The other day I was clicking around on the interwebs, and found cubeecraft.com. You can download a pattern for a cubic version of your favourite character, print it out (on thicker paper), cut all the lines and then put it together, no glue or tape required. Yesterday I decided to try it out with two of my favourite characters: Sam & Max. It takes about half an hour to an hour per character and the directions for putting it together are quite self-explanatory.
Yes, I realise I have no life right now. This will change, as I’ve set up my own freelance business and my first job starts in June. Glee! ^_^
Up until a few days ago, when I made my last post, I thought I had a very nice theme worked out for my blog. The only issue was, posts kept loading really slowly, as if they were waiting for something. I didn’t know enough about it to figure out what could cause it, but Habbie did and he found that the issue was embedded in my theme. Apparently it queried the site xpstatz.com for some reason, most likely for malware purposes. Since my theme came from a non-official themes site (I can’t even remember which one), the malicious code was probably embedded in the theme by the creators of that website and then distributed. I would never have found out if the queried site, 2.xpstatz.com, hadn’t been down all day. So just to be safe I figured I should get and edit a different theme, from the official WordPress site. Who knows what else is embedded in the other one…
Recently, my mother opened her hobby shop. One day before opening she got an offer from someone at Pixelhobby, and she decided to sell it along with the stuff she’d already stocked. Pixelhobby now accounts for a large part of her profits.
But what is it? Well, remember Ministeck? Pixelhobby works the other way around: you have a piece of plastic with pins on it, and you push little square pieces of plastic with holes in them over the pins. Where Ministeck had pieces with 2 or more pins (think tetris blocks), Pixelhobby only has pieces with 1 hole. When I looked at this for the first time I had one association with it that wouldn’t leave my mind: oldskool gaming! Therefore I decided to go with one of my favourite games from when I was young, which is Mario 3. This is the result ^_^
Edit: I’ll give a more detailed description of how it was made. First I got the picture off the internet. Then I used a program called Pixelhobby Designer to make it into a pixelated picture (it’s downloadable from their site, Windows-only afaik). I bought the colours and the plastic boards I needed, as was detailed by the pattern I printed out. Then I put a plastic board on the pattern, which looks like this, and I filled in the squares, circles, triangles and crosses with the four corresponding colours. After that, I put the board on the next pattern. It takes ages and you have to be careful not to mess it up, but it’s worth the effort :)
I’ve wanted a tattoo since forever (well, I think I was 16 when I got the idea) and I’ve known it was going to be this one for the past two years. I always imagined I should have it tattooed when my life is coming together, becoming calmer. It seemed right to think so since a tree is stable, grows steadily and roots deeply. I thought I should ‘root’ first in my life. This might not happen though. Somehow I thrive best in a life that has at least a touch of chaos in it, and I can’t imagine ever really achieving a perfectly quiet life. I’d definitely hate that. My roots lie in the fact that I know who I am and what I want. So the picture was hanging next to my screen and I decided not to wait any longer. I have a tree tattooed on my back!
My mind and my iPhone are in the nineties, and it’s spring time. This is where it’s taking me…
I can’t believe we were into that kind of sunglasses back then, although I can imagine this video would still do well today. The nineties are very underrated in that sense. In a related mood (imo), check Darude – Sandstorm.
Even before I finished my first project, Liessa gave me cute wool and this pattern: Fetching fingerless gloves. This looked like a big challenge to me because it featured knitting in the round -and- knitting cables. Also I was really unsure about how the thumb of the glove should be made. But I thought, what the hell, there’s always someone to ask if I get stuck.
It turns out I never got stuck at all. The pattern is very clear and I did every stitch myself, including the cable cast on, the special bind off at the top and picking up stitches for the thumb. I taught myself all the stitches (cables, casting on, knitting in the round) using YouTube videos. I love the internets!
A while ago the knitting virus hit me too, and I bought some cheap wool to start off my first project with. As I was knitting it in a cafe in Amsterdam, some girl talked to me and suggested (only a million times) that I should make it into a phone pouch. I liked that idea, and here it is.
My mother crocheted the cute flower on the front, and the buttons are from my mother’s and grandmother’s infinite (no really, infinite) button collection. The regular buttons are just for show, since I attached a press stud (‘drukknoop’) behind the flap. I think it looks awesome for a first project!
Al heel lang heeft mijn moeder een (uit de hand gelopen) hobby: kaarten maken, en dan vooral 3d-kaarten. Toen er letterlijk om de hoek een pandje leeg kwam te staan en ze het aanbod kreeg om het te huren, besloot ze van haar hobby haar werk te maken: ze gaat een hobbywinkel beginnen. Donderdag 12 februari is het dan zo ver en gaat de winkel open. M’n moeder heeft het meteen goed aangepakt met een advertentie in het Langedijker Nieuwsblad en ze heeft haar winkel al gevuld met diverse hobby-artikelen. Hobbytijd bevindt zich op Dorpsstraat 691A in Noord-Scharwoude. Mocht je in de buurt zijn, kom dan eens kijken!
One of the greatest old-skool games I remember is Super Mario Bros 3 on the NES. I bet my mother remembers it even better as she actually beat the game before I ever got to :>
MacTijn stumbled upon the coolest thing since Mario on the NES: Super Mario Bros 3 in a Java app. Now you can play the game without needing to bother with emulators or the NES. Of course you can also buy it for the Wii if you have one, but this is a cute alternative. And another asset remains intact: you cannot save and quit the game, just like on the old NES ^_^
