From traditional crafts to modern crafts, we’re covering news and interesting projects to educate you and keep you inspired. Design trends and pop culture related projects are here to inspire.
Great use of retired cigarette machines! What is an Art*o*mat? Art*o*mats are retired cigarette vending machines that have been converted to vend art. There are 76 active machines in various locations throughout the country. What do you get from an Art*o*mat? The experience of pulling the knob alone is quite a thrill, but you also walk away with an original work of art. Ker-plunk! What an easy way to become an art collector. Link
The knitPro tool will take any GIF, JPEG or PNG image you throw at it and make a knitting grid in PDF as a guide. Handy, it’s also part of a larger project called “logoknitting” microRevolt fiber hobbyists use the tactic of “logoknitting” for sweatshop awareness. Logoknitting means knitting a logo into a garment. They knit logos of well known sweatshop offenders, as a way to promote discussion on how advertising, labor, production and consumption relate. Link. Gallery.
Incredibly lo-fi DIY attempt in making panoramic video, with interesting results- Ingredients: Old plastic Christmas tree bauble found in the garden, Felt tip pen, Blu Tak, “Polar Coordinates” distortion in After Effects. Seems possible to make a version with a larger mirror ball, the effect is pretty neat. Link.
Looking to take VR photos of objects? Here’s an interesting DIY way…“Used together with my Coolpix 990 remote control, this turntable forms an automatic studio for simple VR-object movies. It rotates the object on 360° and shoots photographs with equally spaced angles. You can then animate these images with a VR-object viewer such as PTviewer, Freedom-VR or Objplay. Remote and turntable can both be built with Lego Mindstorms Robotics Invention System (only parts included in this box are needed)”. Link.
...Davin Risk, master food sculptor and photographer from Toronto, Canada, is the winner of the Mike Industries “Make a Meatspace Shuffle” creativity competition. Davin’s first entry, made entirely of goat butter, arrived only hours after the contest began and set the pace for a field of over 40 excellent “interpretations of iPod Shuffle as food“. Link.
Fireflies are networked nightlights for a local environment, the jars can be placed in different bedrooms or other spots around a home so people can communicate with one another through simply tapping on the jars. For example, if you tap the jar in your bedroom you will pulse the colored fireflies associated with that jar. The neighboring jars in your home will receive and pulse your taps, record them and then play them back. The neighboring jars can respond with their own tapping and broadcast themselves to the nightlights in the home. Pretty- here’s how to make them. Link.
This might be useful if you’re ever interested in building a high speed flash photography system. Two students used a procured BASIC micro-controller and bolt gun. With the aforementioned micro-controller, we simply had no choice but to build a flash timing mechanism to capture images of hot bolt-on-food action. Link.
