Archive for the ‘Crafts’ Category

Eggstravaganza

Saturday, April 20th, 2019

JK visited today, and even though we all know she’s here mostly to see Zoffy I felt as a good host I needed to have an activity planned. And with tomorrow being Easter the obvious choice was this:

I don’t remember ever dyeing eggs at Easter, so I bought some of these inexpensive kits to try it. It’s very easy, toss a tablet into a mix of water and vinegar and dip a hard-boiled egg in. The kits come with crayons that you use to write on the eggs to keep portions undyed.

Naturally I went with the obvious design: Gudetama. My first attempt was a bit experimental:

But I got better with my second (see later). Other issues arose with the coloring for my Grimace egg:

And the fact that I dropped my K-Pop egg (that I had done for Bernard):

But overall it was fun and the eggs came out better than I expected!

We made a few each and here they all are. What do you think?

In case you’re wondering they won’t be wasted. KLS and I aren’t boiled egg fans, but JK will take them home and turn them into sandwiches 🙂

Perfect Cell

Saturday, April 6th, 2019

I haven’t posted about a model kit in a while, so here’s the latest I’ve made:

This is a character from Dragonball Z (a Japanese manga) done as a plastic model kit! Here’s the runners showing all the colours:

Much like the recent Miku bust I’d made the instructions were bilingual which I suppose makes the kit more accessible. But as usual the almost-completely pictorial assembly guide made it an easy build despite some tiny pieces.

Notably the kit includes a ‘muscle building’ system which just means his mottled skin is made by overlaying a lighter piece onto the darker background:

The precision is as usual for Bandai – excellent – and this works very well.

The head contains about 20 pieces alone and the final kit probably a couple of hundred:

It’s quite large and very posable, although as usual I chose not to display it in battle mode with energy ball attack.

Overall a fun build that looks great. If I was a bigger DBZ fan I’d certainly buy more from this range.

Leviathan

Sunday, January 27th, 2019

This kit was immensely fun to build and looks incredible. I hope LEGO has more innovative ideas like this in the future!

Crystal Hog

Monday, August 13th, 2018

Let soak 24 hours…

The crystals are strong and very pretty!

Tattoo Time!

Saturday, August 4th, 2018

I bought a few packs of these for 25 cents each:

Considering they’re from 1989, I’d say they didn’t retain value! The gum inside is of course inedible, but the tattoo sheets are fine and look like this:

(Yes I’d removed one…)

This is the old 1980s technology; where the tattoos are just food dye printed onto paper. Get them wet and they (are supposed to) transfer. Let’s try one:

Putting aside for now the fact I resemble a snuffleupagus in the photo, licking my hand to administer just enough moisture to apply the tattoo was a trip down memory lane to say the least! These sorts of things were common in our youth, and I particularly remember them being packaged on lolly/ice-cream wrappers. I’d always be putting them on myself, and I seem to recall having fun applying them to bread (!) and even ice-cream (!!) as well.

However… these didn’t work too well:

Maybe the ‘lick the hand’ technique was at fault? Let’s try water:

Yeah… terrible. I can’t imagine much would have happened to the tattoo in the intervening 30 years, but it’s hard to believe they were sold if they worked this poorly?

I will say though that they last a while! It’s been 12 hours now and they haven’t faded at all, and even survived several handwashings! Maybe these ancient tattoos were engineered for strength as opposed to beauty 🙂

I’ve got a couple of packs left if you want one. Let me know.