Craft

Eric Harshbarger has built a seven foot tall grandfather clock exclusively from Lego. It keeps accurate time and needs no electricity; it needs to be weight reset every thirteen hours

Hidden Doors manufactures and installs custom secret doors disguised as swinging and revolving bookcases.
I know what I want for Xmas. One for every door. Satisfying my love for secret doors and eternal lack of bookselves in one fell swoop.

I love getting to play with exotic fibres, so I jumped at the chance to try spinning Soy Silk. The lovely Miss Gusset was kind enough procure me a bag full from the Victorian Guild, but it was to be quite a while until I got around to spinning it.

The chaps that make Soy Silk claim that it will take colour as well as silk. Perhaps that’s true using more caustic dyeing methods than I’m prepared to dabble in, but it certainly wasn’t the case when using Silk dyeing techniques. The colors turned out bright enough, but nowhere near the vibrancy of Silk.

Another exotic fibre winged it’s way to me from Colleen at Wild Rose Fibres, his one was Ingeo, a fibre produced from corn. Colleen did warn me not to take it above 160°C, so dyeing was out. Not a problem, as the brilliant white made a nice contrast with the dyed Soy Silk.
And a plyed yarn was born. The finished yarn was amazingly soft and pattable. You just wanted to fondle the stuff. Perhaps that’s just the spinner (very much out of the closet yarn fondler) in me talking.

I would have loved to get my hands on some hemp for warp, but Australian suppliers only seem to cater to the craft market at the only yarns available locally are more like string and quite coarse. Instead I opted for Cottolin, a cotton / linen blend, and was able to go quite silly with colours.

As it always seems a waste to go to the trouble of warping the loom for a single scarf, I warped it up for three and wove the second and third scarves using Ramie that a friend had spun. I got to weave and she got two rather nice scarves, both in keeping with the nature of my vegan project.

On finishing the scarves, I found that the Ingeo had a far lower melting point than Colleen indicated. A warm iron caused the Ingeo yarn to bead slightly on the edges of the Soy Silk / Ingeo scarf. It’s not the end of the world, but I was annoyed, and very glad to have plyed it with the Soy Silk instead of plying it on itself. As the manufacturer of Ingeo was blowing its own horn about selling a huge quantity of their product to Diesel Jeans, I hope they get their temperature stability sorted or there’s going to be a lot of pissed off consumers.
As usual, the photos don’t do the final results justice, but the shot of the skein is surprisingly good for a change.

Tripods are great for photography, but a pain in the ass to carry. Everyone these days seems to be carrying water bottles everywhere. So trust a Japanese company to combine the two to make a really useful thing: A mount that makes a bottle filled with water or soda a useful stable base for your digital camera — via boingboing

And if you’d rather not shell out US$15 for a bottle cap tripod, Adam has instructions for a DIY job that will cost about $1.50 in components — via boingboing

Who says the cold war is over? Wren Turbines, a UK based manufacturer of scale modeling jet engines, usually for remote control aircraft, has provided the engines for a 130kg+ scale replica of Boeing’s B-52. At roughly $3000 per turbine, this is a serious piece of engineering

Kiwi WiFi hackers are building cheap, incredibly powerful WiFi antennae out of Chinese cookware, such as a $2 parabolic dumpling scoop, and USB WiFi dongles. They’ve got extensive build and testing notes — via BoingBoing.
A 1978 issue of Women’s Day magazine, describing how to build an elaborate Star Wars play set, with moving conveyor belt, out of laminate, cardboard, plywood and the like — via BoingBoing

In a rather delightful tale of revenge on a scam-artist: a Powerbook seller on eBay twigged that he was being ripped off by an overseas buyer, who had even set up a fake escrow service to handle his phony payment. Instead of blowing it off, the seller sent the crook on a wild goose chase that culminated with him taking delivery of a P-P-P-Powerbook made out of keyboard bits glued to an old binder, after paying £350 in customs fees and friends of the seller who’d staked out his mail-drop photographed the whole thing for posterity — via BoingBoing

You can’t resist the allure of a professional moulage kit, perfect for simulating your own brutal wounds and accident scenarios in the privacy of your own home. For $549, you get a convenient carrying case filled with such essentials as: one foreign body protrusion, one eyeball, one eviscerated intestine, two crushed feet, one plexiglass pack for simulated glass in wound, one roll of tape and lots more — via BoingBoing

Scrap materials, the end of an ordinary box, scraps of leather or canvas, are all you need to manufacture a pair of comfortable, serviceable play shoes. So says the introduction to this Sunset article from 1943 on how to make your own Caterpillars. Another pair of make-at-home shoes. Tyre sandals with nothing but a tire and some webbing — via BoingBoing

You need little origami robots, or paper automata, for your desktop. Enjoy the soothing motions of the flying pig, the witch or a barking dog. They have some free downloads too.

