Red Snail Missing

I recently found a box of my childhood favorite candy, the 'Frog butterfly snail' ones - every eighties kid from Finland knows which ones I mean.

As a kid, it was always important that the box contained at least one candy of each of the ultimate correct types: red butterfly, yellow snail, and green frog. I'm happy to report success in the present case! In fact, the only combination missing from the box I bought was a red snail.

Circle Stickers - Lots of Dots

One great thing about Germany is the abundance of small, inexpensive round paper stickers - supposed to be used for archiving, I guess, but in my experience, they're also great for super-fast artwork creation, and for arranging nicely on a table.





On a side note, this company has a very impressive sticker repertoire. I haven't yet seen a shop that would sell all of these, not even in Germany.

Thread Collection

My collection of sewing thread, small but pretty, deserves a post here as well. They're all Coats - some polyester Coats Duet, some Coats Cotton, and some are an ancient and discontinued polyester-cotton blend. I don't actually like sewing, but that doesn't keep me from wanting all the colors (pdf). Maybe if I could get into paper embroidery, to turn needlework into a form of paper craft...

Jelly beans for fall

I was thinking these might make an appropriate seasonal color scheme for the summer to early fall transition. The Jelly Belly flavors can be found here.

Memory game favourites

Street Things Marburg, Part Two

Street Things Marburg, Part One

Glad Morsdag

From a trip to the botanical gardens yesterday.





Met a family of ducks.

Street Things Turku, Part Two

Tiny, feeble measuring points. Approximately natural size.

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.

Noncanonical

New Legos

From the wonderful Pick a Brick machine. Adds to the old stash.

Shiny and New

Ordered some new polymer clay tools from a German online polymer store - a Kemper needle tool, a ripple blade, and a set of tiny 5 mm (5/16 in) Kemper shape cutters.

Street Things Belgium, part three

Part of the Atomium.

Street Things Belgium, part two

Street Things Belgium, part one

Street View Netherlands, part two

 Some more of these street objects, from our recent trip to the Netherlands...

...and some uncategorized bonus objects, such as some surprisingly pretty moss between paving stones. I'm guessing "hond in de goot" means that dogs are not allowed in some store nearby. The red-and-yellow graphics was lighted up at night, and depict the bombing of Rotterdam. The silhouette is of a Rotterdam statue which also commemorates this.

Street View Netherlands, part one

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).