Introducing Make-A-Long, a new monthly crafting event at NYCR.  Make-A-Long is a self-guided craft workshop where participants learn new skills, explore new materials and make great things!

In this session we’ll explore the wonderful world of felting using carded wool (also known as wool roving).  Using water or needles, wool roving can be manipulated to form a myriad of different shapes.  Learning how to felt means you can make things like:  felted soap, felted creatures, felted jewelry, felted ornaments and more!

Are you a beginner? Don’t worry! We’ll provide instructions and materials for a variety of projects.  Facilitators will be available to help guide you through a project of your choice.

Are you a master? Bring a project, use our materials and hang out in a great space while doing what you love.

Sign up here: Make-A-Long:  Felting With Wool Roving, December 15, 5-8pm

Knitting has always been one of those activities that I’ve coveted. Fluffy sweaters, intricate scarves, little baby kimonos (oh wait, that was one of my failed projects…). And as if the results were not cool enough, I also just loved the idea of the community around it. Unfortunately, although I’ve always loved the IDEA of knitting, I… well, I really really suck at it. Then I found out about knitting machines.

I’m not sure how but somehow I’d stumbled upon a knitting machine hack by Becky Stern and the idea of hacking an electronic knitting device to do my bidding was way too enticing. It turns out that I’m a bit late to the party. Since the hack was published, those particular knitting machines had shot up in price. I mentioned it and it was hudson who’d first spotted something labeled TOYOTA hanging out at Resistor. It turned out that it’s one of Kelbot’s machines. She graciously loaned it to us for an evening to play with and play we did. The photo below shows our (ahem, my) first mistake. Since I didn’t know to add weights to the first row of the item, it quickly went south.

But not to worry! What’s a little hacking without some help from friends? Others quickly swapped in to help untangle the mess. There were 4 of us consistently poking and prodding at the machine, another that was shooed away, and in our moments of wonderment, we even started a google hangout with Kelbot for advice. (confession: not sure if any of us really wanted to RTFM but it turns out that the manual isn’t too shabby). Anyway, at any given point when one of us would grow bored/annoyed/whatever with the machine, someone else would step in to poke at it a bit more. We finally got it to work and managed to knit 512 lines of a gorgeous… umm… scarf? I then “hand embroidered” Adam’s name on it. Our awesome output is shown here.

It was a super fun night amongst friends so it turns out I got the best of both worlds, my first (perhaps not my last?) stab at a knitting machine and a community to dork around with. Additional photos can also be found here. And lastly, Kelbot did a great teardown of this beauty here for those who are interested in the innards of this workhorse.

I found Matt Joyce’s HDSP211x alphanumeric displays in the LED bin at NYCR and loved the StarTAC style. He had previously written about driving them, but using an Arduino and a shift register on a breadboard was a bit large for my goal of making it into a wristwatch.

I noticed that the PDIP spacing was the same as the Teensy 2.0 and, much like my ROM dumper, hoped that it could fit on the back of the display with almost no additional wires. Read on for the “schematics” and source code details.
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Want to help those affected by Hurricane Sandy AND learn Arduino at the same time?  There are still spots left in our Arduino 101 class tomorrow, and 50% of every dollar you spend for a class ticket will go towards hurricane relief efforts.  Specifically, we’ll donate to Red Hook NYC Recovers unless we have some compelling reasons to go elsewhere, or divide the spoils: suggestions welcome in the comments.  Red Hook is a neighborhood very close to NYC Resistor that was hit really hard, as you can see in the pictures. So join us for an afternoon of what we do best: learning, making, and sharing.