Cherry wood bookcase

Project finished a few weeks ago: scratch-made cherry wood bookcase for our bedroom. We were getting tired of the piles of books accumulating on the floor from while to the older child after the earlier one had gone to sleep, plus this also gives us a place for the...

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Norse plaque inspired by an old fireback

Ever since my early childhood I have fond memories of going to Camp Happy, my great aunt and uncles summer home up in Door County, Wisconsin.  The home was supposedly built as a replica of a hunting lodge from the Old World.  Installed above the fireplace was a...

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Experimenting with Cricut-assisted leather tooling

Recently, our friends Ariel and Andy inspired me to try using the Cricut (a 2D cutting plotter that can be controlled with third-party software called Sure-Cuts-A-Lot) to assist in leather-tooling and provided some leather scraps to try with.  (I'd tried with the wrong...

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Our wedding software

When Ksusha and I got married, I decided to use it as an opportunity to write some software to manage all aspects of our wedding, from tracking guests and RSVPs to generating place cards for printing.  Given that half of the fun of wedding preparation (for us at least) was …

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Paskha mold: version 1.0

Early Spring in our house is a time for cooking and crafts projects as we celebrate both Passover and (Russian) Easter.  Both of these holidays are great excuses to cook lots of tasty recipes that we learned from our parents and grandparents, and then to enjoy this...

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The Earth, modeled in chocolate

Ksusha introduced me to Ferrero Rocher chocolates a few days ago. My first reaction after biting into it was "this would make a great model of the Earth!" (Well, maybe that was my second reaction. My first reaction was "tasty!")

Thus, it was necessary to slice one...

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