I have a bad habit of being too interested in the world. It means I have horrendous lists of stuff that I want to do. Well I added another thing to that list…
I’ve never been into quilt making. Not to say that I didn’t like those pretty vintage French and Indian numbers that are often oh so very expensive but when I thought of quilt making as a hobby, I could only think of those horrible patchwork things. Needless to say that it really didn’t appeal.
Until I discovered Denyse Schmidt’s Quilts. They’re retro (but in a cool way) and simple. They also don’t look like they’d be stupidly hard and fiddly to make too.
This is one of my favourites:
It’s probably an obvious thing to most crafty people that you don’t have to use horrible combinations of chintzy fabrics to make a quilt, but I really was very blind to it.
It doesn’t help that it’s the beginning of the cold weather here (down South in Australia), but I have the worst hankering to make a quilt now. One of the local material stores have some rather tasty quilt fabrics including a lovely retro stripe that I think will do very nicely in strips with a dark blue or red fabric.
I really like this guy’s art, he’s blind but has worked out a way to paint.
University of North Texas (UNT) student John Bramblitt paints beautiful works of art in vivid colors, despite the fact that he’s been blind for years. [link]
I found his description of how the different colours of paint have different textures really beautiful. It is moot to say we take so much for granted, for the most part we need to do this because otherwise we’d just get overloaded. Still, it’s good to occassionally remind ourselves what we do ignore.
Also, I want the dog painting.
You can find and purchase his works from his website and Sightless Works - it also explains John’s process which is something that the video doesn’t really do.
Studio Daily has links to a couple of wonderful Flash animations in an interview with Darren Price from Nexus Productions (you have to scroll down the article to get the video links - sorry won’t let me legally embed!). First there is Potapych: The Bear Who Loved Vodka which is a beautifully animated and quite sad little story about a drunk who adopts a bear and teaches him how to drink. Apparently based on a true story.
And Hare in the Gate, an amazing piece of animation featuring a hare/rabbit who travels through a myriad of cinematic genres and iconic scenes. It was for a Motorola ad and is somewhat mindblowingly wonderful. Unfortunately, I don’t think the ad made it downunder.
Friends4Days is a sweet little site where you get matched with someone and you can converse for four days and then decide whether you want to keep them as a friend (presumably it has to be mutual) and then you get another friend in your inbox. I’m imagining that for the most part if the other party isn’t there for dodgy reasons, you’ll probably hang on to them as friends. Hope the right people and not spammers and network marketers get attracted to it.
SixApart makers of MovableType and LiveJournal have just released Vox, a social media sharing network (yspace/youtube/delicious), their big selling point is that they let everyone plug in to them so no barring of youtube videos a la myspace.
You might like make a video of yourself to send your new friend or stick on Vox, but Premiere is too expensive. Well there’s a whole heap of online video editors popping up that will do simple editing and let you use some cool effects. Most notable has been JumpCut because they recently got bought by Yahoo. But if there was an award for cutest logo, it has to be Eyespot, esp the one for sharing. Love it!
You might have seen some pics/video of projection bombing recently, it’s where artistic types project images onto large structures and make kinda cool statements, here is a tutorial if you have always wanted to do your own: PROJECTION BOMBING
Outdoor digital projection in urban environments is a great method for getting your content up big before the eyes and in the minds of your fellow city inhabitants.
Penny Arcade’s Gabe has posted a video of his screen while he’s doing a Boba Fett sketch on a Tablet with a mashup of 50 cent and Queen in the background. It’s pretty cool.
The creator of my favourite web comic EVER - Beaver and Steve - has just submitted his first Threadless submission which I imagine has something to do with this moth story arc. Anyway, vote for him, it’s all in a good cause (so I can get a Beaver and Steve Threadless tee!).
I love xkcd comics, they are so cool, cute, beautiful, profound and/or just really funny. What’s also really cool is he has released them under a Creative Commons license which means you’re free to copy and share them as long as the use is non-commerical and you attribute where they came from. Brilliant! But one good thing about going to his website is if you mouseover the comic, some commentary comes out (for this one, it was “It slowly dawns on us that our parents knew exactly what they were doing”). There’s heaps of good stuff in the archives, I may get round to posting some of my favourites one day…
