Saturday Morning DIY

Saturday mornings are my crafting time.

No, I don't mean crafting in an MMO or any other video game, but in real life.

After I'd outgrown the Saturday Morning Cartoons as a kid and sleeping in until noon for my college years, Saturdays became another sort of video-related ritual.

Our local PBS station had the following television shows on Saturday mornings back in the 90s:

•  8:30 AM - The Woodwright's Shop
•  9:00 AM - This Old House
•  9:30 AM - Hometime
• 10:00 AM - The New Yankee Workshop

For a guy who liked to work with his hands, it was like mana from heaven. 

I'd sit in our apartment, newly married, and watch these shows and dream about being able to work on a house of my own.* Or maybe I'd dream about radio related projects, or even what we'd now consider to be cosplay or renaissance fair related projects.

Yes, I'm the sort of person who likes to do things with their hands.

Those days of the 90s are long gone, but in their own way my Saturday morning craft binging still continues. The only difference between now and then is that I can no longer watch This Old House --the projects are far too expensive for me to dream about-- Hometime's last show aired in 2016, The Woodwright's Shop's last show aired in 2017, and Norm Abrams has since retired from all of the shows he helped shepherd: This Old House, Ask This Old House, and The New Yankee Workshop.

Enter YouTube.

For starters, the late Russ Morash of WGBH Boston and the legendary producer of many classic shows** created a YouTube home for all of The New Yankee Workshop episodes. They've been able to upload a ton of them, upscaling them and utilizing AI to correct and improve the visuals, so that they're in as good of a condition that they can be at this time. Some of the videos were on videotape that was in poor condition, so the work performed on them is quite amazing.

The episode shown above was the inspiration for a lot of my feverish work on what a grill cart of my own should look like. I will be making some changes to the design, notably the wheels so that I don't necessarily have to lift up the cart any time I want to move it around, but the basic design will remain the same.

There are other creators on YouTube who regularly post on Saturdays (or Fridays so that I watch them on a Saturday morning) who scratch that "maker itch" that I have. People such as Shara McCuiston of Shara Woodshop Diaries...

And Brad Rodriguez of Fix This Build That...

both of whom give off real engineering vibes to me when I watch their episodes. 

You get the idea here: I get some interesting ideas as well as some tips about how to create things from a wide range of creators and topics. Shout out to Bernadette Banner for her videos that are more inspiring and amusing than anything else, because I don't have even a tenth of her design and seamstress skills...

And to Max Miller who intersects his interest with history with his interest in cooking with Tasting History...

*Of course, once you own a house you end up doing a lot more involuntary work than actual projects meant to improve the house, but I was in blissful ignorance of that reality.

**Which includes Julia Child's The French Chef and Crockett's Victory Garden.