Corona Crisis Crafting: Just Bead It

As you probably have noticed by now, crafting is my stress relief #1. I craft so I don’t kill. And right now, stress is getting high. Omicron is raging and our governments have abandoned us. I regularly get messages from the ministry of education that resemble WW 2 perseverance commands: complete bullshit and dangerous to follow (did you know, schools are safe because we wear masks. Nobody who says that has ever tried to make a kid wear a mask correctly for 6 hours and Covid doesn’t are if you mostly follow the rules).

Well, all in all I needed some pretty escape, I saw a tutorial on youtube and thought “I still have all those seed beads from Uli, for once I wouldn’t have to buy supplies”. Well, let’s put it like this: the cheap plastic seed beads were enough to let me try it out and conclude that I like it, so off to Etsy I went. Charly clearly lives in the land where glass sparkles, because no matter what type of beads one might need, you can’t do better than Czech glass beads.

There are different techniques for beading, so let’s start with the first one: The wheels on the bus go round and round:

These are Miyuki delica beads, they are cylindrical. I found these flat patterns easier than the 3D ones we’ll see later. It’s a bit like crocheting doilies: skip here, add x there, repeat for the round, next round do this.

Same technique, different pattern. These combine seed beads (roundish) with Bohemian crystals and white wax beads. If you wanted to try your hand at beading, I’d recommend something like this, they’re fairly straightforward and don’t take to much time. Unlike the next project…

These are all glass seed beads, except for the black ones, which are Bohemian crystals. After a while you get the hang of the 3D shapes, but until that a lot of cursing was involved. The last tecnique I want to try is block weaving, but for that I’ll have to wait for some supplies to arrive…

A Studio Ghibli Appreciation Bottle Garden

Well, it’s probably no secret that I love Studio Ghibli animes and their magical worlds and being. And I wanted to do a bottle garden for a while, the jar has been standing in the cellar for ages. A bottle garden is a close eco system, where the plants produce oxygen and carbohydrates that then gets consumed by the microorganisms that feed on the decaying plant matter. They’re an invention of 19th century botanists that needed to transport their precious plant samples by boat. The closed boxes don’t need water or fertilizer and there are some that are decades old.

I finally decided what I wanted to do with it and got some supplies, only to be foiled by transport damage. I love the kodama, the little tree spirits from Princess Mononoke and happily ordered some on Etsy, only this is how they arrived:

The seller promised quick replacement, but I didn’t want to wait because who could tell if I had time then, so I glued them back together. They’re extremely detailed gypsum casts, so I covered them with clear nail polish because I was afraid that otherwise they’d melt inside the bottle garden. Then I wanted a small dead twig from our old apple tree and ended up tearing off a big branch…

Next: assembling the garden. First layer: pebbles for drainage.

I actually wanted to add a layer of clay substrate, but I couldn’t find it anymore. I won’t claim to have a photographic memory, but I have a very good memory for “where did I see this last”, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to deal with my chaos. Mr, not so much, and while I don’t blame him, it’s endlessly frustrating to know that he put something somewhere and him not even remembering that the thing exists. Well, the pebbles do the job anyway. You could now add some charcoal, which I’m probably going to do retroactively.

Next: potting soil and plants.

This is pretty moist and probably a thriving ecosystem already. I planted an offspring of one of my succulents and a semper vivum (next pic). those are not ideal plants for a bottle garden. We will see how they do. If they don’t thrive I need to remove the lid and keep watering them like ordinary plants (I only keep orchids and succulents indoors because I suck at watering them).

Next step: Moss and decoration

I collected the moss from a tree stump in the garden. Did you know that by now you can by “moss for decorating” in the garden centre? Like, what?

Sadly, taking the pics through the glass is, well. The light just refracts too much.

I added some fairy lights by drilling through the lid and then sealing the hole with hot glue. Pics are even worse like this.

They do look happy in their new home, don’t they? Now I got to balance the water and hope that they like it in there.

Winter Blues

Joseph Zowghi has sent us a pretty picture summing up his winter mood. It sums up my usual winter mood too.

Virusflakes – Part 3

The final part of kestrel’s viral art project. Enjoy.

Hepatitis B Virus can actually be prevented with a vaccine:

Hepatitis C Virus is a major cause of viral hepatitis. It was interesting to me that it looks nothing like Hepatitis B, it just seems to cause similar symptoms;

Apparently, most people are infected with Rotavirus at least once by the age of 5 years:

Herpes Simplex Virus was rated as “hard” and boy they were not kidding. This one I found the hardest to do and took the longest amount of time:

Virusflakes – Part 2

Some more pictures from kestrel.

This is the Heartland Virus. It was named after the Heartland Regional Medical Center, and not for the shape:

This is Adenovirus, which can actually be genetically modified and used is gene therapy and in vaccines for viruses, including SARS-CoV-2:

Lassa Virus can cause a severe illness and can be caught from rodents in parts of West Africa:

Bluetongue virus causes disease in cattle, sheep, and goats. I think the inner shapes are particularly beautiful:

Virusflakes – Part 1

kestrel has made some lovely viral decorations and she shared with us some pictures. Enjoy!

