Thing-a-day.com

I went back through the things I’ve made during the month, and decided that the ones I liked best were the ones involving rabbits or books in some way. And then I thought back over the posts by others that I’ve enjoyed the most, and realised they generally involved rabbits, books, and small things. So, for my last thing I remade the rabbit I created for Thing 4, and made a small rabbit reading a small book:)

Another picture for size reference:

And that’s me done. Thanks everyone, it’s been fun!

I know these aren’t very good photos - it’s night here, I’ll try and get better photos in natural light after I’ve ‘installed’ them. I know they look like stupidly short friendship bracelets, but they’re actually going to be decorations for my husband’s dreadlocks…once I work out what to do with the ends!

I tried messing with the colour in the second photo, and the colours themselves are closer to accurate, but now it looks funny. I’m really bad at photographing my Things:/

I’ve fallen behind on the posting again - my internet connection’s been dodgy the last few days, and chose twice to decide there wasn’t actually an internet out there at all when I was halfway through an upload to Flickr. Still, I have been making things!

Thing 25 was these envelopes. I made the template out of cardboard from a pizza box:)

I have another project in mind, for which I’ll need around 30 small envelopes - these were fun to make, and I’m sure they’ll come in handy, but after making these 6 I decided to just buy the 30 I need if said project happens.

Thing 26 is my current favourite; journal pages in my brand new journal. I’ve run across a few people doing this while following links from here, and found some wonderful pages on Flickr, and I think I’m going to give Page-a-day a shot once Thing-a-day is over, I really like doing something creative every day and I’ll miss Thing-a-day!

I’m happy with this for a first try - does anyone have favourite journalling groups on Flickr or Livejournal to recommend?

And Thing 27 - an Origami box. With rabbits this time!

I thought for day 24, I’d follow the suggestions at the top of the page: Remake, revise, review, get started, finish things, keep going, send it around. This is how it went…

I finished Thing 7.

Or at least, I think I did - this was what I had planned out in my head, but now that I’m looking at it, I think the corners look kind of sparse…maybe I’ll see how it looks framed, and then see if I want to do more to it.

Thing 13 was my plastic bag yarn which I tried to do something with by way of ‘finishing’ that thing. But I quickly discovered I hated knitting with it, hated the way it felt, and disliked the texture of the ‘fabric’ it produced. Call this one a fail, I’m recycling those plastic bags the more usual way.

Next, I cut out and put together the rest of the things I printed out on Day 14 which was fun:

Jack and Gir are from Papercritters.com, and the skull is from Skulladay.com.

The skull has an articulated jaw, how awesome is that? You can make him talk!

And lastly, I got halfway down the foot of the sock from Thing 16, but didn’t finish it.

Self-Portrait in Three Minutes, or “Hey look, there are effects buttons on this thing!”

My new computer is a mac, and I just discovered Photobooth:)

Thought I’d do something different. I did make more boxes, though…

In my last post, I said you’d be seeing more origami boxes now that my how-to-make-origami-boxes books had arrived…and, surprise surprise, Thing 21 is an origami box!

And for Thing 22…two origami boxes!

These are a lot of fun, I might just keep making boxes for the rest of the month…I have no idea what to do with them, though, any suggestions? They’ll just sit around and gather dust unless I come up with something.

Today’s thing is a little origami box - the photo didn’t work out too well, because the paper has a sheen to it and the flash didn’t like it. I might try another shot in natural light tomorrow.

You’ll be seeing a lot more of these, because my Tomoko Fuse books arrived! See:

I’m going to try some tomorrow with larger, nicer paper, but I wanted to try at least one out before I went to bed, and I just used the closest paper. This is one of the simpler designs in the books, and I might not move on to the harder ones until my folding gets a little more precise!

I wrote letters and put together packages today. I’m not going to post pictures on the very slight chance that someone might see the contents of a package I’m sending to them, but here’s my new stationary, isn’t it awesome?

Posting two things at once, because I fell behind again…

I made a string of paper cranes to hang in my craft room, after I realised it was kind of ridiculous that whenever I got out my origami paper there were pieces I didn’t use because they were the ones I liked best so I was ’saving’ them! So I made my favourite papers into the simplest of origami, and strung them on a red thread where I’ll see them every day.

The bottom one is made from paper with cranes printed on it. I love that:)

And while I was going through my papers, I found instructions that had come with one packet for what I thought was a card with a crane on it, so for today’s thing I made one of those:

It was fun to make, although it’s not technically origami, because although it is made from one sheet, you have to cut the paper. And now I’m not sure what to do with it, because it’s not a card, or an envelope, it’s just sort of a…packet. With a crane on the front.

