I was catching up with my friend Silvia’s blog, Po Moyemu, and saw this post about her brother’s Google Sketchup tutorial.
Google SketchUp? This was new to me. I liked the sound of it (probably because it rhymes with ketchup) and went to check it out. Ooh, fun. It’s a 3D drafting program. You can draft buildings, furniture, all sorts of stuff. You can even plunk your buildings down in Google Earth.
This, I thought, might be useful for Alicia’s Architecture for Kids blog. Have you visited that yet? Gorgeous photos, interesting links.
Every time I visit it I mean to ask Alicia (aka Love2Learn Mom) if she has read our favorite kids’ architecture book, Round Buildings, Square Buildings, Buildings that Wiggle like a Fish, which I wrote about on Bonny Glen a while back.
Back to SketchUp. I wanted to read Silvia’s brother’s tutorial, and that clicky-click introduced me to Make Magazine. Wow. Who knew? It’s a quarterly magazine full of techie projects. You can subscribe to the paper edition or a digital version (or both). You can also purchase single issues, if there is a particular article that catches your eye on the website. (I was able to watch Silvia’s brother’s SketchUp video tutorial for free, but I couldn’t read the article.)
There is even a Make blog, the top post of which right now is a link to a video podcast of How to Make a Balloon Flinging Siege Weapon—guaranteed to make any teenage boy’s heart go pitty-pat.
And! And! Are you ready for this? Make has a sister publication: Craft! (Did I just hear a collective Oooh… from the homeschooling mom crowd?)
What is CRAFT?
CRAFT is the first project-based magazine dedicated to the renaissance
that is occurring within the world of crafts. Celebrating the DIY
spirit, CRAFT’s goal is to unite, inspire, inform and entertain a
growing community of highly imaginative and resourceful people who are
transforming traditional art and crafts with unconventional, unexpected
and even renegade techniques, materials and tools; people who undertake
amazing crafting projects in their homes and communities.
There’s a Craft blog, of course, as well as a Projects page which includes links to project instructions elsewhere on the net, such as these gorgeous felted beads at Maryjane’s Attic.
All this from one post at Silvia’s blog. Oh, internet, you are a marvelous, terrible thing.
Yes, I have! I discovered it (and we have since enjoyed it) through your blog awhile back and I included it both in the Unit study and in the sidebar of the Architecture blog. (Thanks for the link, by the way).
By the way, I have to also credit your family with our most recent no-training-wheels bike rider. I believe it was an old post on Scott’s blog that alerted me to the idea of taking off the pedals. Perfecto! đŸ™‚
I’m so glad you enjoyed the video and SketchUp. I didn’t know about Craft! I should probably not go there. đŸ™‚
I SO LOVE the O’Reilly publications! I purchased my 11 yo a Make subscription for Christmas…a gift that goes down in the annals as “a gift that mommy wants for herself and subsequently rationalizes by purchasing it instead for one of her children…”
There’s a skippety robot in this issue…and a tutorial on making self-sustaining biospheres and…even more helpful? A list of books reviewed for someone like me who looks at a lot of the projects in MAKE, yells out “Coooooooool!” and then remembers that she is a girl and an English major and so is illiterate in Electrical Engineeringese…
And I have a GIANT internet crush on Bre Pettis (http://www.imakethings.com/).
craft magazine and their website are great. The newsstand price for the magazine is quite high but if you go to the website, you can subscribe to the digital only version for a lot less.