{"id":47,"date":"2016-05-08T17:23:32","date_gmt":"2016-05-08T17:23:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/laweinstein.com\/blog\/?p=47"},"modified":"2016-05-08T17:26:58","modified_gmt":"2016-05-08T17:26:58","slug":"first-impressions-of-instructables","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/laweinstein.com\/blog\/mit-massive\/first-impressions-of-instructables\/","title":{"rendered":"“First” impressions of Instructables"},"content":{"rendered":"

Instructables<\/a> is a DIY learning community that I’ve been interested in for a long time, and decided I would use MIT Massive as an excuse\/motivation to actually try it out. The “First” in the title of this post is in quotes because I’ve been aware of Instructables for a long time (vaguely for many years, then more acutely when Eric Wilhelm gave the keynote at the MIT MechE Research Exhibition last year<\/a>), but this is the first time I’ve actually made something from the site.<\/p>\n

Trying an Instructable: T-shirt to wall art<\/h2>\n

I used to wear a lot of graphic t-shirts, and I would often find myself hesitant to throw out shirts that had gotten too ratty to wear, but which had designs that I really enjoyed. Many years ago I bookmarked this link<\/a>, with the intention of following it in order to transform my unwearable shirts into wall art. Unfortunately, I never got around to actually buying a staple gun and stretcher bars, and in the mean time I have thrown out many t-shirts. This weekend I finally bought the tools I needed and turned one of my old shirts into wall art:<\/p>\n

\"Instructables:<\/a><\/p>\n

Making wall art from the t-shirt was very easy, and in retrospect I’m sad that it took me so long to bite the bullet and buy the necessary tools. If I had done so earlier, I’d have a lot more art for my apartment (and I guess Goodwill would’ve had a few less t-shirts donated to them). In the future I’ll definitely be quicker to act on cool DIY projects that I find.<\/p>\n

Publishing an Instructable: Honeycomb sock organizer<\/h2>\n

I also recently had an idea to help organize my socks: I wanted to make a honeycomb structure so each pair could have its own cell. I came up with a simple way to make it out of index cards, and I thought it would be a good opportunity to publish an Instructable of my own. You can read the full Instructable that I came up with here<\/a>, and you can see the results below:<\/p>\n

\"Instructable:<\/a><\/p>\n

Publishing my own Instructable was a lot more work. Documenting the process of making something is about as time consuming as actually making it. It’s also non-trivial to write the instructions so that they’re clear to follow (I’m not sure I did a good job of this on my instructable). I guess I’ll have to wait to see how the response is before I can really say if the extra effort was worth it, but even if no one else makes it, it is nice to have a record of my process. The only frustrating piece I would note is that I looked for DIY honeycomb organizers before making mine and didn’t find anything, but after I was done I found that you can buy\u00a0honeycomb organizers for\u00a0pretty cheap<\/a>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Instructables is a DIY learning community that I’ve been interested in for a long time, and decided I would use MIT Massive as an excuse\/motivation to actually try it out. The “First” in the title of this post is in quotes because I’ve been aware of Instructables for a long time (vaguely for many years, … Continue reading ““First” impressions of Instructables”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mit-massive"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/laweinstein.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/laweinstein.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/laweinstein.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laweinstein.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laweinstein.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/laweinstein.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53,"href":"https:\/\/laweinstein.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47\/revisions\/53"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/laweinstein.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laweinstein.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laweinstein.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}