Wrapping Up December 2021

  I envisioned myself blogging (and writing) much more this December than has actually happened.  Part of this is due to posting to social media more than actually blogging.  I suspect that I need to have add some time-keeping software to my apps to bring social media usage back into balance.    

To recap the last few weeks.   

Through a series of events, the Day Jobbe has expanded to full time.   It's mostly remote, and I drive in to work some days.  I am doing a combination of departmental intranet design and web site management.  It has been a reminder of how brutally insurance benefits are awarded (or not) to vested employees. 

 

Writing is going very slowly, which I find it tends to do this time of year.  

My extended family is doing mostly well and managing to stay healthy during the pandemic.  

The cats have crossed another threshold with the dog and are more likely to spend the night in the house (rather than the garage) with the dog.  The cold might have something to do with this.  They also seem more tolerant of the dog in general, and no longer zip out of a room whenever she appears.  

Smokey seems to have recovered from his earlier medical emergency.  He's still as fluffy as ever, but--whether through the medicine he's taking or through the touch of age--he is bonier than he used to be.  

On the design front:  last November I sat down and decided to see about reproducing an Islamic design I've always thought was an interesting interlocking of circles, triangles, and hexagons.  As is usual with these sorts of designs, one can make it tile infinitely.  Other design projects include designing this year's family calendar and paper projects.

Roses Are Red

I had planned to make paper valentines using the plotter-cutter, but when I had the machine cut out "Happy Valentines Day", the letters were too small and swirly for the paper not to fatigue and mangle the letters.  I suppose there's a reason Army-style letter stencils are so popular.  

I did end up with some screens through which to shoot photographs.

So, here you go.  I think this second one of Aiofe came out the best...   I think.

 

Oh....  Right....  Ahem:

 Roses are red / Valentines is a jinx
Validation through couple-hood / is marketing that stinks.

 

Everything And The Kitchen Sink

The last week has been a quiet one; we've been a little under the weather here, with low activity levels.

Also, I had to replace the ten-year-old water faucet in our kitchen, which required multiple trips to multiple hardware store to scope out replacement parts, purchase a new faucet, and finally obtain a massive, three-foot-long water-valve key to turn the water off to our house.  I seem to recall a lot of swearing.  On the plus side:  we can use the sink without a mini-jet of water coming out of faucet; and I now have a tool that will allow me to pose, Poseidon like, shirtless and with one foot resting on a writing mass of pipes, waterlines, and wrenches.

Mark continued to conduct quests to Delta Ponds in order to see beavers.  The latest trip, early on Saturday morning (2/8), the water in the side-chanells was down, and there were no beavers to be seen.  I guess without the extra foot or three of water gone, they were less inclined to corpuscular morning activity (or else they were exhausted from a previous evening's worth of cambium gnawing).

We did come across a nonchalant heron stalking fish.

On the craft front, I came across a star design set in an octagonal grid system, and riffed off of it.  Stars, with their pentagonal symmetry, are tricky to work with, mostly because 60 degrees, 45 degrees, 90 degrees, and 72 degrees come together awkwardly in two dimensions.

What I've discovered is that pinching or opening the angle of the stars' points is a tremendous aid to cleaner designs when distributing stars around a regular polygon, like an octagon or a hexagon.  Specifically, if you trim a 45 degree angle off of an octagon, duplicated the angle five times and rotate it 72 degrees into a star, the resulting stars will project octagon-friendly grids more readily than a regular star.  Also, you can work with how the exterior and interior angles suggest zig-zags in lines for designs that look tangled on purpose instead of recursive snarls.

The star design on the left is using stars with points made with 45 degree angles, which makes for a more orthogonal design; the similar star design on the right uses points with 60 degrees, so hexagons look more regular.

Also on the craft front, I decorated an Altoids tin with a Valentine's design.  At least, it was supposed to be suggestive of Valentine's.  I was attempting to make two raptors, back-to-back, into a heart shape.  I did this all by hand instead of using the plotter-cutter, and got (more or less) identical shapes by tracing hard over my original design over colored cardstock.  I'm not sure if the heart shape is coming out or not; the end product has a pareidolia effect going.  Mark looked at the finished product and said they looked like parrots.  The background I chose gave the whole thing an Arts And Crafts feel, so I'm pleased about that.

On the writing front:  going slowly, but I did manage to submit a short story.  Yay.

On the gym front, I went last Monday for a Push-Pull Routine, which felt like running through molasses.  I was fighting off some kind of stomach bug.  I felt too run-down to go Wednesday.  Because of Thursday's plumbing adventures, I had pulled something in my hands that left my left thumb particularly pained when I grasped things, so I wanted to give my hands a rest Friday.   And Saturday.   And Sunday.

Easter Tins

Easter Sunday we hosted my family at our house (this required a lot of cleaning...mostly of craft supplies....okay, and the bathroom.). 

The kids had a Easter egg hunt, and we ate a lot of good food.  Mark did a lot of pre-event prep, which paid off.

For place settings, everyone got an Altoids Tin Easter Tableau (mostly featuring bunnies). 

Mark and The Child made a chocolate cloud cake, and decorated the top with chocolate eggs and a nest made out of chocolate branches (I think Mark took a picture...). 

My folks left mid-afternoon, and my sister's family stayed and visited for a few hours longer.

