Maker Monday: Scrap Wood Honeycomb Shelves

Photos from Arrow & Apple Blog
[Charles] Check out these cool honeycomb shelves out of scrap wood from Arrow & Apple. Saw this over on a post from AT. I like that you can use small pieces of wood for this kind of shelf. They didn't use a backer and they just screwed each one to the wall with brackets so I'm a little concerned about how much weight they'll handle. I guess the point really isn't to load these up and well, I 'm always overbuilding things because you never know when someone is going to try doing chinups on your stuff right? I really like this though because you can use all those small pieces of wood which are a problem for every wood shop. Any small wood projects are life savers and you hate building yet another tiny box to store more tiny pieces of wood... Great job folks. Head over to their link on the top to see the rest of the photos!

Friday Forecast: Paint Lambaster Gumbo

Photo of Trombone Shorty in Creative Loafing
[Charles] Friday Forecast is your cheatsheet to the weekend's to do list. In need of a diversion? You found the shortlist...

First up on Saturday morning, get prepared to pop up early and do some painting. Wait... that sounds like work right? Ok, well I guess you could also garden if you prefer but here's the deal. We need volunteers for Paint Your Heart Out Tampa to help with the Seminole Heights Community Garden project. Our buddies at SHCG are not only doing the paint a whole house in a day thing, but they are also gonna plant a garden for the well-deserving homeowner. The house is at 1008 E. Crenshaw and breakfast, lunch, and t-shirt are provided. Get all the details on that link above. Don't worry you'll be done by 2 or so and you can get on out there and still rock the weekend while feeling like you've helped the world a heck of a lot more than any legislator has this week.

After that you could head to Dunedin for the Highland Games or even over get over to the Tampa Bay Blues Fest to catch James Hunter, but here's another option. How about heading over the bridge to catch The Lambasters at Dave's Aqua Lounge with J Roddy Walston and Casey Lee from Fake Problems. This will be a real Florida kind of night. I'd suggest stopping over at the Crab Shack for some real blue crabs or smoked mullet to keep it real FL style with some cold bucket beers to wash it down. That's right over the Gandy on your left with some real cool picnic tables outside to just get your mind off the week with good friends. Leave the Crab Shack and head a little further toward St. Pete and Dave's will be up on the left. This is a Florida music establishment so be prepared for a good time.

If you don't overdo it on Saturday night then maybe Sunday morning you'll make it to the free yoga class at the Sunday Morning Market at Hillsborough High. It starts at 9 and is run by local Jai Dee Studio so it should be a great way to start the day. If not, roll out late and get some awesome coffee and feed your munchies with some of the great food vendors at the market. If you haven't tried the vegetarian gumbo there, you are really missing out on something amazing.

After that your follow up is gonna be Ella's for The Cadillac Bombers or head over the bridge to the Blues Fest for the final day with Trombone Shorty.

Have some fun out there!

Maker Monday: Cinder Block Wall Planters

Photo from Annette Gutierrez
[Charles] Here we go folks. I may have finally figured out how to pretty up the end of our ugly driveway... I've been thinking about this for a while but I haven't seen anybody ready (crazy enough) to try it until now... Take a bunch of cinder blocks which are cheaper than most pots and stack em and plant them to make a living planter wall. Super cheap. This one used landscape super adhesive which is really strong stuff - we used it on our $5 block seats a few years ago. They also used wire cloth and rocks to keep the soil from leaving in a hurry. We've recently started up a nice batch of succulents and I agree that would be the way to go on something like this... Thanks Treehugger!

Friday Forecast: Dos Living Animals

[Charles] So here you find yourself on Friday, what to do? what to do? Here's the short version...

Friday Night - I would think heading to Ella's to check out Signals from Satellites and Los Dos Pistoles should be a great way to kick the weekend off. I'm not sure about you but I could definitely use an extremely large glass of gatorade and Ella's pours the best in the hood! Check out some local talent and soak up the flava!

Saturday - Good day to check out the Living Green Expo in St. Pete and its triumphant return to the St. Pete Coliseum which personally is a much cooler sort of a place to have the event and is a perfect stopoff point to St. Pete for the Saturday Morning Market. I've been pretty quiet on the green front lately while we mend up from closing the store but our personal commitment to the green movement and sustainability is still as strong as ever. I'm excited to hear about new developments and projects in the community and there should be lots of cool info seminars and giveaways as well. Check it all out here!

