Crankbunny Bloggorama: Playing catchup!

Well, hey now - it's been quiet in this small corner of bloggosphere! After dealing with some personal family stuff and the ever almighty Father's day deadline I'm slowly getting back on track to the typical Crankbunny antics.

In the works are more blog posts - especially those nifty "feature" ones that have videos and lots of pics of individual shop goodies.

Also, in a month of so I will slowly start rolling out the ability to actually do wholesale orders (Gasp!). That's right after crunching numbers - and recrunching - and racking my brain, I've found a way to share the love with some nice shop owners. There will be a nifty announcement eventually with all the necessary details.

I'll be animating more too - with my self imposed pseudo sabbatical from June 29th to August 2nd. Everything in that time will be made to order - so please assume 4 working days for orders to get produced and then shipped.

And so this post isn't completely boring and creatively useless - I will kick off a good juicy ramble about :: Volvelles ::!

A volvelle is a type of slide chart that's typically round and made out of paper with rotating parts. Way way back in the day they were used to deal with stars and astronomy and lots of math... but just way back in the day (like the 20th century) they had many different usage (baseball stats, recipes, verb). Basically its a contraption to organize, store, calculate a bunch of information. Kinda like a computer! It rules. The Crankbunny Secret Decoder card can be considered a type of volvelle.

My favorite type of volvelle (and there really are a bunch of kooky ones out there) is the perpetual calendar. A calendar that will work up to 20 to 40 years years! That's genius. I want to eventually make a Crankbunny calendar one day.

Jessica Helfand is pretty obsessed with volvelles too and put out this wonderful book cataloging all the wheel charts she could get her grubby hands on. Her book "Reinventing Wheel" reads like this... From circular mathematical slide rules to Captain Marvel phonetic decoders; from nuclear bomb blast calculators to gestational breeding planners; and from astronomical planispheres to presidential trivia plotters, Reinventing the Wheel demonstrates the astonishing range and remarkable utility of these ingenious "interactive" tools.

It was originally part of a show called Volvelles: the Magnificent Art of Circular Charting.