How to Make a Practice Drum Pad

I'm learning how to play drums, after a couple of decades wishing I knew how. It was only a day or two before I realized I needed a drum pad to use for practice, since I don't always want to sit at my kit, and whacking a pillow or book just doesn't do it for me. So I made one.

It was supposed to be a lot more steampunky than this, and it was also supposed to be decorated with a skull-and-crossbones, not a gay pirate skull, but anyway, this is how I did it.

First of all, I lucked out because I already had a piece of plywood that was almost the right shape already. I only had to saw one side. I bought two thin mousepads at Walmart ($3 each--I'd have gotten one thick mousepad but they didn't carry any) but before I glued them on I decided I wanted to trim the corners of the wood. That only took a few minutes, and I sanded the edges down with part of a cinder block I'd found while doing yardwork. Hey, you use what you have.

I glued the first mousepad face-down onto the wood, using my favorite glue, Gem-Tac. I got frustrated, though, because the nozzle kept plugging up and the glue was starting to dry while I was trying to clear it, and finally I just cut the end off. That was sort of a mistake since now the glue just pours out. But it did the trick.

Next I glued the second mousepad, the blue one, face-up on top of the first mousepad, the black one. If you're confused as to why the finished picture above shows a black mousepad on top, it's because after the glue dried overnight, the pad looked like this:

I'd gotten glue all over it, and it looked awful. Also I didn't like the blue. So I went back to the store and bought another mousepad, another black one.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. When I set the drum pad on the counter to try it out (and my counters are green, not yellow, but that's an awful picture--just wanted to make that clear, it's important), I discovered that the wood was a bit warped. The pad rocked on two of its corners.

(See? Green.) Fortunately, I have a bunch of little foam dots that came with the new cabinet hardware I installed in January. I thought I might be able to use them as shims, and they would help keep my new drum pad from scratching up tables or whatever as I used it. I put a dot in each corner and one in the middle, and to shim the wobbly corners I added a second dot on top of the first on the problem corners. I wasn't sure it would work, but it did the trick exactly. But I recommend you check first to make sure your piece of wood isn't warped.

After I did that, I tried a few paradiddles to see how I liked the drum pad. It worked fine but I thought it could use a bit more padding, which is why I ultimately went back and bought a third mousepad. I glued it on very carefully, using much less glue and making sure not to get any glue on the top.

The glue's still drying, but I went ahead and drew the skull on it (with silver Sharpie) so I could take pictures. I'm not the best artist ever and not only does my skull resemble a troll skull or something, with that huge jawbone, but I also managed to get it off-center. Since I need to practice hitting right in the middle of the drum, I added the blingy star thing, whatever you want to call it. And when I tried to add a pirate hat, it turned into a lady's Easter hat with a feather. Whatever. My dead troll is fabulous!

I wasn't going to include this picture, since it's just glue, but I like the pattern:

Snow-powered with a sidecar

I've neglected the blog, and the garage, this winter. It's just been too cold to do much except read and write and do a bit of knitting. I have lots of ideas for spring, though, if it ever gets here.

I'm in East Tennessee so we don't get much snow ordinarily--but last night we got ten inches! I made a snowman. Actually it's a snowwoman, representing me, and a snowcat, representing Jekyll, and we are about to rev into our next adventure in a snowcycle with a cat-sized sidecar.

I'll be at AnachroCon in Atlanta this weekend. I wanted to make an outfit for the con but I didn't, so I'll just be dressed in jeans and T-shirts and my awesome hat. If you're going to be there, say hi! We can go to the absinthe tasting together!

Distressing a garment really fast

Sorry, no pictures of my complete DragonCon costume yet. I'm not done with the bag, plus my photographer has vanished from the face of the earth (or at least the part of the earth with cell coverage). So here's a quick tutorial on how to distress a garment--in this case, that jacket I dyed.

I actually dyed it three times total, none of them very well, and it ended up an uneven brownish-gray. There are splotches of darker color in the back that are very obvious, so I can't wear it as part of a polished costume. But I was thinking of only wearing my full costume on Saturday at DragonCon, and coming up with a simpler, toned-down costume for Sunday.

