Spirosketch is ready!

After months of tweaking my design, I was finally able to launch my Spirosketch jewelry sets last weekend at Urban Craft  Uprising, and I’m so excited!

The Spirosketch set is a bangle bracelet and necklace, and also a fully functional drawing tool/toy. I’ve always been a fidgeter and doodler, and early this year I had the thought “Wouldn’t it be neat if there were a spirograph that you could wear and take around with you all of the time?” And then I set out to make it happen.

The first hurdle I faced was setting up the gearing in a way that wasn’t horribly uncomfortable around a wrist.  As you can see in the picture above, I ended up with an inner surface on the bracelet that is mostly smooth, with just enough teeth to keep things running cleanly when using it to draw.

Then I set my energy to coming up with an attractive design for the pendant. I wanted to make sure that there were a variety of hole positions so that it could create different designs, but I didn’t want to use the traditional positions from the original spirograph. I also needed to make sure that the holes were large enough to allow the tip of a standard pen to touch the paper through the 3mm thick plastic.

The largest number of iterations came in this step. I ended up with some rejected designs that looked sadly like checkers-pieces, lots that could only be used with super-fine-point pens, and others that looked and worked okay but were too symmetrical so all the holes made the same pattern. Eventually I hit on my final design, which I think does a pretty good job of being attractive and also functional – the innermost holes are just to continue the pattern, and won’t work with most pens, but most of them do work – as you can see from the variety of patterns made in the drawings on the top picture.

Want one? They’re available through my Ponoko showroom or my Etsy shop.