fun

Msg: have snake

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Whipped up yesterday from materials at hand, as a surprise for my eldest’s jungle party.

Bent Objects

Bent

Terry at Bent Objects makes these lovely whimsical figures and scenes with wire and everyday objects. They remind me of the wire figues in Calder’s Circus, and I can imagine them being brought to life as puppetry.

Kite

(via Craft Magazine)

That one!

I want one of these hybrid electric bikes. Seriously.

Then there’s the George Bush Solar Powered Walking Chariot! The robotic rollerblading leg movement is very good.

(via Celcias)

Pratt!

Ah, yes! The wonderful irony of Canberra Liberal MLA, Steve Pratt, calling in the media to record him heroically scrubbing off graffiti, only to find that it was a legally commissioned work, and now he will be charged with vandalism of public art. It’s pure gold! I will refer you to Ampersand Duck’s full account, since she does it so well. The artwork was done by byrd, and I was fond of it; it was relatively close to where I live.

Byrd

The irony is no doubt especially sweet for the Labor Chief Minister, Jon Stanhope, following the brew-ha-ha when he was forced to fire one of his aides for doing some anti-Howard stencil work behind the Ainslie shops a couple of years ago:

Penguin and Moomin stuff

Penguin books beat Time to the punch on focusing on you, the user. They have a series of classic books with blank covers, so you can do the cover illustration yourself. It’s a cool idea, and I might buy the Woolf or Austen if I saw one, but I’m not really tempted. However, it has lead me to drool yet again over the Penguin book mugs. I noticed Laura has one, and I am dead jealous! Maybe I’ll just go ahead and order one.

I saw Moomin Mugs, too, recently – nice as well.

Espresso coffee hats

Espresso coffee hats

Making these fun hats was another of my Floriade projects. I enjoyed making them and was really happy with how they turned out. They were made for the performance group The Bunch of Posers, who in this guise are called Acappellacino.

To make them I started out by making the cup shape upside down, with a mixture of a garden pot and a garden hanging basket and clay. I started paper mache-ing it, but realised that the edges were going to curl when they dried, so instead I made a pattern from the shape (you put alfoil over it, masking tape it so it stays in the shape, then cut it into sections so
it becomes a 2D flat pattern). I could have made a small model and done the same and scaled it up if I hadn’t started down the paper mache track to begin with. Once I had the pattern, I cut it out of a particular thin dense type of foam sheeting and glued it up into the cup shape.

The top cup rim and the foam is made from a circle of polystyrene, so it gives the foam rigidity at the top. The saucer is slightly thicker foam, and the rim of the saucer is a ring of a kind of tubular insulation foam that the building trade uses (its called PEF backing rod, and its like those lengths of foam kids play with in swimming pools – pool noodles they are called here. But you can buy it in different diameters if you know where to go for building supplies.) The ring gave the saucer a nice rigidity. You can see the cups in the raw making phase in this picture.

Then it has muslin spray-glued on to the foam to give it a protective surface and kind of bring it all together. Then paint, with a bit of latex added to make it stick well.

The coffee pot was made in much the same way, just from foam. I made a pattern straight from my neighbour’s espresso pot and scaled it up (what I should have done with the cup, too!). However it does have a ring of light aluminium flat bar in the top rim and a couple of aluminium bars from the ring up into the lid to make the open lid possible and strong. The steam is dacron, the wadding stuff they put in quilts, with a wire through it.

The coffee cups just sit on your head like sombreros, but the coffee pot needed a chin stap which I filched from a bike helmet.

Here’s a video of the group in action, singing “You’re the Cream in my Coffee’. On my computer the sound only streams smoothly once its played through once.


(Click on the photo)

Pemberley is 10 years old

I decided to put up my old anniversary graphics in my Pemberley Image Gallery, to mark the decade since Amy started the Jane Austen site, Pemberley on 22 July, 1996. I put up some others while I was there, so its a sizeable gallery now. I also put in some keepsake graphics which haven’t been public before. Thanks for everything, Amy.