Men of Steampunk Calendar 2011

Though the year is partly spent, if you should be in the market for a calendar to markt he remaining days of this year called 2011, then here is one you might wish to peruse.

Sprockets and Lockets.com has the Men of Steampunk 2011 calendar for sale for 20 American dollars, which makes it a steal in any country! The pages abound with dapperly dressed gents showing their steampride in picturesque settings. I believe this calendar originated with Bianca Namori, an industrious member of  The Steampunk Empire, and may contain many photos of members of said group. Brilliant!

~ DreamSteam

(My sincere apologies that this post is so incredibly late! I just noticed I scheduled it for posting many months ago, but Blogger did not follow through and do that. Horrors! At least you will know where to get a calendar next year....)

Gear Up for 2011 - Make Your Own Steampunk Wall Calendar

I realize this is not a new idea, but it was on my mind anyway.  Since last year's calendar ceased to be of use a few days ago, my mind wandered over to the idea of steampunk calendars. [The kitten calendar from the dollar store that I get as a gift every Christmas is not doing it for me any more. Sorry, Mom. (Where do they find ugly kittens to photograph? Who knew there was such a thing?!!!  Most of the animals in the photos just look sad, which makes me sad, too!)]

But I digress. After a long search and viewing many, many steampunk calendars on the aethernet, I discovered to my disappointment that the commercially available offerings I saw had little to no appeal for me at all. After all, if I have to see a picture for a whole month, I want it to be meaningful, or at least interesting!  The solution?  Make my own!

A clever and thrifty individual certainly use a program to arrange the photographs and the date grid in an organized manner and them print it all out, but if you would rather have someone else professionally assemble and bind it into something more closely resembling a traditional wall calendar, the calendar maker on Zazzle.com will do that for you.  Their prices start at $20.95 per unit. (A free option is to use the calendar grids other people have created and shared, such as those that can be found in the search results here. Not all free formats allow you to add photos, though.)

A steampunk calendar I make on their site would probably include photos of some of my favorite pieces of jewelry (though almost all of the ones I liked best sold and I cannot take newer, more artistic photos of them, guess I should make more!), and whatever else steampunk that I can find that I like and of course is not copyrighted.  The Zazzle site also gives the option to post your full-color calendar for public sale if you so desire.  (One reason I paused on the Zazzle steampunk calendar page was that there was an attractive 2011 calendar posted by an Etsy SteamTeamer, Winona Cookie, featuring original WinonaCookie art and stories..)  p.s. - I have no association with Zazzle.com. nor have I ordered from them before. If you know/own/like of a better place to get custom calendars, let me know! I do, however belong to the Steam Team, who haveincredibly talented members!  =)

Just for giggles, I did a search on Etsy for steampunk calendars, and got some results for wall calendars and some for other items.  Here is a calendar that I like; it has stunning images and is almost the same price as the make-it-yourself ones (about $20).  An identical search term on ArtFire found one item that resembled a calendar.

If you create a calendar online and wish to share it, please post a comment here with a link to it.  Once/if I do finish one, I will link to it here as well.  Happy New Year!

To See The Universe in a Tree - The Celestial Wooden Calendar and Orrery

Clayton Boyer's Celestial Mechanical Orrery

     Hobbyist woodworker Clayton Boyer from Kuaii, Hawaii, spends his free time creating wooden mechanical devices of all sorts; this one keeps track of the universe!

     When the lever is activated each day by hand, the 14 gears spring into action to update the month, day of the week, date, the solstice or equinox indicator, the zodiac sign of the sun, synodic rotations of and when Mercury Venus and Mars are in retrograde, and a "moon face ball" for the moon phase.  It can even account for months which do not have 31 days using a dedicated cam. 

Here is a video of the calendar in action:

     Amazingly, he says the device took just a couple of weeks to build, but the plans took four months.  How does one go about assembling something so magnificent?  Boyer says that "it's just step by step."  Isn't everything, though?

His clocks and other creations are just as beautiful.  The amazingly beautiful  "Torsion Tree Clock" was actually carved from part of a still-rooted tree.  The timer below is one of my favorites.

     Plans and instructions for almost all of his machines are available on his web site, and you will find many more videos of his creations on YouTube under the user name quilty1987.  If you would like to see how he makes the individual wooden gears that comprise his mechanisms, watch the video, "These Gears Really Work?" which shows many oddly shaped gears meshing and this video shows how to make them.  Enjoy keeping time with trees!

~DreamSteam

Have you created your own wooden clock or steampunk mechanism, and want to share? 

Post a comment and link on this blog!