John McEwan is a grand old man of military and role-playing miniatures. He also makes cut-and-fold paper models of buildings and vehicles. Some of these are really, really cool, like a line of alternate-history zeppelins and steam tanks. Once in a while he puts up files for free download. This month it’s a cool Victorian submarine.

Stunning, elaborate paper toys to print, fold and glue. Make your own model of the Sydney Opera House, the Chrysler Building or Angkor Wat.

Freebie fold and glue PDFs that turn into ultra-fab Japanese paper robots.

This collection of dirty origami — mostly explicit sexual stuff — is hilarious. The Kama Sutra pieces are nice, and folding a vulva out of a dollar bill is a great dinner-table trick, but they’re not a patch on the shitting dog origami.

Sometimes dreadlocks are contrary things and they develop weak spots, where the hair thins, to annoy you. I had one such spot, fortunately near the end of a dread, that was defying my best efforts to correct. It was getting to the point of trimming the offending dread when a solution occurred to me.
If you haven’t heard of needle felting, it’s one of those fad crafts that come and go in waves. It’s based on the process used to make industrial felt. A lot of synthetics aren’t that keen on being felted, so barbed needles are punched through, dragging the fibres into an interlocked fabric. Needle felting is the same thing on a smaller scale and is useful if you need to sculpt fibre and felt. I don’t, so had no real interest in it, until it occurred to me that it may be a viable way to repair my dread.
I grabbed a friend who is into needle felting, stuck my head on the table and let her rip. She folded the damaged section of dreadlock onto itself and needle felted the join. It only took a couple of minutes and worked like a charm. The repaired section is indistinguishable.
I wouldn’t recommend it for weak spots closer to your scalp, but it is a useful technique for combating otherwise difficult to repair ends.

Finally got my arse in gear down to Reverse Garbage, well tagged along with a friend is closer to the mark, a small warehouse full of the stuff that normally gets dumped by manufacturers. The place is a hit with teachers as it is a treasure trove of kids craft supplies. I’ve been to the smaller Casula outlet, which is now closed thanks to the inept and corrupt Liverpool Council, but it was great to finally see headquarters.

My friend was in search of dacron filling, my partner asked me to keep an eye out for metal offcuts and I had no particular item in mind. No luck with the items we’d planned on, but I did come back with some interesting stuff.

• Three end spools of yarn that will make a hefty warp for rag rugs
• Two squirty water bottles left over from a channel seven Olympics campaign
• Two empty metal 35mm film cans, I had to wait until a bus load of Japanese students had finish pawing through the bin first, don’t know what I’ll do with them but I like film things and metal tins are always cool
• A large offcut of commercial carpet for Malamute’s kennel
• 4m² of Astroturf that I still have no idea of my partner’s plans for usage

Worth dropping by if you’re in the Marrickville area.

Houseplant Picture Studio purchased a job lot of mid-60s knitting patterns and have scanned some of the groovy, retro photos as part of an ongoing project.
They aren’t the first to do it, there’s a line a greeting cards using 50s knit and kitchen photographs with witty comments added

In a bid to keep the sprogs from getting frostbite during recess in the winter months, Judith Symonds, an instructional aide at Seth Boyden Elementary School in Maplewood, New Jersey, sat the little monsters on the floor in a hallway and taught them how to knit. The knitting program was so popular that the sessions extended the rest of the year and after school classes were started for parents. Nice to see the old crafts aren’t dying out — via Making Light

Yamaha has a series of very realistic origami motorcycles, freely downloadable from their site. There’s also a cool little article on how the models are made

If you’re looking for a gift for someone with busy fingers and a sense of humour, try Subversive Cross Stitch