Paper cutting

Randomly decided to try paper cutting since I have a lovely scalpel and a small cutting mat which makes the slightly excitingly dangerous joy of using a scalpel in your lap a reality.

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Unique Project - Lumination for Antique Glass

I saw this candlestick holder in the window of a charity shop and I kind of suspected it might be uranium glass, which I have a large collection of. Of course, I did the weird creepy stalky thing of going out at night when the shop was shut and shining a UV LED light into the window and, sure enough, the glass glowed green.

So I had this idea of an inverted, clear "candle" with a UV LED pointing down. This kind of fell apart soon after I took the picture... it was just held together with hot glue gun glue which didn't really seem to stick to the acetate/melinex very well. But it seems to work as a concept anyway.

Box making

My phone needed a new box. This probably sounds a bit odd but it's a very cheap phone with a pressure-sensitive touch screen as opposed to the more fancy electrical resistance screen... and it's got a rather bad interface that tries to dial the emergency services if it gets a bit knocked around in my bag (!)
I'm pretty impressed my first box which I made a year previously had held up so well. What got worn down on it was just the book cloth edges.

Here's the new box:




and a few In Progress shots too





Wrapping a tray in cloth neatly involves a lot of strangeness...

Drawing and Life

I've been away for a bit. The holidays happened and my birthday. Lots of stuff has happened in the last 2 months. The biggest thing is me finally admitting I have a problem with depression and getting help for it. Things are still fairly unstable. Some good days, some very bad days (weeks even) but I'm in contact with my doctor regularly and everything. A lot of it is a guess&waiting game.

On the worse days, the only things I can do to keep going is to play minecraft, listen to nightcore and occasionally draw some My Little Pony fan art.

My Sleepy OC by ~Akki14 on deviantART I only really got into drawing the ponies because a friend gave me an OC on my birthday. For some reason, I could suddenly draw ponies much better than previously. My Ivanpony Plushie Finally Arrived! yay by ~Akki14 on deviantART
So... not really much to say. Still alive and surviving. It's a little hard to feel like it today but I am much better than before, I think. I'm considering this as a long vacation. Slightly uncomfortable but trying to chill out.

Longcat Scarves

A little over a year ago, I got a strange request from my sister to make a longcat scarf. How long should a longcat scarf be? I decided very long... but also I was on a budget so I bought 2m of fleece but made 4m of scarf.

It was a lot of scarf.


Decided after that epic scarf, I'd make one for myself but leave it at a more sensible 2m.

Been wearing it around for a while and then someone said to me... hey you could probably sell those. Hm. Interesting. I'll think about it.
A few weeks later, someone else asks if I made the longcat scarf and if they could commission one as a gift. Okay I'll think about it. This time I actually sat down, figured out material costs and time costs and came up with a reasonable number that didn't seem insane. I ask commissioner of scarf if the price was okay and they said it was reasonable so off I went making scarves.


Two of the above are now spoken for - the third is on ebay awaiting a good home. Third has been sold, made another one, put it on ebay, friend bought that one.

I've got a few plans for possible Tacgnol/Longcat combinations but I'll wait and see how these do first.

Laser cut rings and Plastic Weld

Apparently back in October I forgot to write about some laser cut rings I made.



A friend happened to be in the space after I made these and gave me some tips since they're a bit melted. Need to use less power and multiple passes next time.

More recently I learned of Plastic Weld which is a solvent that you use to "glue" (chemically melt & fuse) acrylic together. Just tried it out on a random 5mm mirrored perspex dot I've been keeping around since the prototype for the Infinity Box.



So awesome. So easy. Just hold the pieces in place with one hand, use a small brush to brush the Plastic Weld into the join and it wicks along by capillary action. Done in seconds. This basically means I can make boxes... or whole cases like those in galleries! This is exciting news, especially as I'm too lazy to design boxes with all those tabs or little slots for bolts & nuts (as in the design for the Ice Tube Clock).

Shrinky Plastic Fun :D

Kate is a bad influence on me. Or a good one, I'm not sure which anymore... She made me discover many My Little Pony merchandise, like colouring books. One of the things she used the colouring books for was to transfer pony designs to shrinky plastic (known as Shrinkles in the UK and Shrinky Dinks in the US).
Lately I've seen a lot of MLP jewellery designs using the shrink plastic so I wanted to give it a try. What can be better than infinite pony fan art?

First, I tried to trace a really big Fluttershy... The instructions said it shrinks 7 times smaller. So I measured before

(look at those impressive tracing, colouring and cutting skills!)
And after

And found it really only shrinks down by 2.5 times or so (thanks to Kimball for using MATHS to work this out for me because my brain was slow and addled by plastic fumes).

I realised after making the Fluttershy that ponies don't have black outlines, so I made this Pinkie Pie

I really love her expression in this one. From the original I traced, her head was more down and she was much more shy looking but this is still lovely and I'll probably make it into a necklace for myself soon.

Figured to try something a bit smaller... Gummy! Pinkie Pie's pet toothless alligator.

Would have been a little better if it was a little bigger so you can see he's hanging onto something by his mouth.

and even smaller...

Copied from a mini colouring book, it was a sort of illumination on a games page. Still the most pretty tiny thing ever.

I'm sure I could come up with more ideas for this stuff and I bought quite a bit of shrinkles too. One idea that has come to mind is possibly ... mouse-sized butterfly wings. Combining the mouse taxidermy with the Rarity's wings from Sonic Rainboom MLP... Might be interesting. Or just pretty and weird. Either way it's good.