napkin drawings

Last Wednesday, over 2 pitchers of margaritas, Wendy passed out napkins and fancy new Sharpie's and told us to draw.  Being at the end of the table and probably on my second glass, I did not hear the instructions so clearly... Apparently we were supposed to sketch out ideas for the next few pieces we plan on making; I heard, "draw the first thing that you think of," so I drew a cat riding a bicycle, some palm trees, a sun that got crossed out, a new sun, and an airplane that reads "kitty express." 

Wendy then instructed us to pass the napkin to the person on our left, Poor Adam,  he got my napkin.  I in turn received Jon Bonser's napkin (his blog here).  Part of his napkin below.  There were 2 more sketches on the napkin but this was the only portion that survived the violent expulsion of my boyfriends nose.

She then said that we have to make a piece based off of the napkin sketch, and to do so in a week.  So I chose the dancin' shoe.  In honor of Jon's love of kinetic objects, I am constructing a mechanism that will cause a shoe to tap.  This is certainly something that I am not familiar with, I haven't thought about kinetics since, ummm, high school.  So I devoted Sunday morning to research how in the world I was going to create such a thing.  It's hard to start researching when you don't even have the proper vocabulary of what you are trying to research!  After an hour or two, I finally discovered the words rotational to linear motion, then piston, cam, reciprocal motion, motion converter, and voila, I was making headway.  I eventually found a wonderful animation that made sense to me.  So I took off from there and am about 65% done with the piece, (would probably be further along if I didn't constantly make dumb mistakes), but oh well, ya learn!