I know many were wondering if I would ever give the answer to the question – how many hours did that post on being dyslexic take me.  7 1/2 hours.

Why so long to post the result?  I was emotionally exhausted and had to ignore it to get back to the business of getting the casket class up and running.  But I ran into friends at my son’s school this morning after an event and knew it was time to post.  They are also an over-achieving family full of creative dyslexics, and their son will be attending the famous Carroll School next year, leaving his friends behind.  So the two couples compared notes about having dyslexic children and why can’t schools get it right and we both agreed that the worst part was having to relive your own personal pain through their eyes – long after you had pushed it away into a dark place.

Every time I have to meet with educators about my children, I find the process full of minefields of my own despair at a young age.  I would much rather get into a yelling match about some detail about a military system I am working on with a general than talk to a 1st grade reading teacher or principal.  Those people scare me and reduce me to mush with their scorn because they just don’t get it.  So I had to walk away from it for a bit, although you never quite walk away, my kids bring it up daily.

I was inundated by entries – and some really wonderful creative ones as well.  I laughed a lot and cried some too.  I have still been getting emails from people who went out and read more or just had the link sent to them.  It also spurred on some very interesting conversations at home.  I told my kids about the pallet vs palette email and the response from the back seat was enlightening.  The older one has internalized my messages and is now accelerating at school (a late bloomer effect common to dyslexic children and adults).  He was all about ‘go to it mom – teach the world we have strengths, etc’.  The younger one was horrified.  He has just been diagnosed and is horrified that I might let anyone know I was dyslexic, and on the internet no less!  I asked him why.  He told me in no uncertain terms how I would be cast as a stupid person the rest of my life.  So sad and the root of all the pain we are going through with him at the moment.  The funny thing is that my kids are interracial and the school has all these opportunities for them to do things in affinity groups, etc.  They never do – that is not what labels them.  It is being ‘stupid’ for their difference in thinking.  There is no affinity group for those that ‘Think Different’.  Used to be, it was called the dunce cap.  (Had to explain that this week when the younger came home after that slur was tossed at him).

I did take the opportunity to do some reading and finished the Dyslexic Advantage in only two days (a record for me).  For a dyslexic, reading (or listening to the mp3 version, available through Amazon) that new book is life changing.  And I knew so much beforehand, but the perspectives and additional research I wasn’t aware of… wow.  Their website is full of amazing information.  I love the way the blog it structured.  Just for people like me.

Read the essay by a dyslexic MIT student – you will be impressed.  I think the quote that sums it all up is this:

It is important for us to stop seeing dyslexia as a learning disability and start seeing it as an alternative way of perceiving and processing the world, with benefits as well as drawbacks, and with the potential to contribute creative approaches to our world’s problems.

Lydia K. ’14

We have taken a new tactic since reading the Dyslexic Advantage in our house.  We like to thing of ourselves as superheros with some kryptonite to sap our strength.  I am going to have T-Shirts made up.  It is an image that resonates well with young children and says so much.  We were able to lable the older one’s superpowers quite quickly.  For the younger, we talked about the movie The Increadibles and how nobody thought Jack-Jack had superpowers until the end.  And he had a ton and had to learn how to use them like the older kids did.  That really resonated with him.  We go around theorizing about what my young guy’s powers might be as a family game.  Something to hold on to on dark days.

As dyslexics often become entrapenurers, my older son is wanting to go into a socially concious-business with this idea.  Something that we just might do.  He decided to write his middle-school essay on this topic last week, and just yesterday asked me if I would post it on the internet for him.  I will tomorrow.  I am so proud of him – not because of the content – but because he has embraced it and come to know himself and he wants to use his experience to help other kids.  That is powerful.

So who won the contest and the lovely spools of GST???  In terms of people closest to the number:  Wendy H (7 hr 16 min 35 sec), Carla B (7 hr 30 min), Laurie S (8 hr) and Penelope D. (8 hr)

Then there are those entries that just tickled me.  A spool goes out to all these readers as well:

I have to give a spool to Diane T. for this gem of an entry:

 Calculations:
52 min per diet coke so
52 min x 3 = 156 min
x dyslexia factor (I choose to use pi in celeberation of pi day last week)
156 min x 3.14159 = 490.08804 minutes
+ 21 minutes of walkabout breaks = 511.08804 minutes
divided by 60 minutes = 8.518134 hours

Plus an extra spool for Trish S. whose equation was:

Now let’s get to the heart of the matter.  Your Time.    I would have started with a good half hour of fuming time (FT).  Then, because I was passionate I would have dashed off the fruits of the fuming.  I am a moderately fast writer so I would take my time (MT) 3 hours and triple it for someone who has difficulty (3MT).  However, I would have to subtract a half hour for  passion (P) and an hour and quarter for a full bank of previously unwritten mental rants (UR).  I would also have to subtract an hour and a half for writing practice and hard won skill (WS).  I would use the three coke time (3CT) at an hour and a half each as a check on the correctness of my figures. (Such as they are…)

Calculations

FT+3MT-P-UR-WS=Tricia’s Time

 .5+3(3)-.5-1.25-1.5=Tricia’s Time

                         6.25=Tricia’s Time

Check

  CT=1.5

3CT=4.5

Based on my check, I have you at too long but I am going to split the difference and convert to approximately 5 hours and 22 minutes.

You grab a coke to sit down to do your post. You are pretty frustrated about the pallet -palette thing. I would suspect you could write the post in about an hour. But to edit, re write to clarify specific thoughts, check grammer (or is that grammar?)and check the spelling on the first draft about another hour. Then you re read it to do the second edit for clarification, spelling and grammar checks. By now I suspect you are pretty exhausted with the whole thing and grab the second coke. Then you start to wonder if all this is worth the effort and consider deleting it and just posting a pretty picture for everyone to enjoy – perhaps it is best to keep your personal issues to yourself.But, then you sit back and re read your writing and as you do so you realise that some things just need to be said and the devil be – with what comes from it. You have to make a statement and now is the time to do it. So you start to edit the piece again adding a bit here and there, and as you do so you know you will have to re check the spelling and grammar again…. this is exhausting and takes another coke to accomplish.

Now it is time to push the computer key that will actually put your thoughts out there for the world to judge you by and you think “just one more quick read and edit”. Then you press the enter key and hope your readers understand your thoughts, your feelings, and will learn a bit from what you have written.

My guess is 3 hours, 8 minutes, and 24 seconds.  I’m thinking a shorter time than some guesses because of the passion and personal emotion surrounding the topic.  That could make the entire writing process more inspired and much quicker.  As for the exact time breakdown, expressed as hours, this is 3.14 hours. . . which is pi. . . which would be a likely number for an engineer to hit. . . even subconsciously!

I think I heard a collective head slap there over the last post.  A ‘Duh’ uttered around the world.  Every time I have presented that visual picture to a group in front of an embroidered casket, that is the reaction.  Human wants and desires are universal and product marketers are quick to fulfill that need – no matter the century.

I spent a good deal of time in my past working with industrial designers.  They taught me that the fastest way to design a hot toy for the market was to look at some ‘classic’ toy and bring a twist to it that is modern in feel, but to preserve the essence of the play factor.  Maybe add enough variation to bring the ‘collector’ instinct out that is so human and part of a young child’s existence.  If you can add some ‘trade-ability’ to the toy – even the better as it enhances the social aspect.

You might not live in the same world I do of boy’s toys, but the hottest stuff out there in the last five years:

Bakugan (marbles that explode into a mini-collectible monster when they hit the opponents piece) = Marbles

Beyblades (constructable, collectible spinners used in a bowl shaped arena) = Tops

Pokemon Cards (obvious analogy) = Baseball Cards

It is the same for kids over the centuries.  Wrap the toy in the new colorful package, add some Japanese graphics, and do what you can do today with modern materials and injection molding that you couldn’t do with a hand plane and chisel and you have a winner.

What I CAN’T wait to show everyone in class are the rare toys and trinkets that the little girls of the 17th century made and most likely traded.  They are very rare to find, but exist.  That is what sent me over the moon.  Forget the secret drawers…It’s what was in them!

How about that for a tease?

Tricia

About the same time that the thought of a bookbinder came into my head, I had been invited to a party at a collectors home.  It was a bash celebrating a textile exhibition and so there were a lot of experts on hand and the gratious host was allowing us to look at her collection of 17th century embroidery.  At one point she mentioned that there was a ‘relic’ that she had bought years before and it wasn’t out.  She went to get it and we followed.  Taking it from the closet, she placed it in my hands to bring it to a table for us to look at closely.  I expected the piece to be heavy and braced myself for this treasure.

Well, you could have knocked me over as the casket was so light.  My eyes got as big as saucers.  It was at that point the first casket I had ever held and the feel of it was soooo important.  I knew at that instant what these were all about.  It was in fact so important that when I ran my workshop at Winterthur in Fall 2011 called “A Tisket, A Tasket…who made the Casket?”, I brought my relic and passed it around the room making sure that everyone got a chance to hold it.  And their eyes one by one went as big as saucers as well.  It wasn’t as expected.