Marcus posted a PDF (under the title, “Let’s Go Viral”) that had these wonderful images you could print out and cut up to make virusflakes. I don’t know about the rest of you but the last two years have really hampered my ability to create, so this was a wonderful tonic to help me through a tough time. Here is the link to the PDF: -click-

To start out, just choose an image you find appealing and print it. It will look something like this:

Next, you cut out the square. I actually ended up cutting around the dotted circle, after I tried a few and found out how it all worked. Once you have done that you just fold on the lines (they turn out better if you are as accurate as you can be in your folding) with the printed image on top. I printed mine out on a very tough tracing type paper, almost like parchment paper. I could see through the paper fairly well to fold it, yet it was much stronger than usual tracing paper. After that, you just start cutting out the image.

I found that using a very small and really sharp pair of scissors worked the best. Each virus comes with an information sheet about that particular one; this can be educational as well as a fun activity. I certainly learned a lot more about viruses than I had known before.

OK, so what do they look like? Well, even the “worst” viruses are really beautiful. We will start with Coronavirus.

This next one is not actually a virus but it acts like one. This is the RNA vaccine:

And this is what happens to the Coronavirus when it runs into the antibodies caused by the above particle:

As they say, this is what the end of a pandemic looks like.

To be continued…

Women Educators on YouTube – Classicist – Lady of the Library

I haven’t watched more of her videos than this one, they do not seem to be exactly what would interest me. But this one did interest me and it was informative. Until recently, I did not know there are conspiracists who deny the existence of well-documented and researched history (apart from Nazi Holocaust deniers that is, I knew about those). Apparently historians – just like climate scientists, physicians, physicists and biologists – are engaging in yuuge conspiracies all the time.

It makes me despair, really. The world seems to have no shortage of proud, loud, outspoken, and self-confident ignoramuses.

Plush of the In Between: My Neighbour Totoró

One of the things we like to do as a family is to have movie nights: Problem is, with two teenagers, they disagree on principle on a movie to watch. Anything Kid 1 deems a good choice is hated by Kid 2 on principle. Exception to this are Studio Ghibli animes. I mean, how can you not love them? Their most beloved film is My Neighbour Totoró, and how can you not love the title character? This is my trial version made from fleece blankets to see if the borb pattern fits and to scale the eyes/arms/ears/etc. Isn’t he lovely?

A very round grey plush with a white belly. There is a grey triangle pattern on the chest. It's got large arrowhead shaped ears that stand upwards and big round eyes. At each side of the head are three bigh whiskers standing out. Front view.

Pin Cutting Thingamajig

As I am (very slowly) ramping up my production, some problems arise that simply are not an issue when making knives only on occasion and each time of a different design. One of the most recent challenges was to cut a lot of 10-11 mm long pins & dowels for the “hidden pins” construction that I have decided to deploy as my main thing for kitchen knives with full tang. Currently, I am making four two-knife sets, and that means sixteen wooden dowels and sixteen metal pins. And whilst the length must not be exactly precise, it does need to be at least somewhat uniform.

Putting the dowel/tube/stick into the vice, cutting it, and then filing them in a jig to exact length was very boring and time-consuming, and fiddly. And I am glad to say I came up with a much better solution.

I drilled a 6 mm hole through a piece of black locust wood (6mm being the diameter that I will be mostly using for this design). Then I used the table saw to gouge approx 2 cm in the middle in a way where the blade cut just below the hole and just touched one of the edges, creating a sloped surface between two walls with holes.

Here you can see it in action. The screw on the right side plugs one of the holes and allows me to adjust how far a dowel/tube can be inserted on the left side. Then I can cut the dowel with a hacksaw inserted into a slot on the left side, cutting it off at an exact-ish length. The cut-off falls then off the slope onto the vice and the table. I might add some simple paper funnel in the future so they fall directly into a receptacle of some sort.

I haven’t tried it on metal tubes yet, but it has proven to be absolutely perfect for wooden dowels. I have cut more than 20 in under five minutes. If it works on metal too – and I hope it does – I will be very happy in da tent indeed, because that is one time-consuming and boring task reduced to near nonexistence. And it also should minimize material waste. Brass tubes don’t grow on trees, you know.

Getting a Different Grip on Handles

I have recovered from the vaccine haze and Christmas laze so today I was able to finish (i.e. sharpen and clean up) five knives. Initially, I have intended to make these with the usual rounded ergonomic handles, but during the work, I have decided to try something a bit different and I have made the handles with a hexagonal profile. With a flat back and belly and ridges somewhere around the middle of each scale. They do feel comfortable enough in the hand and this profile is very safe against the knife twisting in the hand if big force needs to be applied. With a knife, everything is about trade-offs between comfort, safety, costs, and functionality. What a piece of wisdom that surely does not apply anywhere else /s.

The first one is my medium-sized universal knife, with a rounded (or this time “clipped”) tip. The wood is a piece of very uniform birch wood that was pickled in ammonia which gave it a slightly brown color.

The second one has a handle from jatoba, and it is a kinda prototype of the type of knives that I want to make to make use of my jatoba treasure-trove.