The idea I had was more dieselpunk than steampunk, with a grimy, oil-stained jacket over crop pants, corset, and a bright top, with my old beat-up leather boots and a pair of lace-trimmed socks. It might have worked, too, except that I'm not the right shape. For the most part I'm happy with the way I look, but I'm also very aware that women are judged by appearance, and the outfit is not flattering on me. This is an outfit for a younger, skinnier woman.

But I digress. Here's how to distress a badly-dyed garment.

1. Try to send it through the reel mower's workings. It won't go through, but it will get a bit rumpled and grimy if, like me, you never clean the mower's blades.
2. Use the tail of the shirt to rub the top of a rusty, gummy oilcan.
3. Hang it over a chair and snag it several times with the screw poking out of a block of wood that you just happen to have on hand.
4. Try to cut it with a really rusty old pair of loppers that aren't sharp anymore. They will put a few small holes in the cloth but mostly they chew at it.
5. Try to cut it with a really dull boxcutter.
6. Cut it unexpectedly quickly with an X-acto knife.
7. Poke holes along the edges of the big X-acto knife gash with an awl, and use the holes to sloppily lace up the hole with a leather cord or an old bootlace.

That's what I did. The lacing looks particularly good, I think.

I'm sure I can use this jacket for an outfit sometime in the future. Heck, I may wear it Sunday after all, but with jeans instead of the brown pants that aren't flattering. But so you can see what I mean about the outfit, here's a picture of me in it. Sorry, I didn't have my boots on.

The Sewing Machine

It's totally not steampunk, and it would take a lot of work to make it not look like a plastic toy, but it's saving me a lot of time. Yes, I bought a sewing machine. It cost me all of $20 and you can see how small it is. It does one thing: lockstitch, forward only. But that's all I need it for.

I also found a pattern for bloomers that I think will work a lot better than the simple patterns I've found for free online. It includes patterns for a chemise and corset too, so I think it's a good investment. I took a picture of it in front of the window so the light would stream in like a halo.

This is the fabric I have bought for my Dragon*Con outfit, although I won't know about the dark brown feather-print fabric and the light brown lace until I get my finished corset and can look at the colors together. But the yellow-and-white cloth is for my bloomers. If you look closely, you can see it has a swirly pattern sort of like white feathers, perfect for an owl-thing costume.

It's been a busy week for me, so I didn't get as much done on the bloomers as I'd like. I've also cut one corner already, on the cuffs. The pattern goes through a complicated method for removing the edging of gathered lace and sewing new gathers into it, and then doing something with eyelets--I read over it and thought, "The hell with this." I had some nice edging that's perfect for threading ribbons through to make gathers once the garment is finished, so I just sewed it on. I seamed it twice, once above the eyelets, once below, to make a sort of casing. My little sewing machine did quite well getting through the heavier edging. I thought it wouldn't at first--the thread kept snapping--but then I realized I hadn't rethreaded the machine properly. I fixed it and it was fine.

I've never made a waistband before, and that's my next step. I almost started tonight, but after reading the directions over several times I still can't figure out what I'm doing. I'll have to read up on waistbands in my sewing books. I gave up for the evening, since it was pouring rain anyway and I wanted to go inside, get into my pajamas, and read. So that's what I'm going to do.

That's it for the shelves

At least, I hope that's it for the shelves. I'm tired of fussing with them.

First, I bought six more bricks to make the brick-and-board shelves taller. I got buff-colored bricks to mix in with the red ones, since I wasn't completely happy with the red. But I'm not completely happy with the mixture either. But they'll do, and the shelves are stable, a good height, and will be very useful. They also help hide the Christmas and other decorations in bins under the table. And hey, the mismatched bricks just echo the mismatched wall panels, right?

While I was shopping for bricks (I don't know why I'm not considered a more interesting person, really) I went to get another shelf bracket, one that matches the two I already had up. As predicted, having the third bracket a totally different type--metal instead of wood--has driven me crazy. Maybe that's why, when I couldn't find the bracket at Lowe's, I drove across town to another Lowe's. The second Lowe's had it, thank goodness.

So I stained it yesterday when I got home from work, and I also stained the three smaller brackets in case I want to put up another shelf, which I might but not right away. I made my usual mess.

