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Step 9Sew the curtains and make the lid
Curtains
With the curtain rods in place but no curtains it was time to do a little work on sewing the velvet. I bought about a yard of red velvet and cut it up into four panels that fit my ant farm. I sewed a small hem at the top of each of the panels for the curtain rod to slip into. I then took the curtains to the laser etcher at Instructables HQ and burned an ant graphic into the front of the curtains. The big blob on the left curtain is supposed to be a piece of kale, but I etched the velvet with just a little too much power to pick up all the detail in the image. For etching velvet I recommend settings of 100% speed, 70% power - this usually produces nice results.
I then sank some small screw eyes into the sides of the window and tied some gold rope around the curtains to hold them back so that the curtains could be retracted for ant viewing.
The .eps and .ai files that I used to etch the ants are included below.
Lid
I may have overdone things with the lid of the ant farm just a bit, but I have heard that ants can lift 20 times their own body weight, and so if I had enough of them in there, they might all be able to band together and bench press the cover right off! Well, not really, but I still wanted to make sure things would stay put.
I found a scrap piece of steel laying around the shop and drilled some 1/2" holes in it on a drill press. I then covered the back of the lid with window screen materials to make sure that the ants couldn't crawl through the holes. I then used the laser cutter to cut a quick stencil out of extra sticker paper I had from printing Instructables stickers of some ants just walking around aimlessly. I applied the stencil to the lid and spray painted the top of the led. When I removed the sticker material the paint was left right where I wanted it and the ants came out looking great.
Laser cutters and large pieces of sticker paper make awesome stencils. These are big time perks of working at Instructables HQ, but now with our new Win a Laser Cutter Contest you might be able to make you own laser cut stencils too!
The tried and true method of using a piece of paper with an image printed on it and an exacto blade works just fine too.
The final step to make the lid was to drill holes in the top the window frame to hold a couple of rare earth magnets that I had lying around. The magnets hold the lid in place with quite a bit force - so I am pretty sure that the ants won't be able to escape even if they do combine their strength and try to pry off the lid.
The illustrator file that I used to make the vector cut for the stencil is included below as well.
With the curtain rods in place but no curtains it was time to do a little work on sewing the velvet. I bought about a yard of red velvet and cut it up into four panels that fit my ant farm. I sewed a small hem at the top of each of the panels for the curtain rod to slip into. I then took the curtains to the laser etcher at Instructables HQ and burned an ant graphic into the front of the curtains. The big blob on the left curtain is supposed to be a piece of kale, but I etched the velvet with just a little too much power to pick up all the detail in the image. For etching velvet I recommend settings of 100% speed, 70% power - this usually produces nice results.
I then sank some small screw eyes into the sides of the window and tied some gold rope around the curtains to hold them back so that the curtains could be retracted for ant viewing.
The .eps and .ai files that I used to etch the ants are included below.
Lid
I may have overdone things with the lid of the ant farm just a bit, but I have heard that ants can lift 20 times their own body weight, and so if I had enough of them in there, they might all be able to band together and bench press the cover right off! Well, not really, but I still wanted to make sure things would stay put.
I found a scrap piece of steel laying around the shop and drilled some 1/2" holes in it on a drill press. I then covered the back of the lid with window screen materials to make sure that the ants couldn't crawl through the holes. I then used the laser cutter to cut a quick stencil out of extra sticker paper I had from printing Instructables stickers of some ants just walking around aimlessly. I applied the stencil to the lid and spray painted the top of the led. When I removed the sticker material the paint was left right where I wanted it and the ants came out looking great.
Laser cutters and large pieces of sticker paper make awesome stencils. These are big time perks of working at Instructables HQ, but now with our new Win a Laser Cutter Contest you might be able to make you own laser cut stencils too!
The tried and true method of using a piece of paper with an image printed on it and an exacto blade works just fine too.
The final step to make the lid was to drill holes in the top the window frame to hold a couple of rare earth magnets that I had lying around. The magnets hold the lid in place with quite a bit force - so I am pretty sure that the ants won't be able to escape even if they do combine their strength and try to pry off the lid.
The illustrator file that I used to make the vector cut for the stencil is included below as well.
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