and end of life issues) or run over to the gym to the class I was actually enrolled in.

I stayed. And so did 15 other people. It came down to putting names in a box and randomly selecting 3 people. Thank Jebus I was the first name drawn! I was so worried I skipped the first class of leisure and recreation for nothing.

As far as my independent studies class goes, it is going to basically be artistic reproduction using new and emerging technologies. I will do 4 projects (from creating the artwork in physical or digital representation reproducing those works using various methods incorporating technology) and write a final paper. I'm super excited about this. This means I get school credit for stuff I would normally be doing 4 days a week anyway (with my school schedule, there's no real way I can go to the Gnomery on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday).

I am also fairly stoked on my textiles class. Textiles? Yeah. After discussing with the department chair my ultimate goals, we came to the conclusion that textiles would be a great place to focus my energies. People are intimidated by fine art. If you aren't an artist, you aren't really going to feel comfortable painting a picture or drawing or sculpting. But people are far less intimidated by crafts. I'm learning hand sewing, crocheting, embroidery and the like. These are skills that are far less intimidating to most people.

Not quite underwater basket weaving. Maybe that's a more advanced class.

365 Days of Zentangles - Day 30

Day 30! I had to go on an epic journey to find some place to get a money order, so that ate a good portion of my morning (I didn't get Placerville apples).

I made a killer coconut banana mousse (I had planned it out to be pie filling, but am currently out of arrowroot - I made it anyway to test the flavor/texture).

I finally listed cupcake toppers in our Etsy store,

Justin posed an interesting question to me about the current project. Could the tangles be adapted to a 3D model environment, therefore allowing me to create 3D sculptures daily.

I don't know any organic modeling software, so I'm on the hunt to find one that I can learn easily.

I checked out the 123D suite from Adobe today, thinking "oh awesome. 123D Design would be an enhancement over some of the limitations in TinkerCAD. It's not.

There is no import/export feature. I use illustrator to create a lot of my line art and import into TinkerCAD. I thought "woo, I can add chamfers and fillets using 123D Design" Nope. Not at all. Because I can't bring my work from illustrator (another Adobe product) into the app.

So then I was thinking "oooo 123D Sculpt could be an option for this idea of digital tangles to print." To my dismay, it is only available for iPAD. WTF? Seriously? It can't be utilized as a web app? It can't be made available to android? No thanks. I'm not a fan of anything that is iOS only.

Keep an eye out for reviews of various entry level 3D tools. I'm pretty good with the 2D and illustration, but AAU's IDS program didn't really have a huge emphasis on 3D modeling (it was very much still grounded in the olden ways of hand rendering and hand modeling). 3D printing was entirely glossed over in my production processes class.

Sooooo EXCITED to cut paper!

I put M0rt1m3r to work yesterday as soon as he arrived.

I have wedding invitations to get out this week.  Let's just say my printer (who has not been named like all of other other mechanical items) was not cooperating, so I have to go back to the paper store in the morning and get more paper. Luckily, I can use the cards I cut with M0rt1m3r for other purposes since the printer won't cooperate with the size requirements.

Some really cool stuff I found out about M0rt1:  M0rt1 is dual head.  I knew he could draw and cut, but I didn't know he could draw and print at the same time!  Most craft cutters require you to swap out heads from a cutting head to a pen head to draw vs cut.  Not M0rt1!  He switches back and forth between a ballpoint tip and cutting tip flawlessly.  I tested some of the preloaded designs on the SD card provided with him.

Granted the designs are fairly simple, but the bird turned out cute! With other craft cutters, I would have had to try to print the line work, get the page lined back up and then cut after swapping blades. With the e-Craft, it was as simple as selecting the design and letting it print/cut.

I also made Trogdor the Burninator stickers last night.  I had some issues with the page shifting while cutting the second pass (I probably should have used a heavy card stock backer as the sticker paper is considerably thinner than the other paper I've cut so far), but they turned out AWESOME!

First I created the cutting template in Illustrator and saved it as an SVG file (scalable vector graphic - this is what you will import into the e-Craft software to cut from).  I scaled and placed my Trogdor images in Photoshop and printed without the outlines from the template.  I placed the sticker sheet in M0rt1 and hit cut in the e-Craft software.  I set the pressure at 2, trying to just score the paper for a sheet of stickers. That wasn't QUITE enough, so I sent it through again at a pressure of 4, which was too much (it cut clean through).  Also on the second pass, the page skewed (hence the thought I may have needed a card stock backer), which messed up the cuts on the second row. I got six usable stickers from one side.

I'm going to try using manual mode to cut out the rest of the stickers that didn't get messed up (which was only one sticker, but it threw the cut pattern off for the entire thing, so I canceled the print.). 

Unfortunately, I had homework to work on this weekend, so it was a mix of trying out M0rt1 and doing work.  I have to tell you, I wanted to blow it off completely and just cut paper!  I want to blow everything off and cut paper!