Both of these have a bit thicker blades than I ideally want them to have. That makes them very sturdy, but perhaps less ideal for cutting some hard foods. Still should cut about anything with ease.

Of the five finished knives, three are chef knives.

One has again the handle from jatoba. I am very pleased with the handle, not so much with the blade. The curve of the cutting edge did not come out as I wanted it and I was unable to correct it during sharpening without risking destroying the blade.

The same objection applies to a knife with the handle from black locust, with the addition of the blade not having proper taper at all. – I have messed up the grind mightily on this one. Nobody else is probably going to notice it and the knife will be still perfectly functional, but I need to hold myself to a higher standard than that. Anyone can make a perfectly functional knife, it is not that hard.

The third one, with the handle from spalted poplar wood stabilized with honey-color dyed resin, is the closest to what I was aiming for of these three. A broad blade comes to an extremely fine cutting edge, slightly curved to allow for slicing as well as draw-cuts. This is a knife that I have no objections about. Well, except for a slight asymmetry in the handle shape. The asymmetry in coloring is of course due to the used wood and is part of the character,

These knives were supposed to be parts of sets, but I have messed up the numbering, so they will have to make their way in the world solo. I could not make a set of the spalted poplar anyway, I only had two pieces of that wood and I messed one of them up.

These angular ergonomic handles are easier to make than fully rounded ergonomic handles so I will make more of them, especially for cheap-ish knives with handles from jatoba and black locust. The pile of naked blades shrinks, but very slowly. There is still a lot, and I mean a lot of work to do.

Plush of the Month: Dragons!

Yes, I know

I’m two months behind, but in my defence, I don’t actually need any. This is supposed to be fun, and I didn’t have the spoons. But now I have a few days off and finally finished one of the three dragons I embroidered and cut out. Next project will be a bit more freestyle, but I’m not going to spill the beans yet. Anyway, here’s Fuego, the latest addition to the Giliell household. I think we need a third bed…

An orange plush dragon with big tan horns, a tan belly and floppy ears. He#s looking straight at the viewer

An orange plush dragon with big tan horns, a tan belly and floppy ears. You can see the tail fluff in red. Side view.

Well, Fuego got quickly adopted as Knöpfchen’s best friend

View of my Knife Testing Lab

Its Christmas and that means cutting up a lot of food in a lot of different ways. So I thought I might share a little peek in our humble knife testing facility.

My mother is giving the knives thorough testing and so far she has not found any task they are not suited for. I have tested them too, yesterday, when I was gutting, skinning, and fileting the carp for traditional Christmas dinner. The three knives were up all the tasks, including sewering the head from the body and de-boning the fish (which consists of cutting out the ribcage and spine). I am usually very critical of my work, and these knives do have some cosmetic issues but functionally I am very satisfied with the design. The handles do allow for a variety of grips that are commonly used in the kitchen by both noobs and pros. The rounded tips on the medium and the chef knife did allow me to easily scrape off the scales with the former and place one hand safely on the blade for additional pressure for the latter. The tip on the smaller knife was sharp enough to pierce the wall of the abdominal cavity and its shape did help to avoid piercing the guts as well when cutting it open. Which is important, especially regarding the gall bladder – if you pierce that, it can render a lot of the meat useless.

The testing will continue of course – what is not known yet is how the cheap oil finish will stand up to time. For that several months are needed at least, several years would be ideal. But I do know already that when I am finished with my current batch of knives, it is worth making these sets for sale because they are not just ornaments and will be genuinely useful to whoever buys them.

Regarding my third Covid shot, yesterday the slightly elevated temperature was gone and I was feeling mostly OK. But I did notice a symptom that I do not remember from my previous two shots – in addition to a sore shoulder near the injection site, the lymphatic nodes in my left armpit swole a bit and became tender, and the pain extended to my left pectoral muscle. It has receded a bit, but it still hurts somewhat, although not as much as to impede me in any meaningful way anymore.

It seems that I had a different reaction to each of my three shots, although they were all Pfizer. And not only different in duration, but also where, when, and how the symptoms are expressed. Interesting but hopefully not very consequential.

Gingerbread Cookies

And to finish off this Solstice’s gingerbread abundance, some pictures of gingerbread cookies. Made, as usual, by my mom.

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Affinity

Art, Fun, & Nonsense.

Sexy beast

Once Again I Rule Freethoughtblogs

Sporadic blogging over the holiday period

Abuse in the Anglican church: An all-too-familiar pattern

Targeted Individuals II

Invasive but Cute

Shellshocked

Corona Crisis Crafting: Just Bead It

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A Studio Ghibli Appreciation Bottle Garden

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Winter Blues

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Virusflakes – Part 3

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Virusflakes – Part 2

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Virusflakes – Part 1

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Women Educators on YouTube – Classicist – Lady of the Library

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Plush of the In Between: My Neighbour Totoró

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Pin Cutting Thingamajig

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Getting a Different Grip on Handles

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Plush of the Month: Dragons!

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View of my Knife Testing Lab

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Gingerbread Cookies

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