I made a sock heel. Usually turning the heel is my favourite part of knitting socks, but this time I used a ‘forethought heel’ - basically an afterthought heel you work straight away instead of putting the stitches aside and coming back to knit it when the rest of the sock is complete - and it just wasn’t as satisfying as turning a flap & gusset heel, which makes me feel like a Real Proper Knitter. It’s a perfectly good, functional heel, but there’s no getting around the fact that it’s basically a sock toe. So I have to knit four toes for these socks, and I don’t get to do the part that makes me feel clever! I’m going back to flap and gusset heels after this pair of sock, I think.

For Thing 15, I made…a hangover. Oh, my head. It’s years since I drank enough to feel this bad in the morning, and why on earth did I decide it was a good idea to go to two more bars, *after* the bar where I thought drinking ten shots was a good idea?

Don’t they look innocent, all lined up in colourful rows?

I worked on a few projects without actually finishing anything, but since we got a printer today & I was finally able to play around at www.papercritters.com,  Thing 14 is these guys:

I didn’t make them, just printed them out & stuck them together - it took so long to choose, they’re all cute!

I was feeling neither inspired or creative today, so I totally ripped off someone else’s idea and made plastic bag yarn. I’d been meaning to try this sometime, but I didn’t think of doing it for Thing-a-day til someone else did it - sorry, whoever you are, I looked for your post so I could link to it but couldn’t find it again!

Maybe whatever I make with it will be more original…

Thing 12 is a birthday card for my friend Jen - I took the photo before I wrote in it, so you’ll have to imagine that part. I wrote birthday wishes on pieces of white paper, cut them out in cloud shapes, and stuck them to the inside under the pop-up sun.

The inside looks better in person, you can’t see through the sun to the folds behind it so much!

For day 11, I knitted a gauge swatch on pencils! I got gauge, too, and knitted most of a slipper on a set of double pointed needles that were actually pencils sharpened at both ends…but it became obvious I wasn’t going to have enough yarn to make a pair, so I frogged it.

I also did some more documenting - I wrote up the pattern for the rabbit I made for Thing 4. It’s on my Livejournal, here if you’d like to take a look.

On day nine, I went to see the Leonardo Da Vinci exhibition at the Macau Tower. They had replicas of the notebooks he wrote in, with his mirrored backwards handwriting, and being a little obsessed with little books recently, they caught my attention. So, I’ve turned the origami book I made for Thing 5 into a little book about Da Vinci. The cover is made out of out entry tickets, and I found samples of his handwriting to copy for the inside. Badly, but I like the way it looks anyway:)

More photos of it here.

Thing 10 is documenting: I updated my Librarything profile to include the books I’ve bought since I moved. It makes me feel better to have them all catalogued together, even if most of my library is packed up a long long way away!

Oh, and I’m still working on Thing 7…

..slowly.

Thing 8 is a book made from the instructions here, making a book from by folding and cutting paper, no glue or tape. It’s a little insecure, because my folding and cutting skills are less precise than they could be, but it’s still closer to a ‘real’ book than my previous efforts, and I’m happy with it. I may put some glue in a few strategic spots before I try and write in it though:)

I used recycled wrapping paper for the pages, you can see the green parts - I don’t like that much, I may have to break my self-imposed ‘no new craft materials’ rule and buy some plain paper. The boards are cut from a pizza box, and the rest is origami paper.

I don’t have a completed Thing 7 to show! I had a few ideas that went nowhere, started a couple more projects that argued with me and won…my third idea was a mini blackwork sampler, and although I like it, this is as far as I got in an hour:

And not much further since. I need graph paper.

Thing 6 is pretty basic - it’s a pen holder for my desk. Maybe having somewhere handy to keep them will stop me leaving them all over the flat, always underfoot unless I actually need one…

In case it wasn’t immediately obvious, this is made from the cardboard tube from inside a roll of toilet paper, covered & lined with origami paper, and glued to a square of cardboard also covered with origami paper. Took about five minutes, not counting waiting for the glue to dry!

I also had another go at making an origami book, using the directions from instructables.com because I wanted a rectangular book, not a square one like my effort for Thing 5. It didn’t work very well though, I should have used much bigger paper:

Poor wonky little book…

Thing 5 is a little origami book, made by following instructions from this origami site. It’s about 2 inches square, and I haven’t written anything in it yet. There are instructions at instructables.com for a nicer looking one I might try next - I could use actual origami paper for that, this one was made from the wrapping paper from a department store called New Yaohan, which came wrapped around some glasses I bought.