For the past six weeks or so I've been posting, fairly often by my standards, to the social media and photo-sharing service Instagram. I intend to limit this account to creative work subjects: photos of my engineering projects, materials, and techniques, for my professional clients and for my related personal pursuits. It's likely to feature a lot of pictures of work in progress. Follow me if you'd like to keep up with what I'm up to, and thanks for your indulgence!

Those that follow the activities of the North American branch of the Martinson family will have heard of an eccentric holiday tradition: the naming, one year in advance, of a color scheme to be adhered to rigorously in everything to do with the next celebration of Christmas. Gift-wrapping paper, decorations, outfits, seasonal cocktails, and even some of the foods are chosen to comply with the stated theme, selected by a sort of democratic process. Although it is more customary to explicitly name two (hopefully harmonious) colors, this last Christmas was adorned by colors described only with “Peacock”, i.e. any colors to be found in the feathers of the bird.

Needing name tags for the gifts I was giving, I designed a sort of snowflake graphic composed of peacock feathers and laser-engraved it onto acrylic. I'm not the only one to have thought of this as a google image search will reveal, but I did draw the feathers myself in Adobe Illustrator using a tool I'm pretty clumsy with but would really like to master in the new year: a Wacom Intuos tablet. I made about a dozen of these for my family and friends, each with a name on it, raster-engraved on to and vector-cut out of 1/16 inch cast acrylic sheet. They can be used as decorations for the tree also.

Here's an Illustrator file if anyone would like to adapt the design for their own purposes:

• Peacock Feather Snowflake, PDF

If I had made a list of unlikely post titles when I first started this blog (or even only a year ago), “Peacock Feather Snowflakes” would surely have ranked high.

Another year, another fix to Crystal Palace, a somewhat cheaply built clone of the Prusa i3 V2 3D printer that I've been upgrading steadily since I bought it last summer. This time the extruder cooling fan failed, so I ran down some superior ball-bearing replacements and got it running today.

Happy New Year to my readers!

I'm informed by google's doodle that today is the 131st anniversary of the invention of the hole punch. Here's a lovely example from my office:

I've put my notes on assembling, fixing, and upgrading Crystal Palace, my 3D printer, on this page. The machine is a Prusa i3 v2 clone made by Reprapguru, and it's needed a lot of improvements to get to the level of quality and reliability it currently enjoys. Hopefully these notes will be useful to anyone else that has this machine or one like it.