For a Christmas gift I attempted to make a creatively packaged mix CD, in the style of Adam Kempa's creations. For some reason I fixated on the idea of a cylindrical or spherical package to match the CD's shape; I enjoyed imagining the recipient trying without success to fit it neatly into his CD collection. For a while I drew a blank, but one day the idea of an Oreo cookie with the CD in the middle popped into my head.

The creamy filling is made from a DVD-R spindle case, reduced in height. This means to open the case and remove the CD, you twist the two halves first, much the way some people eat Oreos. I also thought this would be a much more reliable and satisfying mechanism than I would have been able to make myself.

The cookie pieces were made from a material called Last-A-Foam, a rigid polyurethane foam that we've been using at work recently for quick prototype construction. It forms easily and I figured it would have a good cookie texture. After forming the pieces using a bandsaw and router and sanding them, I cut a circular groove in one side for the upper half of the sliding mechanism.

I painted the pieces black and white with Plasti-Kote enamel paint before gluing the creamy filling parts onto the cookie parts with hot melt glue. I applied a label to the CD and also printed out and cut a circular paper tracklist.

The Oreo pattern came from a picture on Flickr, which was actually of a tin made to look like an Oreo, but was by far the best and highest-res image available. (One of the lessons I gleaned from this exercise is that when searching for 'oreo cookie' on Flickr, you get a lot of pictures of two distinct types: black and white cats, and one white person surrounded by two non-white people.) I was slightly disappointed by the contrast in texture between the paper and the foam, but the alternative was hand-painting the pattern, and given my skill set, that seemed unlikely to produce better results.

As difficult as the packaging for me was choosing a tracklist. I'd already made a mix CD for the same person last year, and then lost the tracklist in a computer crash, so I was afraid if I stuck with my old favorites I would inevitably end up choosing some of the same songs as I did last time. But I hardly listened to any new music this year. So I frantically read mp3 blogs, and found a lot to like, with the final list leaning rather heavily on a few blogs' best-of-2006 lists:

1. Peter Bjorn and John - "Young Folks"
2. Phoenix - "Long Distance Call"
3. Arms - "Tiger Tamer"
4. Islands - "Rough Gem"
5. Yo La Tengo - "Mr. Tough"
6. The Panda Band - "Eyelashes"
7. Grizzly Bear - "Easier"
8. Belle and Sebastian - "White Collar Boy"
9. Fred Thomas - "Disappearing"
10. Regina Spektor - "Fidelity"
11. Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks - "Vanessa from Queens"
12. Band of Horses - "The Funeral"
13. Jeremy Enigk - "Been Here Before"