Glass Beads

Got some new glass beads, in three sizes - small, tiny, and ridiculous.

The New Grey

Since I had almost no grey Lego bricks in my old collection, I ordered some new ones from Pick-A-Brick. I realized that the color was different - the new grey bricks, on the left, make the old ones on the right look even older and dirtier than they are. According to Brickipedia, this new color, bley, has some blue in it and replaced the old one in 2004. A pity, since the old grey bricks are among the most stylish objects I know.

Glad Morsdag

From a trip to the botanical gardens yesterday.





Met a family of ducks.

Making Soap

We followed this tutorial, based on this recipe for transparent soap. We were slightly short of castor oil (since 250 ml oil does not weigh 250 g...), but we substituted olive oil for the missing part. This German soap calculator was handy to get the substitution amount right.

Some equipment and ingredients. For alcohol, we used a bottle of Stroh 80 rum. This gives our soap a hint of red-brown color and a nice rummy smell as well, at least during the soap-making. On the right, some sand cake molds, pudding cups, and a plastic heart-shaped bowl, to be used as soap molds.

We heated the oils and dissolved the lye in water. Here we pour the lye solution into the oil, then mix with a blender. This is where the chemistry happens, the lye and the fat react, producing soap and glycerine. The mixture quickly became opaque and quite thick. The thickened mixture was kept in our small oven on 80 C for one and a half hour.

After staying in the oven the soap was quite hard and dry. Here we add solvents - first alcohol and glycerine, then sugar solution. We had lots of small soap pieces floating around, but after sitting in the oven again, the solution cleared up miraculously.

Time to add pigments and fragrance oils! For color we used food colorants and some of my fluorescent pink pigment, dissolved in alcohol. For fragrance, we had rose geranium and grape fruit essential oils. The grape fruit smelled very nice, but was much weaker than the rose oil in the finished soap.

Then the soap was poured into forms, and put in the freezer to harden. Ice cube trays from IKEA  gave nice little soaps.

Some of the finished soaps! We were apparently a bit heavy-handed with the food colorants, and some of the soaps are really too dark to be transparent. The green and the fluorescent pink (see top of post) were just perfect.

Street Things Turku, Part Two

Tiny, feeble measuring points. Approximately natural size.

Striped Blue Beads

An experiment with making 'length-wise' striped beads. The transparent greenish stripe is 1 part transparent white, blue, and green, correspondingly.

Another set of beads - dark sparkly green-blue with some pink mixed in.

Bonus - wave patterns forming in the sink when sanding these blue beads.

Street Things Turku, Part One: Round Covers

Lego Storage

Organizing Lego bricks has always been something of a problem, if you're inclined to categorize. We took a clear plastic lidded box, a SmartStore Classic 31, and cut clear plastic sheets into the proper shape, to divide the box into sections. The sheets are polycarbonate Lexan sheets, 1.5 mms thick, just thin enough to be cuttable with household scissors. Five sheets were used in one direction, giving one compartment for each of the six traditional Lego colors. Compartment width was chosen to match the relative frequency of each color.



Where the sheets cross each other, we cut out a thin rectangle from both sheets, from the top to the center in one sheet, and from the bottom to the center in the other, to form a cross halving joint. It was helpful to drill a 2 mm hole at the inner edge of the rectangle, and then make two parallel cuts from the side to the hole. We fastened the plastic sheets with hot glue to the box. One long sheet was placed perpendicular to the six shorter ones, to stabilize and to separate thin and thick bricks.



Here is the box with the divisions in place and filled with our supply of bricks.

Dot grid beads

Attempting to make beads with a simple repeating pattern. They turned out to serve as illustration of how reduction distorts a pattern. I thought I was using a lot of dark brown buffer clay around the gray dot, but in the first step (4 dots) we already see the dots beginning to square up. When reducing the 4-dot cane, and forming the 16-dot cane, the corners have escaped further into the corners... Possible remedies: more buffer, and perhaps making the canes on a larger scale in the first place.


The ends of the dot grid cane contained patterns which are perhaps more interesting than the actual dot grid. Made some round beads with slices on the surface.

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