It’s great when two separate things in my life come together and make one beautiful, crazy, hot mess. This is a post about one of those times, which ended with a triangle suspended in a box. Let me explain.

Wednesday through Friday, I will be at the Arizona City/County Management conference in Sedona, Arizona.  I am relatively excited, though conferences are not my favorite thing.  I love the educational sessions, and I like (but do not love) having a chance to network with current managers and like-minded people.  What I don’t like is being away from home and out of my usual routine.  But, it’s ok.  This is three days, two nights.  I can handle it.

Anyway, this is all to say, I sit on ACMA’s conference planning committee, and I helped plan the speed coaching session for young professionals.  As part of this planning, we decided we should have a way of telling young professionals to switch from one coach/manager to the next.  An audio cue seemed like the best idea, right? And at previous conferences, I had seen a gong being used for this purpose.  Which is great.  But they aren’t so easy to find.

At local stores, I couldn’t find a small gong on some sort of stand.  Online, I only found relatively expensive ones or ones that had reviews calling the sound they made as, “tinny,” which is not the pleasant sound I am looking for.  So I gave up on that.  But at Central Music, they guided me towards a triangle.  A triangle!  Brilliant!  But, they didn’t have a stand.  Let’s leave it there for now.

If you read my post from a few weeks ago, you saw that I have wanted to get into furniture making (New Coffee Table!).  That was so successful and fun, that I wanted to continue my tool-weilding experience.  Now, let’s return to the story.

So I had a triangle.  And tools.  And I needed a stand.  BAM!  Brilliant idea.  I would make my own! I had some wood in the garage from something or other, and I cut those into four equal lengths.  Then, I sanded them a little, and spray-painted them in gloss black.  That yielded the image below.  It’s just a plain black square.  But it was incredibly fun to figure out how to make and make as well as these untrained hands can make possible.

Then, I had to figure out how to mount the triangle. If I had a hook, I was just going to put the hook at the top and call it a day. But I didn’t have a hook. So I had to (and wanted to) get creative. We have a ton of ribbon from leftover projects here and there, so I knew I could use that.

I drilled two HUGE holes into the square, one at the top and one at the side. Then, after spray-painting the holes black, I hung the triangle from the top and created a loop on the left side to hold the stick to hit the triangle. To hold the ribbon above the whole, I tied them around pop-tops from soda cans that were also painted black.

When I was all done, here was the result:

The finished product.

I had a LOT of fun doing this, and I already am learning how to wield those tools better. And now, I have a really basic tool set and I know how to use it. Watch out, world, Sam has a saw and he knows how to use it.