Strawberry Love

La la la, strawberry~

It’s a variation on the persimmon pattern, minus one panel and plus a different type of leaf. You can add seeds if you want, maybe with beads or French knots.

楽しみしてね！(Have fun!)

_{PS: If you make a persimmon body in red felt and add one cutout of leaves from the strawberry pattern, you get a tomato. XD}

RIP Gary Gygax

"We've all gotta fail a roll someday."

A few more marbles

I had to leave some marbles in the kiln for annealing back during this spectacular adventure, and my kindly aunt Mari has since sent them along to me. Showing off my (barely extant) flame working skills, part deux!

I made one for my Dad. He's a big ND fan, and I figure he could put it on his desk. Then again, how maddening would it be to keep track of a marble rolling all round your desk when you're working? (Oops.) The technique for making this kind of marble is maddening enough in itself... you have to blow out the tip of a glass tube, build up a bunch of stringers, draw the stringers onto the thin bubble and invert the bubble around the stuff you've drawn in. Suffice it to say, I only made one of them.

And then there's this one, which is just a sandwich of clear glass around a shard of silver dichroic and some red frit that I was going to twist up into a regular, smooth marble. BUT, it got way too awesome in the middle of the twisting phase, so I just stopped it there and left it a glob.

Yay marbles~! ^_^

Conflicted

As a graphic designer, I don't think I'm supposed to appreciate the subversion of someone else's advertising campaign. But, as the same, I can't help but admire the brilliance of it.

Please visit the Billboard Liberation Front and have a look at their clever snark. It's pure gold.

Persimmonious

...is not a word. However, if it was, I’m fairly sure it would have something to do with persimmons.

I’ve been making stuffies for a couple months. They’re not nearly so advanced as things you can find on Runo's blog, Soto Softies, or the works of Mondopando, but they are awfully fun to make. Also, they’re much easier to compose patterns for.

For example, a persimmon! Called kaki in Japanese, I’ve eaten more than my fair share of these thingies in Iwate. It was always neat to see them hung up in long chains from the windows of houses, drying in the winter sun... even though it wasn’t a tradition I was familiar with, it evoked that old “grandparents' house at the holidays" type of nostalgia.

Download the pattern and enjoy! I hope to get the rest of my patterns up here in the near future... next up should be the strawberry.

Since you ARE using it right now...

...why not help save the internet?

This is pretty important. You may have heard about it already.

From the site:

The nation's largest telephone and cable companies -- including AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner -- want to be Internet gatekeepers, deciding which Web sites go fast or slow and which won't load at all.

They want to tax content providers to guarantee speedy delivery of their data. They want to discriminate in favor of their own search engines, Internet phone services, and streaming video -- while slowing down or blocking their competitors.

These companies have a new vision for the Internet. Instead of an even playing field, they want to reserve express lanes for their own content and services -- or those from big corporations that can afford the steep tolls -- and leave the rest of us on a winding dirt road.

The big phone and cable companies are spending hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying Congress and the Federal Communications Commission to gut Net Neutrality, putting the future of the Internet at risk.

Source: http://www.savetheinternet.com/=faq

Please help save the internet. If you've got a blog or make regular visits to a forum, you can help by spreading the word. At the very least, please use the protocol on the website to send a short message or log a call to your congressional representative.

Thanks,
The Internet

Paperhead

One of the reasons I decided it was time to start a blog was so I'd be able to share my “stuff” with the online community. That was one of the reasons why I started a DeviantArt page, too, only DA is for... well, art. Illustrations and fine photography, that kind of thing.

Most of what I do these days is either design-related, or one of the many crafts that I've gotten addicted to over the years. For example, my first love: origami.

I've been an origami nut since childhood. There was a Honda plant near our home in Ohio, and Japanese executives who came over to manage the factory brought their families along with them. The result was a relatively large population of Japanese students in the elementary school I attended. They (and their very gracious mothers) shared the Japanese culture with us through snacks, crafts, and toys.

The school library built up a healthy collection of origami books. We prepped our own squares from sheets of notebook paper, or stole sheets of neon pink and orange from the teachers' copy room to get colors.

I remember folding origami on the playground with a Japanese boy named Yoshi. He didn't know any English, and I knew no Japanese, but we could communicate just fine by watching each other's hands working with the paper. He taught me how to make a flapping crane and all sorts of boxes. In fifth grade, a girl named Emi Kida introduced me to modular origami. She shared real origami paper with me and showed me how to put Sonobe units together; the concept totally blew me away. I was hooked.

Since those days, I have photocopied origami books, cover to cover, from libraries in six cities across two nations. I have built up a digital library of origami diagrams that currently stands at 2.4 gigabytes.* I have collected at least 300 different prints of chiyogami and washi, many of them from small shops scattered throughout Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, Nagoya, Toyota-shi, Kamakura, and Nikko. Someday, I will join the Tanteidan.

In the meantime, I like collecting the lesser-known traditional models that I come across. This one, taught to me as the orei tsuru (お礼鶴) by a grandmother in Shizukuishi, Iwate, is cute and simple. Orei means “gratitude” in Japanese, and tsuru means “crane.” If you find yourself with a square piece of paper and a few minutes of free time, I hope you’ll download the diagrams and try it.

*If you are looking for the diagrams of a particular model, let me know – If I have it, I’ll send it!