weekend project

I'm planning to use my vanity as a desk while I'm working at home, but I haven't been using it that way yet. The wood surface is fairly delicate and I was afraid writing on it would leave impressions in the wood and ruin the surface. After pondering how to best protect it, this weekend I made a hard protective cover. I finished the cover about an hour ago and am really pleased with the result:

It even has some unplanned bonus features: it can be flipped if I want to use it as a card table (or anything that needs a less slippery surface) and it can be folded for storage!

Here's how I made it (it you'd like to reproduce it yourself):

Materials: 

• vinyl floor tiles (enough to cover surface): I used 6 TrafficMaster Deluxe Red Wood 12"x12" tiles (manufacturer's part # 62331). My local Home Depot had an open box, so I was able to buy just what I needed. These tiles come in different wood and ceramic tile designs.
• backing fabric (enough to cover surface) & matching thread : I used 3/4 yard of burgundy suede (found in the remnants pile of a discount fabric store!).

Tools:

• sewing machine
• scissors (fabric and normal)
• ruler/straight edge and tape measure
• permanent marker 
• box cutter
• straight edge
• cutting surface (a cardboard box works well)
• a paper towel and some rubbing alcohol

To make:

1. Cut fabric to size, plus 3/4" on all edges.  Hem edges with a simple straight stitch 1/2" in from the sides, and trim fabric at the corners to to keep them thin.
2. Lay out the cut fabric on the surface you want to cover, with the wrong side up.  Lay out floor tiles roughly to decide on your patterning.
3. Starting from the front, tile the fabric surface by removing the paper backing from the tiles and pressing into place.  Hold the fabric taut when you do this to prevent wrinkles and minimize gaps between adjacent tiles.
4. For cutouts, corner shapes, or partial tiles at edges: draw the pattern to cut with a permanent marker (the kind that comes off with rubbing alcohol) on the top surface. For straight cuts, score the top surface with a box cutter against a straight edge and bend the tile to break it.  For curved edges, I used pair of scissors.
5. After all the tile has been placed, flip the cover over and press out any wrinkles before the adhesive sets.
6. Turn the cover back to its normal orientation and clean up any permanent marker on the vinyl with the rubbing alcohol. Check for sharp edges (especially on the straight cut edges).  Remove any you find with the razor blade by turning the blade 45 degrees to the material and running it along the edge with little or no pressure. This should remove the sharp burr.
7. Cover with books to ensure the adhesive makes contact with the fabric while curing (~12 hours).

Correlate

Lately, I've been recreationally learning about data visualization, which is basically a bunch of rules of thumb and graphics styles people have developed to communicate lots of information fast.  Some nice data visualizations/info-graphics from the last year include a map of locations where people self-reported feeling the east coast earthquake in August, 24 hours of taxis in Vienna and how well sunscreen works.

One of my current favorite tools on the 'net - both for fun and for sifting through loads of data - Google's Correlate, which recently 'graduated' from Google labs. This tool lets you enter in a line graph by hand (of word frequency vs. time over the last 8 years) and attempts to match it to search terms.  Alternatively, you can grab the line graph for a term of your choice and match it to other terms that have similar time evolutions.

In honor of the new school year starting, I 'correlated' the search term 'SI units'--a very common beginning of term unit for physics--with other search data. Many of the highly correlated terms were expected: several other beginning-of-semester searches from science ('units', 'metric prefixes', 'chemistry conversion'), English/history ('the epic of Gilgamesh'), biology ('characteristics of life') and even Spanish class ('map of spanish speaking countries').

However, there were some I didn't expect. 'SI units' had an r value of 0.948 with 'prime meridian' (shown below--in retrospect, that's geography's first unit), 'Titchener' (r=0.922) and 'Wilhelm Wundt' (r=0.946) (the Wikipedia articles suggest they are philosophy's contribution to the list), and 'nacirema' (r=0.928) or American spelled backwards, which I'm still puzzling over. Any ideas?

 

Happy beginning-of-semester, everyone!