Category: Craft

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Shrinking

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We had a great turnout for our Shrinky Dinks project at CraftHack!

CraftHack Shrinky Dinks

I think that has a lot to do with the nostalgia that goes along with these.

CraftHack Shrinky Dinks

CraftHack Shrinky Dinks

We started out with clear and frosted sheets of shrinkable plastic and then used sharpies to draw or trace our designs. We cut them out and maybe punched a hole in the top for making jewelry later.

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A couple at a time went into Eileen’s toaster oven. We found ourselves gathering around to watch them transform, the plastic curling up before thickening and setting. It still seems kinda magical.

More photos on the CraftHack Facebook page.

Microblog Mondays

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The Farm at South Mountain

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Have you been to The Farm at South Mountain? It has 3 restaurants, a big grassy field with pecan trees and picnic tables, a handful of shops, a crepe truck on the weekends, and, yes, a small organic farm. It’s a delightful place to spend the day. Phillip and I like to get breakfast from Morning Glory Cafe, or a picnic basket or cup of coffee from The Farm Kitchen, and then wander around.

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The Botanica shop has unique garden and gifty things. On Saturdays, they set up a table in front of their chalk art wall and sell various local foodstuffs, like salsa and honey.

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Maya’s Farm has an organic produce stand and its own CSA. Last time we were there, they were demonstrating simple ways to use more vegetables with samples of this amazing salad and sauteed breakfast radishes.

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mayas farm

About 20 years ago (yikes), my family briefly lived at the base of South Mountain. On the way to school, we would drive down Baseline Road past all these beautiful fields of greens and flowers with little roadside stores selling local produce, sweets, nuts, and flowers. There are still a few left, but most have been replaced by stuccoed condos and strip malls.

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The Farm is a way to preserve some of that open space, to keep the land viable and beautiful, to nourish the community in a way that asphalt and stucco simply can’t.

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Her secret is patience

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Floating above downtown Phoenix is a permanent public art sculpture inspired by monsoon clouds and hot Arizona summers. “Her Secret Is Patience” was created by artist Janet Echelman, specifically for the site it is now suspended above. At night it’s illuminated with the colors changing with the seasons.

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The name comes from Ralph Waldo Emerson. “Adopt the pace of nature; her secret is patience.”

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I’m taking part in Microblog Mondays!

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A Plotter and a Dreamer

In case you ever want to print some really big stuff, there’s now a plotter at Gangplank that prints on 3-foot wide rolls of paper. Not like photos, more like black-and-white line drawings. It would be great for patterns, maps, large schematics, and probably lots of things we haven’t thought of yet.

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I was looking for ideas of something we could make with it during the May CraftHack meetup. I’m not sure I found anything that would work for that, but I did come across some interesting stuff.

Modified Plotter Art

XY LED Plotter (University of Illinois) – Stephen Cartwright creates abstract long-exposure photographs with an LED plotter.

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Coal Drawing Machine (Belgium) – Carlos Amorales created an art installation in a former coal mine that features a modified plotter printing with charcoal.

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Cardboard computer and plotter (School of Art and Design Offenbach, Germany) – In an electronic media class, students were able to use cardboard to construct a tiny working computer and plotter.

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Print and fold

I wondered if we could use the plotter for printing larger versions of foldable projects like this Paris city scene or these VW buses.

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Then I fell asleep and dreamed of looking for plotter crafts.

Really. In the mall, there was a store that still had a Christmas display in their window with 3 paper figures that were as tall as I was: an angel with beautiful paper cut wings, a boxy snowman, and maybe a Nutcracker. They had been printed with a plotter, cut out, and folded up (Folidify craft style). So I went to ask the store owners if they would let us have the files for our CraftHack project. They showed me this adorable little papercraft camper that was a cross between a paper VW bus I’d seen and the Fisher-Price camper I had as a kid. (Remember those?) Of course, I still don’t have the files. Because it was a dream.

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But if you have any fabulous real-life ideas for projects that start with a plotter printer, let me know!

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Photos via sites as noted, except for the top one, which I took of the actual HP DesignJet 600 at Gangplank.

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