Cool deployable structure in wood and tape
Architecture student Ryan McCaffrey made this amazing expanding model from a bunch of pine parallelepipeds with white duct tape hinges. [via Dude Craft]
Made On Earth
Screw-in coffin patent issues
This is a choice selection of images from the application for U.S. patent 7,631,404, which has since issued to Donald Scruggs of Chino, CA. The title is “Easy inter burial container.” [via Neatorama]
Warship camouflaged as tropical island
A commenter on my recent dazzle camouflage post alerted us to the fascinating story of the HNLMS Abraham Crijnssen which, in 1942, escaped destruction by the Japanese fleet because the crew moored her among other small islands and covered her in a thick layer of tree branches, thereby disguising her as a small island. [Thanks, rekinom!]
Beautiful cube sculpture from copper pipe fittings
This 2007 piece by Vancouver artist Steven Shearer (Wikipedia) is called “Geometric Healing Cell for Youth – Model III.” It reminds me of some of my favorite work by Tom Friedman. I love art that redefines our expectations of everyday materials. [via Neatorama]
Teeny tiny evil fairy sculptures
British artist Tessa Farmer makes these amazing little vignettes featuring 1-cm-tall skeletal fairies made from “bits of organic material, such as roots, leaves, and dead insects” pitted against actual insects and other, larger taxidermied critters. Both creepy and awesome. Crawsome? [via Dude Craft]
What Was I Thinking? Part 1: Light fishture
It’s “Failures!” month here at Make: Online. Throughout February, we’re going to be celebrating the flip side of making, doing, and risking: Sometimes things don’t work out as we plan.
On the other hand, sometimes things work out exactly as we plan, but when the passion of inspiration is gone and we look back in the cold, sober light of morning we come to a painful realization: I just made a giant piece of crap.
Thus it is that I hereby inaugurate a limited weekly series of posts called “What Was I thinking?”
How-To: Make a giant octopus
YouTuber bluworm took on the task of making a great big octopus puppet for stop-motion animation in a film by his friend Daniel Lennรยฉer. Along the way he produced this informative and entertaining video describing the casting, sculpting, and armature-work that went into it, as well as showing off some of the finished animation (starting around 5:00). Besides the cool propcasting info, I gotta give it up to bluworm for his video editing chops–this is definitely one of the most watchable how-to videos I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a bunch of them. [via Propnomicon]
