Show Time

The show was really great. I think everyone had a good time, especially the kid mowing down on the chips. There were some really impressive works done by my classmates, and of course my buddy Nick comes out of nowhere with a really cool work on canvas and completely shows me up! I can't believe the term is over and graduation awaits. ♫...those were the best days of my life...♫ (prolly not).

The Spread

Finished

I'm very pleased with the way it turned out. Good times are had by all!

In Progress Shots

The cutting phase was the most painstaking and grueling task of the project. More than 25 hours was spent turning whole corks into the 1800 hexagonal tiles. I ended up cutting more than 2000, however, I had to downsize the board to fit my backer material, turning more than 300 pieces in wasted effort.


Dying each piece to match my color scale was a painstaking task. Because each piece needed 10 -15 seconds to dye, more than 5 hours was spent simply coloring the cork tiles. The dye used was a combination of dehydrated black currant juice and boiled down coffee.


Ah, wood glue, the backbone of any good project...


I really did like the look of the cork board in this phase. Perhaps it was a waste of time to put all the pieces together only to rip them back off, but I felt like I needed to see the whole thing assembled. Plugging the pieces in without paying attention to orientation or value range was significantly faster than piecing together the final board. More than 23 hours was needed to adhere the final cork tiles to the backer board.

How to Spend a Week

Nothing much to say, except for, "BLAAAAH!"

Down and Down We Go...

Proposed Imagery:









Really comprehensive Ikea manual page:
http://www.ikea.com/ms/en_US/customer_service/assembly_instructions.html

There will be 3-4 different boards completed and documented. Feedback on the better images would be appreciated. Naturally, these are copyrighted and don't fit my exact specifications so I'll be taking digital photos to emulate them for my purposes.

To make an omlette, you have to... cut some cork?

I'm through cutting cork. Altogether, I have over 2050 individual pieces. That is enough to make a square board 45 tiles by 45 tiles. This works out to being about 27" square, which ends up being a bit smaller than I originally estimated, but adding more tiles is not really an option at this point.

Just some fun facts:

Each tile takes an average of 8-9 cuts to complete it's finished shape, which puts the total number of individual cuts over 17,000.

The total weight of all tiles is nearly 2 lbs. While the weight of the scrap is just over 3 lbs.

Each cork makes an average of 5-6 tiles, meaning roughly 350-375 corks were used in the production of the tiles. At one bottle per night, it would take you a full year to amass this number of corks from regular consumption.