Leaf cane and beads

Trying out an idea for a Fimo polymer clay cane with a leaf pattern. Above left: the cane before reducing. Above right: Slices from the leaf cane on beads, before going into the oven. The squares are 1 cm.

 

The beads after curing (baking in oven). Above, the bead surface before sanding. The colors changed quite a lot - the background, which was pale violet, probably contained some translucent clay, since it darkened so much.

The round beads look like blueberries, with a painted-on blueberry leaf pattern, silly... For the flat beads, I added a pale clay layer before slicing. It was supposed to be a pale gold frame, but it mostly looks like someone's finger was cut to pieces, and happened to have a blueberry pattern inside :) 

Wooden beads

The things my home-made 'jewelry' has mostly consisted of, so far. Wooden beads, small 4mm ones above, and larger 6mm beads below. In the pictures are the contents of three bags of beads (165/125 pieces per color for the smaller/larger ones).

Fabric Spectrum

Reference picture for shopping online at American Apparel.

Spectral Hair Accessory

Folder Reduced

I've never managed to find a slim A5 folder - it seems one can have only one special property per item, either slim or A5. So I sacrificed a slim A4 folder, and cut it to hold a sheet of folded A4 paper. If I punch holes at the open end of the folded sheet, and make two cuts from the edge to the holes on one side, then I can fold out the A4 sheet without opening the rings.

The reduced folder compared to one in the original size.

Laser Ruler

Translucent ruler acting as an optical cable.

Bubbles

Bubbles in a beer bottle.

The bubbles shape themselves so that their surface area is minimal. Where three surfaces meet along one edge, the angles between them are 120 degrees. In a corner where four bubbles meet, the edges extend with the tetrahedral angle. These rules are Plateau's laws.

My few bubbles already look like a foam. Apparently the optimal structure of a foam with bubbles of equal volume is still unknown. The Weaire-Phelan structure is the best one known.

Printable Wall Calendar for 2012

2011 is almost over, and since it's so hard to find a simple and non-hideous wall calendar that one can write on, I made my own. The basic layout is "inspired" by the Bold & Noble calendars.

My calendar is a pdf, two pages, meant for printing on two A4s and sticking together as shown on the right. Download your own and print it on a regular printer. It should work also in gray scale.

The calendar is made in Inkscape, my favorite free vector graphics editor. The correct date/weekday arrangement for 2012 comes from Inkscape's Extensions -> Render -> Calendar function.

Marker Spectrum

My collection of Copic markers. They are alcoholic pigment ink double-ended felt-tip pens, which come in a lot of colors. I have some of the original square ones, and some Sketch (oval). The plastic boxes are from Muji.

Crystal foot

Got a large green glass "crystal" as a birthday present. Very pretty, but impossible to put on display... so I made a stand for it, from translucent polymer clay. Shown in the middle, the last shape-checking before it went into the oven. Above right: all done.

The crystal in its proper orientation. Showing nice green phenomena in the sunlight.

Circles and Python

Project Euler is a collection of computer programming problems. I have solved some of them in python, in order to learn the language. For one of the problems, I wanted to see what my program was doing, so I made it draw this picture:

The problem concerns circle packing: three circles are placed so that they all touch each other. Now place a fourth circle in the gap, touching the other three. Now there are three smaller gaps. Continue filling the gaps with circles.

I drew the circles with the matplotlib plotting library. Matplotlib is rapidly becoming my favorite plotting tool, replacing gnuplot.

Stickies

Sand machines

Took a walk in the Lahn valley. It's a huge sandy riverbank, where it seems to be profitable to dig for sand.

My first panorama, i.e. a picture that's stitched together from several photos on the computer. Click for larger version.

Reflection Double Recording

The reflecting metal droplets are the outdoor artwork "Helmet" ("Pearls") by Merja Pitkänen by the river.