On Sunday since you went all the way to St. Pete the day before, why not check out a local growing festival in the hood?! The Talking Animals Festival will be at the Lowry Park Band Shell and in its second year it sounds like it is growing by leaps and bounds. Definitely WMNF is helping usher in tons of awesome local bands like my favorite The Sun Society, Bird St. Players, and Sons of Hippies and there will be lots of vendors there and apparently even a bounce house?! Sounds like a good time even though my four legged friend isn't too socially apt, maybe we'll check out the festival for her.

Have fun out there!

Maker Monday: Transformer Tables

[Charles] I know it's a few days late but to be fair this project is a few years late. I spend a lot of time thinking about transformer furniture. Specifically, I think and sketch and conceive a lot on a transformer dining table. The slideshow from Treehugger here has a good cross section of what is out there and it also features the one that they all get measured against... The Capstan or Fletcher which is pictured above. My friend Nicole has been asking for her own version of a transformer table for years. I must have 5 different unrealized versions on my hard drive that were either too hard to make, too complicated to convert, or just too plain ugly. For people that like to solve problems though this is a fun one. Check out the slideshow and well if you have a good way to go from say a 36" round to a 72" round with less than 25 grand on the price tag - let me know. There's nothing cooler than being able to take your intimate little breakfast table up to Thanksgiving dinner size in ten seconds flat. You'll have to watch the video for that though...

Friday Forecast: Pause Overload Ecolution

[Charles] So you can't go the Avett Bros because it's sold out and you're broke anyway well then here you go. You want to have fun in the bay and don't know where to start. Start here. Friday forecast is my little guide to three things every weekend in Tampa.

Tonight is the sold out show at Ruth Eckerd with the aforementioned Avetts. That's okay though, cause you saw them at the Cuban Club anyway before they were completely huge! So head over instead to catch Modern Skirts with The Pauses and Poetry N Lotion at New World Brewery. The Pauses and their sweet indie rock are returning from blowin it up at SXSW and Modern Skirts are another cool indie Athens rock group that has been to town before and is rumored to be really great. I'm digging the mix so head over and have some fun with all your buddies while the weather is still awesome for an outdoor show.

Saturday night is the annual Sensory Overload show and this year it's heading over to the new Children's Museum downtown. It's a big mix of art, music, and performance. There are bands like Infinite Groove Orchestra, the results from CL's Show Us Your Neighborhood contest, and always lots of craziness going on. It should be interesting to see it transition from a clubby setting like Ybor to a museum. It could be growing up or maybe growing apart - we'll have to check it out and see.

Also on Saturday is the Cigar City Criterium and Ecolution downtown. The criterium was interesting last year but as a vendor at Ecolution it seemed like it was lost on most Tampa folks why they should come to this thing at all. It's pretty cool to see the bike race and just get out and enjoy the vendors and music downtown. The folks at the Urban Charette work hard to put on a good event in a pretty harsh environment for sustainability and green mindedness. Cigar City stepped up to sponsor the Criterium so if bikes don't excite you, maybe awesome beers will get you going. I hope people continue to support it and in a time where bike accidents are at an all time high in Florida it is really important to get out and show how important bikers are to us.

There are tons of other things going on this weekend including especially the GIFF and Ybor Festival of the Moving Image for those movie buffs out there so get out and have some fun!

Maker Monday: Electric Umbrella

Photos from Instructables user sockmaster

[Charles] It took me quite a few articles and digs to end up on an Electric Umbrella, but well here it is. I wasn't looking for it and that made it much more intriguing of course. I actually was just wondering how to make an LED light bulb. I dug into Google and Make magazine and Instructables and read quite a bit about LED reading lamps and flashlight circuits. It sounds pretty simple really - you get some LEDs and resistors and a DC power source and wire it up. Of course there are some simple calculations about getting the resistors right and well you have to keep in mind that LEDs are electrically directional. It doesn't sound too bad though. I still didn't find a lightbulb exactly but this umbrella is pretty cool and it might be just the thing for long walks home in a neighborhood that isn't too pedestrian friendly...

Friday Forecast: Kesstronic Movement Dap

Photo from Tampa Museum of Art
[Charles] Friday Forecast is my survey of three awesome things to do each weekend in Tampa Bay. I try to find things I could stumble home from in my hood of Seminole Heights but sometimes I'll travel the bridges for the good stuff. If it's music, art, or a good time - I'm in. Check it out.