One person actually blerted out what was on their mind:  “This is balsawood!”

Not quite, but not that far off either.

Tricia

PS.  Thistle Threads is on Spring Break until Sunday

Well, with that thought in mind, that a simplified interior could save tremendous cost yet result in a lovely casket, I was on the hunt for a prototype.  One day, I found one on an antique dealer’s site.  I was thrilled as it was also in very good shape and lovely color.  I used all the profits from my teaching from an entire year to purchase it.

The interior is simple, a lift out tray that has slots for two scent bottles, a love letter/paper slot, pincushion and two secret drawers.  Under the tray is space for other things.  The top was also flat.  But the best part was that it only has three pieces of hardware – two hinges and one escutcheon.  Plus mirror hardware.   And only one lock.  You can immediately see the cost reduction in this piece.  When the plans were made up to replicate this one, it only had 51 pieces of wood to cut.  This was a great option.  It had large usable spaces, but yet still had some of the features that make these caskets desirable.  Things like removable panels and secret drawers.  

The only way to make something less expensive would be to remove the tray and its fittings entirely – make it an empty box.  But then why would anyone need me to make that?  You could have your husband or a friend do that.  And some will.  That is fine, I am happy to help in that dream by making a few of the needed elements like the hardware available.

But my conclusion was that I would make two types of authentic period caskets available – a flat top with the interior tray and then the double casket with all the drawers and bells and whistles.  That way both ends of the cost spectrum had an option.  But now that also meant that the course would have to be run so that people could choose which one they wanted to make – or if they would buy the bits and have their spouse make them a simple empty one.  I would show enough details in my course so those with simple interiors could be understood and those who have handy people in their life could give it a whirl.

Flexibility was required, and thus the carcass couldn’t be included.  I could imagine people who couldn’t afford all of this at once, yet if it was spread over years, it was doable.  So what if we decoupled the expensive carcass from the teaching and let people design and learn techniques and how they would be finished, then stitch their pieces, then get the carcass?  Then more people could afford the one with all the drawers.

So that became the model.

Tricia

So I told you last post about the shear number of pieces that have to be formed for this casket.  There are 17 molds that have to be made:

vertical escutcheon

horizontal escutcheon

smaller horizontal escutcheon

door hinge (3 pieces)

lid hinge (3 pieces)

small lid hinge (3 pieces)

ring

pull backing

large handle

small handle

handle backings

As a product engineer, this was scary to me as I know what it takes to get things made.  If it is something that needs special tooling, such as a mold, you have to pay for that tooling to be made.  That cost is either charged as a NRE (non-recurring engineering cost) up front or there is a large minimum number of pieces to allow the maker to absorb the cost through their profit margin.  So if you want one, you can pay $300+ for that one pull ring.  How the company wants to work all depends on if they are willing to go through the investment in time (there is always time in the sales process) to do one even through they are charging you the NRE or require you to make a minimum number.  When you realize how the casting of brass works, it makes total sense on why a company wouldn’t want to cast you just one set.  Take a look at this slide show of a brass works that specializes in making short runs for the architectural industry.

The best way to go is to bring something to a foundry that can be used to make an impression for a mold, then be used to make a wax positive that then can be used to make a negative mold.  But that requires having a set of real 17th century hardware that is not attached to a casket…  HMMM how do we do that?

If you don’t, then you need to pay the fees for a CAD drafts person to work with the photos to render a drawing that can be used with CNC machinery to cut a mold.

Well in this case we are using all of the above.  As a group, we have to be very, very, very grateful to an individual who not only had hardware that was coming off of a badly damaged casket, but who had sent it to a company to reproduce it a decade ago.  This was only a one off set for her own casket reproduction.  The individual offered to let me use the molds if they still existed.  It took awhile, but the molds were hunted down and I commissioned a one-off casting for all the existing molds.

Then I took these pieces and worked with them and the casket design.  Since they came off a flat top casket configuration that we weren’t making, some were in scale and some weren’t.  I would be able to use 70% of them and then the rest had to be either designed (CAD) or found on another casket that could have its hardware removed.   So I have known that I had over half the hardware ‘in the bag’ for about five years.  It took the other five years to find the rest.

Because of the minimums, it will take me the rest of the year to afford to cast all the pieces at the minimum.  I am doing a few every three months.  One hinge can cost me $5000 to cast at the minimums required.

Let me show you some of the pieces we will be using.  You can’t find these in any small box catalog!  They are among the most elaborate used on caskets and thus the jewelry will be fine as well!

Tricia