I’m honored that Ben Carpenter and Sudhu Tewari asked me to do the illustrations for their grant-winning proposal for SFMoMA game labs! The game is called Dialogues in Motion, and was really fun to illustrate. The GameLabs opens tomorrow, January 14th, 2012. You can see the interior illustrations in my gallery, or go visit the museum.

Being new to the online business thing, I’ve been struggling a lot with shipping. I get a lot of orders, but not quite enough to hire an external order fulfillment company, and lose a not insignificant percentage of revenue. PayPal, as a lot of you know, stinks. It’s not just shutting down random accounts at whim, but also their track record for small businesses is just awful. For example, to print a shipping label with USPS, I have to go through five screens (FIVE!). Which is fine if you only sell one or two things, but with 20 orders it’s a huge hassle and time sink.
So, between between PayPal and hiring out, I’ve started using the one month free trial at shipstation.com. It’ll eventually be 19.95 a month for the ‘bronze’ (base) version.

TL;DR: ShipStation is a good but not super friendly solution for middle-sized online stores. More details below the cut.

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I’ve done quite a few different types of e-textiles over the last couple years, but never done cross stitch. Of course, I can’t make a project without a geek reference or a good pun (best case:both!) and the Ohm Sweet Ohm cross stitch was born.

I’ve never done cross stitch before, but I decided I could teach myself. It’s surprisingly satisfying- and not totally unlike drawing up circuit boards. In this ‘board’, the silver/grey colored thread is OhmSpun conductive thread, the batteries are underneath the battery symbol (lower left corner), ground plane goes off to the right (through the ground symbol) and up the right side. Both the ‘Ohm’ symbols are conductive thread. The positive follows up the red thread to the left. I’m selling the kits in my Etsy store.

The new videos I made with PopularMechanics and RadioShack are up! My co-host is my pal Ken Murphy, and amazing tech-artist local to San Francisco (and a fellow Awesome Grant awardee!).

Here’s one of the videos- see the other four on PopularMechanics’ site!

I made this video with RadioShack and PopularMechanics a few weeks ago and it’s now live on RadioShack.com.

I’m happy that RadioShack is coming back to their electronics/maker roots- I’m going to be happy when I can go there for more last-minute parts needs.

I had some wool batting left over from my ScarfADay project and, after a very full week of electronics, I decided to make something a little bit softer and friendlier. Of course, I can’t really switch modes that fast, so I wound up making these  fuzzy felted resistors. I’ve been making them like crazy (they make a nice counterpoint to watching House, MD) and they are now up in my Etsy store. They’re $25.00 for three, and they’re made with a pipe cleaner as their wire so they can be made to hang or stand. I think they’re irresistible. [badum ching]

Whew! What an awesome maker faire weekend- I had a blast meeting people and showing off my wares. I’m happy to say I’ve put up my solderable conductive thread up on my Etsy store. In case you didn’t get to see it at MakerFaire, it’s totally solderable, about the thickness of embroidery thread (maybe a tad thinner), and VERY conductive- only 2.5 ohms a *yard*. Comparatively:
Lamé Lifesaver_____________ 12 Ohms/foot
Mitsufuji/ Aniomagic __________8 Ohms/foot
This thread _________________LESS than an Ohm a foot (0.83ohms a foot!)
Right now I only have 5 yard samples up-if you have needs for more, contact me directly. I’m looking for a way to spool these with a reliable way to measure yardage, if anyone knows anything about that.
Also, I’ll have my StarBoard kits up soon! Hang tight!