My niece really really wanted to take her bunny tin apart because she was convinced there was something hidden behind the purple cut-out square trellis the brown bunny sat in front of.  I don't know if she was expecting to find money, or a secret message, or candy, or something else.

The full Altoids Bunny Tins set is here:  https://photos.app.goo.gl/Jk1appfouMUMvMPJ8 

Easter Craft

Follow! But! follow only if ye be men of valor, for the entrance to this cave is guarded by a creature so foul, so cruel that no man yet has fought with it and lived! Bones of four fifty men lie strewn about its lair. So, brave knights, if you do doubt your courage or your strength, come no further, for death awaits you all with nasty big pointy teeth.

Arts and Crafts Sunday

 For a while, I've been thinking about ways that I might convert an Altoids tin into a kind of reliquary or shrine or portable diptych.  Serendipitously, when I last visited my folks, I discovered my Mom had about five hundred of the things -- she gladly donated five to me (my Dad was probably sorry that she donated only five...).

 I did some Internet research on portable altars, and lots of folks sand down and use paint stripper to prep their tins for a repaint job.  I suppose I should see if anyone pounds out the embossed "Altoids" legend, but so far folks have just dealt with the paint -- except for the one woman who encased her tin in Sculpey clay.

 Since I wasn't planning on taking my piece anywhere particularly wet, I opted for a paper liner on the inside.  For extra credit, I could maybe papier-mâché the lid, but this was more of a concept piece than anything.

The most fussy steps were figuring out the sizes of the lid and the box, which are a tenth of an inch different, so I could cut out a paper liner for them.  The compass came in very handy crafting the curved corners.  In theory, now that I have the measurements, I could use InkScape to cut out the two liner papers... I do wonder, however, how much fiddling I'd have to do have the measurements accurately come out on the Silhouette plotter-cutter.  That's another project...

 I figured I do a moon on the lid, and cut out a dark sky liner.  It felt a little pedestrian, but looking through various scrap paper shapes I had left over from previous paper art projects, it seemed obligatory that the sun be on the other side.

 The proportions of the shapes were in scale.  I wasn't sure what to do with the sun, which seemed a little lonely.  So I added some hills.  Bending strips of curve-cut green paper gave the hills some dimensionality.

So I gave the moon some hills, too.  The trickiest part was placing the sun and the moon to avoid a pareidolic face. 

At first I felt "terribly arty," and absurdly pleased with my own cleverness.  And then I realized this particular Altoids Diptych is dangerously close to Country Cute.

Oh well.

What works best in this particular example is the way the hills pop out of the box and are on both sides of the hinge.  Some other things I might try to add different levels would be making some Mucha-esque arches (the kind adorned with a frame of circles) in front of a Sarah Bernhardt figure.  In some of the Internet examples, folks had strung small beads or charms along the inside; it might be fun to try to work in an LED.   And if I were feeling intensely clever, I might figure out how construct and install a pop-up sundial...

Latest Paper Triangle Craft Project

 Last December, I was using paper triangles to make Christmas Tree Ornaments that were roughly icosahedron shaped.  During the process, I wondered if I could make a stellated truncated icosidodecahedron (or something).

 And it seemed like something my dad would like for his birthday, so...  I fired up the cutter-plotter.

 And cut apart the triangles that were stuck to each other.

 And assembled star shapes.

 Once I had enough star shapes, the idea was to piece together six different colored star assemblies--but the cutter-plotter ate one of my pieces of paper, so I only had five colors.

 Mostly, I was pleased with the outcome.  I think in the future I might have made the triangles a little smaller and used slightly thicker card stock to give the whole thing more rigidity.

 A smaller construction of two star assemblies joined at their points could make a charming little Christmas Ornament for a tree.  Mark says I've run the course with triangles, and started to make Chromolume jokes from "Sunday Morning in the Park with George."

The finished products.  They remind me of hydrangeas,  Mark thought the green and purple one on the left looked like something an evil sorcerer would use, and I had to agree that it had a Maleficent vibe to it.   So I gave the blue one to my dad, who really liked it.

Holiday Craft Project: Paper Icosidodecahedron

This year for the holidays I made some ornaments.  I'd wanted to make something a little more complicated, but in the end opted out for something that would use (mostly) straight lines and wouldn't require glue to put together.

The ornament is based on a stellated  icosidodecahedron.  I cut out triangles with a circle cut out of the middle to give the design an airier feel.

The edge of the triangle is about two inches; anything smaller and it would have been too difficult to assemble.







Five triangles hooked into each other pop into a three-dimensional star shape.  (Pause to imagine giant triangles making some cool outdoor gazebo.)  The triangle edges are slotted so they'll make a five-pointed star wen assembled.

There are several ways to put the different colors together.  I like to start with five triangles of the same color to make a star.  Other times I'll surround a triangle of one color with three of another and make a banded effect.












I didn't actually link the stars together at their points... but you could, and get a giant snub dodecahedron... and I would have for this post, except that I didn't have enough triangles (it would take 60 triangles... eyes cutter-plotter).

Back to this project,... I decided to make a blue and a green star joined together with a band of purple.

Usually I put the triangles together directly into the sphere, but for purposes of illustrating how things go together, I made the two end stars first, being sure that I kept the slots on the triangles on the same sides

Here's an interior shot, showing the geometry of interlaced pentagons and hexagons.

The last triangles require a little sphere flexing to fit together.

The holes in the triangles are useful for turning the sphere into an ornament.  I suppose a larger construction could be used as light shades.