Engineer’s Shirt Pocket

Visiting hundreds of client sites, engineers are always the ones with the fullest shirt pocket, carrying an assortment of pens, pencils, and measurement tools. If that may have been the inspiration, I certainly was not aware of it when I started with this piece. In fact, I started with the two pieces of wood left over from another project and some cool orange/red paint.  I started turning the wood into funny rulers. I then thought about how to present them in a formal way. I had this nice shirt -- I had liked it so much that even though it was a size smaller, I had bought it and got some mileage out of it. Having put on a few pounds in the Spring, I decided not to put in the laundry bag, but instead decided to incorporate it as the background for something. Rulers and a checkered shirt -- yes, I was onto something.  But I also needed a core in the middle. Working in an office helps in moments like this. I picked some brightly colored post-it notes, layered them on top of each other, leaving some edges to show.  I then captured my protection/restriction framework, yes the engineer would like to put layer over layer to fix the messiness of life, he or she layers on some wire mesh, but still will need to press on it to hold it all together.  So the engineer's quest to bring order, by layering over things, gets stamped by his or her palm, keeping the lid on the colorful contraption.