Steampunk USB Drives

I try to keep The Steampunk Home, well, "home" focused, and USB drives are a bit outside of the home. (Mine are most in use when I'm *away* from my home.) but these two were too good not to share.

Carl Ulrich sent me this one:

I took an old flash drive and with the aid of a 2 dollar cigar for the
glass tube I made my own vacuum tube flash drive. The entire project
took under an hour and costs under 5 dollars.

I love simple steampunk projects!

This one, made by Dave Barton's dad, is not so simple, but oh so beautiful:

Cog Etched Glasses

Craftster recently ran a steampunk swap. Most of the crafts were more costume centric, but I thought these etched glasses might suit your casual dining table.

Created by Craftster user Gnome.

Burlapping your Flat Screen in the NYT

The New York Times has an article about steampunk today.


The best idea I saw in it was a flat screen TV with the ugly plastic hidden by burlap. Simple, elegant, a hack of the best kind. The creator, shown, is Giovanni James, a musician and magician in New York.

Photo by Robert Wright for The New York Times

World's Smallest Steam Engine

Looks easy to build, for hours of fun!



Building The Amazing Steam Candle

Discovered by someone on the steamfashion community, and pointed out by Kaja Foglio (of Girl Genius).

Steampunk Keyboards for sale on eBay

Datamancer has two of his wonderful Steampunk Keyboards up for sale on eBay.

First, the warm copper "Baron of Cyprus". Truly lovely, a work of art.




Second, it's dangerous (I know, it's a keyboard, but this one looks like it would grab your fingers and leave them mangled if it found you trashing science fiction with it), it's made of engine parts (hex nuts for keys!), it's The Industrial.

Lots more pictures of both over at the eBay posts.

We also have a peek into Datamancer's workshop.

MakerFaire Austin

The family and I went to Maker Faire Austin this weekend, and while the Neverwas Haul did not put in an appearance, there was still some steampunk goodness.

Two art-cycles. The one on th left was covered with music box mechanisms. I love how the one on the right looks like a Victrola.

Cockroach Car. photo by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid

Wooden Gear Clock, from Scrollsaw Magazine. (We picked up a copy of that issue, if you really want to make one.)

Test Tube Vase Project

I ran across this project on Curbly the other day. It's simple, easy -- I like projects that could be done in an afternoon or less. It's based on a stainless steel design on Sprout Home, but I think Chrisjob's version is closer to Steampunk. I think I'd stain the wood a dark brown to get a more Victorian feel.

With a little more work, you could extend Chrisjob's plans to a larger wooden test tube rack -- for spices or flowers:

Our "modern victorian" kid's table

Ben wanted to build Miss J (Steampunk Sprog? Steampunk Spawn? I'll give in and post a picture of her in her steampunk jacket before fall is over) a play table; I, of course, wanted it to to be attractive enough to "fit" in the house.

I found this table by designer John Reeves in some home decor magazine a year or so back:

A simple, elegant twist on a Victorian table, no?

So that's what Ben and my dad built:



We found a standard table leg at Lowe's, and quartered it to make the table legs. I wasn't involved in the actual table making (involved the purchase of a biscuit making machine, which made the table more expensive than a store bought option, but Ben very happy) but afterwards it was painted with a high gloss lacquer.

(note: The chairs are from Ikea, but I thought they looked right. The rug underneath is one of our Turkish souvenirs.)

Modern Victorian Tea Set

There is a growing trend of what I'd call "modern victorian" home products. One of my favorites are these tea sets by Christine Misiak. She finds old silver tea sets and refurbishes them:

With this black set, when I sourced it at a car boot sale it was in extremely bad condition. The surface finish was rusty, dirty and scratched, also the inside of the tea pot was very unappealing.
Moreover, one of the little legs on the sugar bowl had been snapped off by the prior owner, therefore it had really reached its end life.
So I cleaned the set up and applied black to it, and now the surface finish is glossy and smooth and the set can actually be used again. The imperfection with the broken sugar bowl leg is still there, but it acts as character and the set aims to celebrate the imperfections.

I think the black one is the most steampunk -- for some reason I can see Mrs. Coulter in The Golden Compass using it.

There are pictures of the entire line on Flickr -- in addition to the black one she has an orange set and 2 green sets.

If you were really ambitious, you could try doing this yourself. Old silver plate (maybe start with just a tray?) is cheap and easy to come by at thrift shops. I'm not sure what kind of paint you'd use, but if I was doing it I would start with light coats of spray paint.

Steampunk Toothbrush Holder

Over on the steamfashion group at livejournal, someone pointed out this lovely craft project:



The how-to is on Instructables.

Paper Curtain Template

The Martha Stewart Halloween Special Issue (I know, I know -- I read these things so you don't have to....) has instructions for creating these elegant paper window curtains (along with a template).

I like this idea -- do it in a Victorian wallpaper or wrapping paper (maybe glue it to cardboard first) and you'd have a very inexpensive and very unique window covering.

Steampunkish Design Templates

While I was brainstorming about what to do with my kitchen cabinets, you may have noticed the nice piece of clip art that I'm considering for a stencil. Since I'm not that graphically talented (notice the lovely stock blog template...) I've been looking around for ideas and templates to use for projects.

The best resource I've found, so far, are the Dover Electronic Clip Art CD-ROMs & Books. They come with a coloring book sized book of designs (useful for looking through and dreaming about projects while *not* in front of your computer) and a CD with the designs in 6 different formats (gif, jpg, tif, eps, pct, and bmp). The image quality is high and the designs I was drawn to will be relatively easy to enlarge to the size I need for projects.

I ordered a couple -- one on 293 Art Nouveau Designs and another simply called Old-Fashioned Frames. I considered some of the Victorian ones, but they looked a bit too fussy for DIY projects.

I was disappointed in the Art Nouveau ones -- not they weren't wonderfully Art Nouveau, I'm just not sure I realized quite how *floral* Art Nouveau graphic design was. (The image at the top of this post was one of the better Art Nouveau clips.) Old fashioned frames yielded the best options for the sort of projects I'm thinking about. The nice thing about the old-fashioned frame set in particular was that it has a breadth of types of frames -- Victorian, Art Nouveau, geometric, scrollworks, simple, ornate, etc. Something for everyone and every project that requires framing. I can see some of Mr. von Slatt's Electrolytic Etchings with these designs. Or perhaps you'd use one to incorporate a little bit of steampunk "bling" to your laptop casing.

The images are royalty free, including for web use (up to 10 images per "publication"), so feel to grab the ones I'm using in this post to get you started.


Old-Fashioned Frames CD-ROM and Book (Dover Electronic Clip Art) via Amazon.