How it’s done.

• November 6th, 2006 • • Uncategorized •

YouTube is pretty neat, I have to say. I remember being hypnotized by this video as a child. There’s nothing as intoxicating as a new box of crayons, no matter how old you get. But to see how the things are made! It was one of those rare glimpses into how something so integral to life as a small person who loved to draw came into being.

The film actually reminds me of watching the bottling machine that was in the microbrewery my parents ran when I was little. Because my parents owned the first microbrewery in the Southwest, brewing equipment for the small brewery was scarce so they used machines from a dairy farm. I recall the metal being thick with paint and age; the machines seemed impossibly huge to me, a six-year-old. Beer bottles ran through a sterilizer and chattered along the conveyer where they were filled with beer and capped. My favorite part was when they ran through the labeler: smooth, perfect bottles were pulled off the end of the line and put into six-packs. Somewhere in my head there is a memory of being shooed away as my mother filled boxes with six-packs. (One of these days I’ll get videos of the machine working transferred to digital…)

Packaging represents the gorgeous result of a fascinating mechanism coming together to somehow provide a finished item. I suppose that’s why I’ve always loved process as much as the finished result. Yes, I can buy a blank book from the store, but it’s so much more fun to make one! My hands get dirty, glue gets under my fingernails and I get to relish the looks on people’s faces when they look at the final, packaged product and wonder, “How did they do it?” I know how I did it, and I love to share how it’s done!

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