Adventures in Box Making (The Hiccup)

Adventures in Box Making (part four)

I had found my final design… I had decided to go with hexagons for the shape of both boxes. A hexagon was a given for the shape of the box with the heart in it, as it allowed access to all sides of the object inside. It made sense from an aesthetic perspective to make the other box a hexagon as well so it looked like a cohesive piece.

After talking to Steve, I went with his suggestion of only putting hand-holes on three sides of the box to increase the difficulty level slightly. You can still feel the object inside but perhaps not all of it, so you have to really focus on what you experiencing to try fill in any blanks that are there. Along with the stocking material, it makes it a case of  ‘how smart is your sense of touch and your brain’s ability to process the information to build up a mental model of the object based on what you can feel’. The modelling of that mental image in plasticine is evidence of your abilities. I think it is fair to say that regularly interacting with ‘the Intelligence of Touch’ you would get better at the process. Hence, the idea I had for multiple interchangeable hidden objects.

I learnt a lot from this experience. I learnt things like:

• Don’t cut the different cards into the sizes needed and cut out the hand-holes before sticking them together. The sides won’t line up properly. Also, curves are really difficult to cut neatly.
• Don’t forget to make the hole in the middle layer of card recessed so that when you glue the stocking in it will be nice and flush and you won’t need to make those sides 4 layers of card thick instead of three just to get it looking okay…
• Don’t use that spray adhesive , it’s not potent enough and you didn’t stick a ton of books on the glued layers after, so in a day or two the layers are gonna start to separate.
• Leave enough room between the outer edges of the card and the stocking layer because when it comes time to drill the holes for the thread, you’re gonna start chewing through stocking because it doesn’t drill too well and that’s gonna make your dremel go nuts and make holes larger than they should be.
• The box with that gorgeous resin heart that you skewered with brass rod in it. Yeah, you know the one! You should have thought about that better. Brass is nice and bendy in an elasticky sort of way and the lovely aluminium rods you chose in that thickness you thought was appropriate for a tall skinny box are also bendy but they don’t spring back… And it was a good idea for all the rods to be hammered into the ply base and top, it makes it more stable and durable, the heart won’t move around when fondled by fingers. The execution however was a miserable failure, that springy brass just would not let hammer the top on properly, it kept wanting to let light and air in at the top and make sure those aluminium rods wouldn’t stay in their holes. Boy, was that a stressful endeavour!…
• Then you realised at the 11th hour that you had no stand for the sculpted representations and no box to put the plasticine in! Really for the design to be truly cohesive, it would’ve been good to have these things.
• And you were already bottoming out mood-wise, you didn’t realise it at the time but that anti-depressant of yours wasn’t being so effective anymore. The fogginess in your head, the inability to think, the near constant exhaustion you’d been suffering from, all symptoms you should have noticed but didn’t.That top not attaching properly and the realization you were missing pieces that would be good for the overall design was the nail in the brainpan and down… down… down you went.

I think that covers the nightmare well. Then I’ll post about being able to get the design finished thanks to my wonderfully understanding course co-ordinator, my doctor and the SSRI.

Adventures in Box Making (The Conclusion: part one)