Friday night: Izzy and the Kesstronics are making another visit to Ella's Folk Art Cafe Friday night. This band runs the fine line between roots rock, rockabilly, and even a little large band type music. They have been known to burn the place down and should probably encourage some real live dancing in front of the stage at Ella's. I'd love to catch these guys mixing it up - they bring a sax and a trombone into their swinging groove so definitely be ready to shake it.

Before you head out to Ella's you should probably head down to the Tampa Museum of Art to check out the Art After Dark Party dedicated to the latest show opening - Degas - Form, Movement, and the Antique. The Degas exhibit is really great and is one of the biggest and most expensive shows at the new TMA. They brought the what I call "Tiny Dancer" sculpture down from The National Gallery in DC and quite a few of Degas's bronzes that are rough and unashamedly large figured. They take the abstract and rough sculptures but somehow capture the angles and balance of a dancer's movements in unexpected ways. I really enjoyed it and there are a few paintings that are truly fantastic as well with one of my favorites called Three Dancers in Yellow Skirts - a fuzzy abstraction with just enough detail to force you to carefully study it and really try to sort out what is going on while the colors are so much brighter than most of the drab world that we see in his pencil sketches. Also since you're there - check out the Herb Snitzer jazz photography exhibit which is every bit as fascinating as I wanted it to be.

Saturday night: Excuse me for a second while I mourn the fact that I'm going to miss this show. This is one of those shows that is pretty impossible to miss and I'm completely disgusted with myself for not making it. Sometimes the schedule just doesn't work out for you. So, anyway, if you have any way of making it to the Ritz on Saturday - do not miss Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings. I have only been as close to them as Austin City Limits on PBS will allow me to but that was plenty close to see that this is one of the hardest working and smokingest shows that I will ever get a chance to see. They are getting pretty well known now but The Ritz is still small enough and open enough that you should be able to weasel your way to the stage if you wanna get in the middle of the sweaty mess. Sharon Jones takes everything that was soft and sexy about the 60's soul women like the Supremes and then grinds it through a Foxy Brown vibe that makes you wonder why the heck they ever stopped making music like this. More than a throw back, Sharon Jones picks up where the greats like Aretha left off and takes this soul into the future. Check out her updated version of This Land is Your Land or the floor-burner 100 Days and try and figure out when they were made...

Have fun out there!

Maker Monday: A Tiny House Blog

Photos from Evan and Gabby's Tiny House Blog
[Charles] We've been a little fascinated by tiny houses, by which I mean, one room one bath sort of things that you can only fit the essentials in for a while. There are these things though Tiny Houses that are being built by a company that will also send out plans to you if you want to build your own. These houses are built on a trailer and are beautiful tiny cottage things with lots of wood and simple living in mind. Today I'm showing some bits from a blog where a couple shows how they are doing it themselves. This week they are sealing the deck which we just did last week on our house.

We uncovered some beautiful antique pine boards that have been hiding under our linoleum for years with us completely unaware. Maybe some day we'll ditch the 1100 sqft mansion that we inhabit for something this tiny - definitely would force us as Thoreau would say to "live deliberately".

Friday Forecast: Gun Chiseler Refinery

Poster from Brokenmold
[Charles] Friday Forecast is a running feature here on TSM about what to do and where to go in Tampa for the weekend. I pick three things I would like to do if I could break away from my busy Saturday schedule. Check it out and let me know what you think.

There are tons of pre SXSW shows this weekend as bands continue to contend with higher gas prices and tapped out fans. I've seen a number of groups heading to Kickstarter to try and drum up some gas money so definitely see if one of your favorites is out there and drop them some coin if you can. One of the many shows is Have Gun Will Travel tonight over at the Local 662 in St. Petersburg. These guys are getting a lot of buzz and let's send them to SXSW with enough cash to do it right and hopefully get noticed.

Tomorrow is the Chiseler's Flea Market at the University of Tampa in downtown. I've never been to this but I drove by once and it was huge. Long lines and lots of people descend on UT for what is apparently a really great bunch of stuff that gets donated during the year as a fundraiser. It only happens once a year and a lot of vintage hunters in the area swear by this one. Maybe this year I'll finally see what all the hubbub is about...

Sunday marks the official celebration of The Refinery's one year in Seminole Heights! They are having drink specials and get this... a free buffet! Oh yeah! Greg and Michelle have done a fantastic job of promoting their place and getting really great and challenging food onto skeptical Tampa plates. The result has been an overwhelming success that even garnered them a James Beard Best New Restaurant nomination. They are having live music and the deck should be hopping. Have fun and as they say "Eat. Drink. Confabulate."