Love this – Lisa Tilse at We Are Scout turned our solar system into a pompom mobile:
So clever! The blue and green Earth is the best, closely followed by Saturn with its rings and the colorful Jupiter.
Visit her site for the tutorial.
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In Making Stuff occasional feature, we share fun arts and crafts done by us and our fellow geeks and nerds.
Ashley DIYed a really cool Star Wars marquee. It even lights up!
The base is a handmade wooden sign stenciled, painted, and varnished.
Wow. I don’t think I’d have the patience! Full props for such a meticulous job!
See the full tutorial at Handmade with Ashley.
In Making Stuff occasional feature, we share fun arts and crafts done by us and our fellow geeks and nerds.
Ruth E. Carter, costume designer for Black Panther, tweeted the knitting pattern for Nakia’s scarf. The pattern and scarf were created by Jeff Gillies.
Since the pattern didn’t come through in full on Twitter, Gillies made the whole pattern available for download at Ravelry, including gauge information and recommended yarns.
Squee! How awesome!
Images by Walt Disney Pictures, Marvel Entertainment via Jeff Gillies at Ravelry
In Making Stuff occasional feature, we share fun arts and crafts done by us and our fellow geeks and nerds.
Kristie Wolfe built a Hobbit hole in the mountains of central Washington state. And what great work it is—the attention to detail is superb!
The house hole has a bedroom, a small living room, and a bathroom with a large wooden oval jacuzzi. As befits a Hobbit hole, the structure is mostly underground and has a round door.
The small yard is edged by a stick-and-branch fence woven by Wolfe’s landscaper sister.
There are loads of thought-out details like the floors made of wooden disks of various sizes and a beautiful metal door decoration/knob. But where is the kitchen? Wolfe explains in this video:
A Hobbit House You Can Stay In by Zillow
In case you can’t access the video, she says she’s planning a total of three holes, and since it’s not very practical for each to have its own kitchen, she wants to build a bigger shared one in the style of an English pub.
Read the article at Zillow for more details and photos.
I can understand that you can’t always overcome restrictions, but I still think a kitchen is vital, VITAL, in a Hobbit home. On the other hand, an indoor bathroom is often omitted in favor of an outhouse when building in a challenging location, so full marks to Wolfe for including a full bath.
Also check out a Scottish Hobbit hole I blogged about earlier—which do you prefer and why?
In Here is an occasional feature highlighting geeky spaces created by our fellow geeks all over the world.
Reddit user KahlumG shared photos of an amazing Hobbit-style house built by their uncle outside of Tomich, Scotland.
Looks completely like it could be from Bree, right?
The inside looks as appropriate as the outside.
And—and I almost can’t believe it, it’s so perfect—the house has an outbuilding with its own water wheel!
Kudos! Visit the imgur gallery for many more photos.
Images: kahlum1986 on imgur
Edited to correct an inaccuracy and a typo.
In Here is an occasional feature highlighting geeky spaces created by our fellow geeks all over the world.
A speed-knitter and a Star Wars fan? There might still be time to make one of these awesome stormtrooper sweaters for Rogue One opening!
Both the instant download patterns and finished knits are by Natela Astakhova at NatelaDaturaDesign on Etsy. Just glancing at it, my eye read the pattern as your generic Scandinavian circular yoke sweater, then I did a double take. As I already said, awesome!
In Making Stuff occasional feature, we share fun arts and crafts done by us and our fellow geeks and nerds.
Remember Uncharted Atlas, the online tool to autogenerate fantasy world maps with? If that feels too convoluted or restrictive, there’s also a quick low-tech solution. Tumblr user ohemult describes how to make maps with pasta (and expletives):
“BETTER, BUT NOT FUCKING GOOD! WHATEVER, TRACE THE COASTLINE WITH YOUR PENCIL. BE SURE TO BE SLIGHTLY SQUIGGLY AND, OH, FUCK THOSE LITTLE ISLANDS YOU MADE THEY’RE NOT BIG ENOUGH TO BE WOBBLY ENOUGH SO YOU’RE BETTER OFF USING EITHER RICE (OR SIMILAR) OR JUST TRY TO MAKE SOME REALISTIC FUCKING ISLANDS (SPOILER: YOU WON’T)”
(I find that ohemult’s instructions work best if I imagine Samuel L. Jackson reading them as his Pulp Fiction character.)
Visit Tumblr for the full write-up. Found via Tor.com.
Image by ohemult via Tumblr
In Making Stuff occasional feature, we share fun arts and crafts done by us and our fellow geeks and nerds.
Autogenerating fantasy world maps is now possible with an incredible online tool coded by Martin O’Leary.
Currently mainly existing to feed material to the Uncharted Atlas twitterbot, the tool and its code are available for others as well.
“I wanted to make maps that look like something you’d find at the back of one of the cheap paperback fantasy novels of my youth. I always had a fascination with these imagined worlds, which were often much more interesting than whatever luke-warm sub-Tolkien tale they were attached to.
“At the same time, I wanted to play with terrain generation with a physical basis. There are loads of articles on the internet which describe terrain generation, and they almost all use some variation on a fractal noise approach, either directly (by adding layers of noise functions), or indirectly (e.g. through midpoint displacement). These methods produce lots of fine detail, but the large-scale structure always looks a bit off. Features are attached in random ways, with no thought to the processes which form landscapes. I wanted to try something a little bit different.”
Uncharted Atlas also generates names for cities, towns, and regions with a separate bit of code, following a set of consistent rules. For an explanation of how it works and to try your own hand at it, see the terrain notes and language notes.
As a user, I’d like to see a way to connect several of these individual maps into a larger unity, but that’s getting ahead of things—just having a free tool like this is fantastic. 🙂 Kudos!
In Making Stuff occasional feature, we share fun arts and crafts done by us and our fellow geeks and nerds.
Alicia Sivertsson took a close look at the props for Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and re-interpreted a table cloth as a narrow wall hanging:
Isn’t it fantastic? It’s adapted from the huge blue table runner that shows phases of the moon in gold from the Harry vs. Draco dueling club scene.
A very beautiful and neat smaller scale version. Jättesnygg! Kudos!
Visit Alicia Sivert for more photos and video clip from The Chamber of Secrets with views of the table cloth. (NB. In Swedish.)
Images by Alicia Sivertsson
This post has been edited.
In Making Stuff occasional feature, we share fun arts and crafts done by us and our fellow geeks and nerds.
May the Fourth is a week away! Just time enough to figure out a small something to celebrate Star Wars with, if you’re so inclined. The Makeup Dummy shared a tutorial for a painted t-shirt with a Yoda-inspired quote:
Nice use of negative space on a starry sky. Also, using stickers to create the lettering is clever; it removes the need for messing with stencils (which can be a pain in the hindquarters to make if you don’t happen to have an electronic cutting machine or somesuch).
Bonus project: This wall art piece made with neon rods from a room designed by cityhomeCOLLECTIVE is decidedly lightsaber-like, if you ask me:
Do you have any Star Wars projects on the way? Do share!
In Making Stuff occasional feature, we share fun arts and crafts done by us and our fellow geeks and nerds.
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