They’re a little heavy – the beads are glass – but I’m pleased with the outcome.

Yay for phone cameras.

Unfortunately the people I bought the beads from didn’t have two shades of blue in the right bead sizes. I made do with clear for the light blue – and put pieces of blue paper between the glass so that from certain angles it refracts the colour. You can see hints of it in the above photo but it’s definitely most effective viewed longways.

I am thinking of making a necklace to match. My housemate suggested putting the blocks on tiers so they look like they’re falling. To go with that I had an idea of making a matching t-shirt design, so it would look like the blocks were falling into the t-shirt… hmmm, ideas!

I’m painting butterflies!

A Monarch and Ulysses Swallowtail

Inspired by butterflies created by Danielle Corsetto of Girls With Slingshots. Something that I’d always thought would be neat to do but didn’t really twig onto how to manage until I saw her versions.

The last time I attempted to draw a butterfly accurately was in year 7, and I found it pretty hellish then. This time, it’s been a real breeze, and painting them has been heaps of fun. When I did my research for the Ulysses swallowtail I realised that the tops and bottoms of wings could be quite different and interesting, so now I’m attempting to get the top and bottom sides of the wings relatively accurate. I’m not being pedantic, but it’s nice to have a grounding in reality.

Undersides of the butterflies

These don’t take too long to make so I hope to be doing lots more. I’ve found lots of pretty butterfly and moth patterns and I’m hoping to do justice to them all.

Last December, I started making a plushy version of everyone’s favourite crazy clump – the Katamari. To summarise the Katamari games in a few words, “you roll around a ball, picking up anything and everything in your way”.

The Katamari ball is basically a truncated icosahedron (fun fact, “truncated icosahedron” was briefly my nickname in year 5 as I was too nerdy to be a “square”). If you don’t know what a truncated icosahedron is, think of a soccer ball. In the Katamari, the faces that are pentagons become the knobbly nodes. To make my Katamari, I created a truncated icosahedron net based on one from Wikipedia, as my truncated icosahedron would exclude the pentagons.

The two net halves

After cutting out the two main sections of fabric, I started sewing furiously! It took most of the day, but I was able to sew together the nets, and add ten of the twelve knobs.

Me and my Katamari

After getting that far, I left it. I wanted to add magnets, but had none on hand. The Katamari went to the back of my mind, and I was lazy in finding where to get magnets from. Anyway, last Thursday, I finally ordered some magnets and have put them in the Katamari. The result is quite satisfying!

Tidying up in a messy way

The Katamari can hold the scissors pretty well! It takes two magnets to hold them quite firmly, but the weight of the scissors can make the Katamari tend to fall over. This might behave a bit better when I add the final two nodes. For objects that it has trouble holding onto with magnetic forces, the nodes are distributed fairly evenly over the surface, so objects can be balanced quite comfortably between them (as is the case with the box of staples in the image above). Objects can also be balanced on ones that are stuck on, like the brush. So there are a few ways to make the Katamari hold objects, and the overall effect is exactly what I was aiming for. The Katamari makes a great pincushion!

There is still some troubleshooting left to go. I will have to think about how to colour the Katamari – whether to use a variety of coloured materials, or to use fabric paints. I will likely have to glue the magnets to the insides of the nodes. And I will have to work out how to get the last two nodes onto the Katamari neatly. After I get those things sorted out, I’ll probably make a number of Katamari and maybe even some Team Fortress 2 Sticky Bombs.