MakersHourQuestionsQ5: This ‘dishcloth’ thing came about from my misreading last week. What funny or confusing misreadings, potential or actual, have you had in your making? Instructions, measurements, or whatever you casually read during your projects.
Michelle / The Giddy Stitcher@MakersHour I do try to skim read through the whole pattern before starting a knitting or crochet project, but sometimes it just doesn't make sense until you get into it.
So I'm not sure it counts as funny, certainly not to me, but if I had a quid for every time I've completely misread the instructions and not noticed for a week I'd probably already be buying that yarn van we were talking about the other week.
John T@MakersHour
A5: Although not my making, I do have a very funny story where it was a new colleague's turn to make "Friday Cake" for the group, and he was very excited as he hadn't baked before.
He made a cake with a "secret ingredient" and was very excited for us to guess it.
We all bit into the cake and immediately made an array of bad faces.
The secret ingredient was a cup of coffee. He had added a cup of ground coffee.
Sue Archer😆 😝 Not the way to do it!
@MakersHour he said the recipe was called "Black Magic Cake", I just looked it up and at least this recipe calls for one cup of "brewed black coffee". Maybe his was vaguer?
Iris Young (he/they/she) (PhD)@grajohnt @MakersHour oh nooooooo. I love what coffee can bring to baked goods, when used properly, though.
diyelectromusic@MakersHour A5 Misreading component values can lead to some rather infuriating fault finding!
Mistyping is just considered part of the normal workings of the universe...
YvanQ5: This ‘dishcloth’ thing came about from my misreading last week. What funny or confusing misreadings, potential or actual, have you had in your making? Instructions, measurements, or whatever you casually read during your projects.
Mostly deliberate, non-subtle, often rather NSFW, innuendo. I am usually setting up the misreadings, per se. (Or are they misreadings?)
Q5: This ‘dishcloth’ thing came about from my misreading last week. What funny or confusing misreadings, potential or actual, have you had in your making? Instructions, measurements, or whatever you casually read during your projects.
I haven't made the mistake, but it's important when cooking to make sure you read tsp (teaspoon) and tbsp (tablespoon) correctly.
Or as my late godmother once failed to do, know the difference between a clove of garlic and a bulb....
Janet@suearcher @MakersHour one assumes she upped the required amount rather than reducing it!!
Yes. It was ... garlicky.
QuixoticgeekA5 at risk of an actual sensible answer today. After too many drawings where workshop dirt blurred part of the dimension, so you can't see if the part should be 75mm or 75cm. I now stick to only using 1000 multiples. So m, mm, um, etc... this then provides context. A 75m length doesn't fit in the lathe, it has to be 75mm. Even if the unit part of the drawing is completely obscured by oil or coffee... That and only using sensible unit systems, provides for error checking
#MakersHour
@quixoticgeek
Yes, during my mech eng degree we were told to only do that.
It makes good sense to only use the one type of measurement on a drawing.
@quixoticgeek @MakersHour smart. I have never forgiven crystallography for sticking to Ångstrom (10-10 m) units when nm (10-9) is used in so many related areas, nor IR spectroscopy for using inverse centimeters.
AndyQ5: This ‘dishcloth’ thing came about from my misreading last week. What funny or confusing misreadings, potential or actual, have you had in your making? Instructions, measurements, or whatever you casually read during your projects.
A5: Not making related but a group of us were out one night, many years ago and I was standing outside a bar looking at the sign which said “HOGSHEAD”. I obviously had a confused look on my face as a mate asked me what was up. My response was ‘what’s a hog-shead?’ (pronounced ‘sheed’) and he just stared at me as if I had seven eyes.
@Andy @MakersHour I remember shopping with my son when he was young enough to be newly reading everything. He suddenly asked why ‘Men Swear’? I started a long explanation about some words just being for the playground only to realise the sign said ‘Menswear’!!
@Janet_52square @MakersHour I was somewhat older than that…
@Andy this reminds me of when I asked a British colleague referring to a castle ("kah-sle"), what a CARsle was.
In the German system "sh" and "th" are not phonemes, but multi-word-monstrosities-packed-down-into-a-single-word can have parts ending in s or t followed by parts starting with h, and I'm starting to get used to it but it was a major footgun early on.
@MakersHour can’t think of any specific examples but I often mismeasure - it’s the ADHD in me!
Jeff Miller (orange hatband)@MakersHour Q5: This ‘dishcloth’ thing came about from my misreading last week. What funny or confusing misreadings, potential or actual, have you had in your making? Instructions, measurements, or whatever you casually read during your projects.
A5. Measure twice cut once holds for fabric as well as for wood.
Making directions make more sense after misapplying them once or more.
The dishcloth misreading is adorable and the sort of thing I would be prone to.
But mostly "read the instructions through multiple times, mentally rehearse the steps" is what I tell myself.
@MakersHour Q5. Does it count as a misreading to load a CAD design in imperial units that was designed in metric or vice versa? I think this was why I had so much trouble finding the right size bolt-handle-knob-thing that one time I wanted to print one to keep in my bike toolkit. #MakersHour
Relatedly: supposedly standard measurements that mean different things across languages and regions (e.g. US/UK/metric "cup" all being different).
@iris @MakersHour The worst case of that I finally caught up with recently is the naming of SMD components - two numbers for the dimensions, but some are the same numbers in both imperial and metric! I mean... really!?