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.

UPDATE. Fascinated by this shape, I made a painting of it.

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 of Fimo polymer clay. 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 Fimo clay 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.

Noncanonical

Robot cookies

Got robot-shaped cookie cutters as a present!


Made a couple of differently colored and flavored cookie doughs with the help of some very patient friends. Red - plum, orange - cinnamon, yellow - vanilla, yellow-green - ginger, green - lime, purple - cardamon.




Army of robots.

Twirly flower beads and bracelet

I used the square flower cane from a previous post to make large square beads. I cut slices from the cane, and put some matching turquoise clay in between two slices. Pierced them twice with the needle tool. Also made some matching spacer beads, and some small flat flower beads from leftovers from the square cane.


Thick chunky beads form a huge bracelet. The double holes need a double loop of string (or rubber band), but by crossing the string at one point, I only needed to make one knot.

Life

A walking Meccano elephant!

Compiling zziplib with MinGW

In our platform game, we use the zziplib-library to access game data files from within a zip archive. On a Linux system zziplib is easy to install via the package management system, but on Windows it is more challenging. I could not find the library precompiled, so I compiled it myself with MinGW. Here is a list of the necessary steps and tweaks. In addition to MinGW, msys is needed (to run the configure script). Python is needed during the compilation, apparently when formatting the documentation. Either one has to disable  the documentation step (but I don't know how) or have a Python interpreter in the PATH. Since I have the great drawing program Inkscape installed and it ships with Python, I just added that python interpreter, C:\Progra~1\Inkscape\python to the system path. Note that spaces in the path lead to problems, for that reason I used the name C:\Progra~1\...

Get zlib. The header files, lib files and the dll are needed. Download both "Binaries" and "Developer files". Put them where they will be found during the compilation, I chose C:\mingw\include for the header files and C:\mingw\lib\ for the lib files. The file zlib1.dll should be in the same directory as the application.

Download the latest version of zziplib. Extract it somewhere, make sure there are NO SPACES in the path. Turn off any anti-virus software for the duration of the compilation process. At least f-secure often pretends to find viruses in files compiled with gcc. Also, any antivirus program may interfere with the configure scrips in the following steps, if it opens a file which the script creates and then quickly wants to remove.

cd to the zziplib directory. Edit the file configure. Replace uname -msr by uname -ms in two places. This is necessary, since uname -msr returns a string containing brackets. This string is used as a directory name, and for that brackets are not allowed. (This tip is from here, on the MinGW mailing list.)

Run sh configure --disable-mmap --prefix=C:/mingw/ . Without --disable-mmap the library compiles fine, but causes a segfault in some mmap function when accessing a zip file. --prefix describes where the header files and libraries should be installed. Then run make and make install.