And this afternoon I took everything off the shelf, unscrewed it from the third bracket, unscrewed the third bracket from the wall, and put a new nail in to hold the new bracket. That didn't take long. Then I found the wood glue and glued the new bracket to the wall. Then I leaned against the new bracket and hummed to myself and stared out at the yard and thought deep thoughts about how I really ought to buy some clamps so I wouldn't have to lean against stuff I'd glued to keep it in contact.

Once I was pretty sure the bracket wasn't going to unstick itself when I let go, I left for a while to do other stuff. I'll talk about the other stuff tomorrow because I'm not done. The bracket seemed to be okay when I checked it later, so I went ahead and put the shelf on. I glued it down, although I have no idea if the glue is going to stick properly because A) no clamps and B) I was bored and didn't stay to hold it in place.

But the shelf looks much better now that all three brackets match. It's not going to hold heavy things or I'd have put up stronger brackets. Mostly it'll hold old bottles and sewing notions, because the table underneath it is my cutting table.

Breaking everything!

I started off this afternoon's project by breaking a glass. It was just a little votive candle holder, so it's not like it was expensive. But it was a harbinger of things to come.

I had several things I wanted to do this weekend. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find some of the supplies I need to do the things, so they'll have to wait. I did get some particle-board to use for shelves, though, and when I got home I immediately got to work staining them (after I swept up the broken glass).

The previous owners of the house--the ones who I think of as the monkey family, since the bathrooms sure smelled like a monkey house when I moved in--had started a project in the garage but never finished it. Bless their hearts. I'm not sure what they had in mind, but it looks like two shelves for very, very tall people. But the shelves they left were the crappy, plasticky kind from a cheap bookshelf. I moved those out right away; they're leaning against the side of the garage now in hopes bees will carry them away.

So I was left with a jerry-rigged structure for a shelf. I had to remove the pieces that are sticking up in that picture--they weren't very secure, they didn't seem to have any real function, and they were in the way. Apparently the monkey family ran out of the right length of screws by the time they got to those pieces, though, because the screws were really short, buried into the wood half an inch or more and impossible to extract. So I used a combination of brute force and twisting to wrench them off. It worked, but one day I'm going to try that and get my eyeballs impaled or something.

I wore a pair of those one-size-fits-all-if-you're-a-guy-and-have-big-hands nylon gloves while staining the shelves, and of course they got slippery. So when I picked up the can of stain halfway through the job to move it, no surprise that it slid right out of my grasp and splashed all over the floor. Oops. [picture below shows stain AFTER cleaning, not before. It looked much worse before]

I used as much of the spilled stain to finish the shelves as fast as I could. Then I mopped up more of it from the floor, smearing it all over the place. I may have said some bad words. Finally I just left it and put the big shelf up to see how it looked.

Well, it looks pretty good. It needs a bracket or something in the middle because it sags, but I'll pick one up eventually. I also tried to hang two wooden brackets I'd stained to go with one of the smaller shelves, but it turns out they need more hardware. I'm not sure what to get or how to make them secure on the wall. They look good just sitting there, though. I'll figure something out.

Finally I couldn't put it off anymore and checked the can of stain to see what it suggested for clean-up. Well, it doesn't. Most of the label is taken up with warnings. The stain is very flammable, so I figured it couldn't hurt to try lighter fluid and see if that helped. It's not like I could make it even more flammable than it already is.

Lighter fluid worked a little. Nothing is going to get it all up, though. That's okay, it's a garage floor. I went into the house, scrubbed my hands and arms with lighter fluid (while I had the can open) to get the stain off, then scrubbed my hands and arms with soap to get the lighter fluid off. Then I did it all again because of course I didn't get all the stain off. When I discovered I was trying to scrub off a bruise, I gave up and took a shower.

After I was clean and in fresh clothes, I went back out to the garage and tinkered around with little stuff for a while. I found a candle-holder I'd almost forgotten about and put a candle in it. Before I lit the candle (to drip wax into the holder so the candle would sit upright), I determined that if the garage went up in a ball of flame, I would grab the photo of my imaginary boyfriend if possible before I bolted outside into the rain.

I wish I'd gotten more done today. Tomorrow I'll work on hanging a second shelf if I can manage to figure out the brackets.