JulieLeung.com: a life told in tidepools

When Ted’s traveling I enjoy sneaking a peek at his magazines before he does. This week I discovered a copy of Make in the mailbox. During mealtimes I’ve browsed through the magazine. It’s filled with excellent photography, wonderful illustrations with directions that seem clearer to me than other instructions I’ve read, for example, in Sunset magazine projects. The thought of creating a kite with a camera for aerial photography intrigued me, however the list of pages is intimidatingly long and we lack some tools.

The magazine has a masculine feel to it. The ad on the back implies that the Make reader would fantasize about creating a shapely robotic woman. As I had the page of contributors open on the table, my six year old daughter glanced across and declared “Four men and one woman!” But Make doesn’t succumb to Ikea’s failings: there are women featured in some of the photos (even a girl in one?) and female authors such as Dori Smith (her first paragraph is especially good).

The highly-detailed technical sections were difficult for me to understand, especially while supervising three children over lunch, but I enjoyed a number of articles, including Bruce Sterlings’ piece on flintknappers, Merlin Mann and Danny O’Brien on Yak Shaving and Mark Frauenfelder’s description of ecto.

Reading the magazine, I thought it would be fun to do some of the projects with Ted. I like working together with him. Make would make a great date night. 😉

After I wrote this, I read Paul Boutin’s review at Slate.com