Thanks! It’s crochet. I don’t knit nearly fast enough to make things that big without losing my mind! 
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Edit rather than new post due to that daft “no more than two replies” thing:
Workbench nearing completion…
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Edit again:
Benchtop finally glued in place:
Just gotta trim the ends, plane the top, install the bottom shelf and mount the vice before I’m done.
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BTW: will one you other fine folks please make something and drop a comment so I don’t have to keep re-editing this post?
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Quince jelly’s on the stove. Will post photos shortly, but conscious of keeping the thread ticking over, here’s a jelly-foreshadowing post.
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I make three preserves and I have a religious fervour for all. Every year I bottle a shirt-load of tomato passata, generally as part of a boozy Saturday afternoon; make a few jars of quince jelly because it’s like nothing else; and make marmalade out of any cumquats/kumquats I can get my hands on, because they make the best marmalade possible.
Autumn/Winter is quince season though, so this is jelly.
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This is Kiddo’s work:
Hat Kid and Mustache Girl from “A Hat In Time” game
Medium: Perler beads
She designed them all by herself, no templates or picture underlay. (She’s 9, btw.)
ETA: (Sadly the colors aren’t coming through very well, but the cat hair certainly is.)
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Coffee table at the sanding/planing/varnishing stage:
And I got one end of the workbench trimmed off:
Time for a beer.
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Still a bit more planing and sanding to do, but the benchtop is coming along nicely:
BTW: total materials for the bench were about sixty metres of construction pine and around a litre of glue. All up, roughly $320 (Aus dollars, equivalent to US$220).
Nothing but 90° crosscuts in it, too. Dead simple to make.
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That’s a nice, solid-looking bench. I’m moving in a month and I think I might borrow your design for my new shop.
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The joints are put together like this:
Just cut and glued 45x90’s (AKA metric 4x2’s). I deliberately made the joints tight when constructing the legs; the stretchers required a bit of fine tuning with the belt sander to make them fit.
It’s 1.4m long, 800mm tall and was originally 990mm wide…but then I realised that I needed more clearance to mount the vice, so I added an extra board on one side, which increased the width to 1035mm. But all of those dimensions are easily customised to suit; this was built to fit my height and my workspace. If it were any longer, I would have added another set of braces in the centre.
It’s just light enough to be moved by one person; I can’t lift the whole thing, but I can lift one end and “walk” it for short distances. I deliberately went for hyper-stability over portability; if I ever move house with it, I’ll definitely be paying a few beefy blokes to move it for me.
If you don’t need quite as much heft, flipping the benchtop boards onto their faces (i.e. a 45mm top instead of the 90mm version) would reduce the required timber by about 15m and make it substantially more portable.
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There’s still a little tweaking I could do (adding bench dogs etc), but with the installation of the vice I hereby declare the workbench project complete:
EDIT:
First coat of varnish on the coffee table:
And a shelf for the workbench:
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I’ve got an old house and like to have period-appropriate decor in some rooms, and I was inspired by an earlier article in Boing Boing about a design group building Amazon Echos into antique phones. So here’s my new phone project, which is just about complete:
I used an Echo Input for the project, which is a thinner version of the echo dot without a built in speaker. They’re nice and cheap, but I found that it was next to impossible to work on. The built in microphones are teeny tiny PCB surface-mount units and I figured there was no was I could solder wires to them without likely destroying the unit. Same thing for the indicator LED. So I went all analog Rube-Goldberg on the thing. I made a circuit with a light sensor and relay, so that when the LED goes on it triggers a retro looking bulb on top of the phone. I used parts from a stethoscope to remote the microphone input to the phone’s original microphone housing. And I wired the audio output through the original phone’s receiver switch so that when you pick up the receiver you hear the sound through that, and when you hang it up the sound goes to speakers in the old radio below the phone.
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Damn. Respect!
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Damn, I step away from this topic for a few weeks, and just look at all the cool stuff y’all were doing in the meantime!
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I just wish I could figure out how to change the wake word to “operator.” The system lets you choose from “Alexa,” “Amazon,” or “Computer” but those are the only options. 
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Apart from my somewhat bodgy spoon mule (which I had to leave behind in Sydney), that workbench and coffee table were the first time that I’ve ever made anything bigger than a bowl.
I’ve just started practising how to make mortice and tenon joints, in preparation for building my computer desk:
Not quite perfect, but good enough to work. Quite happy with it for a first-ever attempt.
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How do you like your Ryobis? I’ve seen some good deals for power tool sets, and was thinking about getting one after reading some positive reviews, when I have the disposable income.
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Mixed, but mostly positive.
They’re hobbyist-grade rather than professional kit, but they’re good value for the money. Cordless is essential for me, as I don’t have any power in my workshed.
Interchangeability of batteries is a major plus; I only have three batteries (one 2.5Ah, one 4Ah, one 5Ah), but those batteries run all of my power tools (drill, impact driver, circular saw, reciprocating saw, jigsaw, multitool, trim router, belt sander, detail sander, angle grinder, torch, worklight, shop blower, handvac, radio/bluetooth speaker, chainsaw, lawnmower, planer). Two of the batteries came with the 9-piece kit, one came with the lawnmower; the other tools I bought as skin-only models.
The only one that’s notably disappointing is the reciprocating saw; it’s pissweak. Which, presumably, is why Ryobi brought out a Mk2 version (which I would have bought instead, if I hadn’t got the saw as part of the nine-piece kit). It still does the job eventually, but it tends to jam frequently if you’re making it work hard on a cut that’s binding.
It would be nice if the circular saw was a smidge bigger; maximum depth of cut is 45mm, which is only just adequate when crosscutting the 45x90 construction pine I use.
I shelled out the extra for the brushless version of the chainsaw, but the rest of them are just the basic models. They all come with a four year warranty, extended to six years if you register them online.
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After a few weeks in Australia, I came home to a garden choked with weeds. This is my poor garlic patch.
And after spending two hours weeding just this little patch:
Brocolli had bolted, but salvageable. Kohlrabi now the size of softballs so they’ll be a bit tough. A busy weekend ahead of me. Raspberry patch is next on the list.
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