Studio Bricolage-Plastique!

Ted has finally taken me up on getting out of the house and getting a life of his own. Not only is he playing in the park dodge ball league again this year and taking a LEGO Robotics League coaching class but he has gotten involved with a neighborhood workshop as well and is not only on the Steering Committee but also leading events!

Ted's dodge ball team is called Grand Bal Seizure and they are currently in fifth place out of twelve teams. The league got a little messed up this year as the result of a few teams being far too competitive last year. This year the directors were hoping to make a competitive league and a recreational league and the teams formed with that in mind. However, there weren't enough competitive teams to form a separate league and so the teams are all mixed together again except that some teams have no "weaker" players (read: women), so they dominate.

When we were on the King Field Neighborhood Board we met a fellow who has gone on to start a hands-on workshop for kids. Now in its tenth year Leonardo's Basement, as it is known, has a building of its own and lots of classes for kids. Ted and Louis have been going there since Louis was five, mostly for the Saturday Open Build sessions. Check it out at http://www.leonardosbasement.org

Naturally once the adults saw what fun the kids were having, they wanted to play, too! Studio Bricolage (French for do-it-yourself) was born and once a month big people get together to build on a topic.

The first event this year was a doozy! The crew, fueled with snacks and adult beverages, built a Rube Goldberg machine that turned on the light switch at the door and ran across the workshop all the way to the Ladies' Room, where it flushed the toilet. It was a ton of fun, a huge success (it worked!) and you can see it on the Studio Bricolage site at http://www.studiobricolage.org/ It was, appropriately, named Chain of Fools.

Subsequent themes have been ice sculpting, balls (where not only did they make a Newton's Cradle out of bowling balls and steel cable, but a fellow made an incendiary device by filling a tennis ball with the heads from wooden strike-anywhere matches that he had meticulously cut off of the matchsticks with a pen knife!), and most recently plastics.

For the plastics class Ted taught a lesson on how to make bowls out of little green army men. Using green (and khaki) army men of the WWII vintage and grey and black medieval army men (maces, swords), aluminum foil and a propane torch (no oven at Studio Bricolage) they heated up the figures and then draped them over a bowl. Next they set the next smaller bowl of the nesting set into the bowl and pressed the figures into the shape of the bowl (and together).

As the night went on bowls were also made of plastic tableware, plastic snakes, CDs and more. It was a great hit and Ted earned his first teacher chit. The next topic has not yet been announced, so sit tight! In the meantime, admire Ted's creations!