Chewing Gum Foil Snowflakes

Printable Christmas Card

...for family and friends! The card as a pdf.

Print the pdf. Cut out the card by cutting away the grey in the background, halving the larger circles. Then fold along the rows of smaller circles, as in the picture, to make an S-shape. Place in your collection of Christmas cards.

Still life

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

Our bread machine

Ingredients: flour, water, olive oil, sugar, salt, dry yeast. Sunflower seeds are nice. Pumpkin seeds are also nice, and may give the bread a slight green tint.

The ingredients are put into the bowl of the bread machine. It is important to insert the mixing blade first! Then dry yeast is added in a small cup on top of the machine.


Our machine is an old one, made by Panasonic. Wikipedia says the first bread machine was made by Matsushita, now Panasonic, in 1986.

After four hours the bread is ready.

With this post we celebrate a 100 bread jubilee, counting since moving to a new country and taking the bread machine with us. During this time, we have consumed 30 kg of the standard 405 wheat flour, bought at the standard price of 25 cent/kg.

Here is a blog by fellow bread machine enthusiasts.

Fascination

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.