Here is something for the science buffs – or, more specifically, the genetic engineers among you: The X and the Y chromosome:
Well, Y here lacks an arm and is quite small, but he makes up for it with his charms and not a small dosage of confidence. X, on the other hand, is all cool and laid back – she knows that no matter what, no human could exist without her. Something you can’t say of Y, much to his chagrine.
Anyway, the two of them make a nice team, what with Y’s drive for adventure and X’s down to earth ‘let’s get the job done’ attitude.
If you want to make them, here is the PDF template. It’s admittedly a bit finicky to assemble these. If used as provided, the figures will about be 6cm high. To make things a bit easier, you may want to scale up the PDF a bit when printing.
This is a valentine card with a special trick – when you rotate the image, it changes. I found this very cool idea and concept on the Extreme Cards and Papercrafting blog, and more specifically on this page – a very nice blog with a wealth of unusual, eye-catching and beautiful papercraft projects. Here is what it is:
Looks like a regular greeting card, right? Now, when you pull the left-hand handle and rotate the image, this is what happens:
The smiley is replaced by a heart. Add some personal text and you have the nicest valentine card. Here is a video that shows the effect:
Should anybody wonder, the pixelation is deliberate – I like the old-school 8-bit look of the smiley and heart icon.
Now, how do you make one of these? Well, first of all, print and cut out the following two-page template:
You will get three smaller pieces and the card itself:
(The pencil is supposed to highlight the fact that the card itself also has an internal cut. This will be difficult to make with scissors, and I rather suggest a Xacto knife or similar tool)
Now, you have to align one of the ‘heart’ pieces with the card itself, like so:
The heart piece goes behind the smiley part, and they should be aligned so that the vertical cut ends for both at the same position. This also means their left semicircle edge will align:
Next, take the other two parts and align them in a similar way to each other:
Next, keep each of the two pairs firmly together and slight one pair into the other, so that they interlock and meet at the vertical incision:
This is a bit difficult, and you have to be sure that everything is perfectly aligned. In the end, the two top parts should form a complete smiley face:
Almost done. Now glue the bottom flap to the card. As you can see, it extends below the card, but that will be corrected by cutting the piece off where it sticks out. Glue the two left-hand flaps together, but not to the card. Make sure that the parts can rotate freely while the glue is drying. The pieces interlock and hold each other securely in place. The glue makes sure that the two rotating parts move in sync, and that they cannot move too far – otherwise, they would fall out of the card.
Here is the card after trimming the bottom flap:
All that’s left to do is to fold the card at the center line and to come up with some witty / romantic / cool text to go inside the card.
I decided to start a ‘line’ of very, very simple papercraft toys. I’m calling it Cubicity, as these have a, well, rather square shape, and the overall topic is slightly urban. Well, actually the cubicity people come from all walks of life, and if you look closely you will even discover that some are from fairy land, but I’m happy enough with ‘cubicity’.
These are essentially small boxes (3cm high) which are extremely simple to assemble. The idea is to have toys that are fun to play with and robust enough to last some time. The boxes can be opened and flattened in an instance, making these very portable. The ideal toys to take on a trip, or have the kids kill some time while on an errand with mom/dad.
Making these from paper based on downloadable PDFs, it’s no big deal if they get lost or damaged. Replacement is a matter of 5 minutes of printing and folding (and glueing one flap, so that you can rightfully say you ‘constructed’ these).
I have started a dedicated page for them – they won’t appear on the home page, as there will be a lot of updates – one for each boxy person, and the collection is still growing.
There seem to be people who believe that dinosaurs weren’t extinct at all when Jesus walked the earth. It’s hard to stomach, but the Beginner’s Bible Coloring Book clearly endorses this belief. I actually assumed that this was fake, but a background check on the internet didn’t yield much. Seems to be quite the elusive coloring book.
Anyway, I found the (both mental and actual) image of Jesus riding a dinosaur so hilarious that I couldn’t resist doing a small papercraft project on the theme:
The whole idea is rooted in the creationist ‘earth is 5000 years old’ credo, and assuming a sufficiently vivid imagination, the rest follows naturally. From a European perspective, where not even the most extreme religious fundamentalists dispute the theory of evolution, the American obsession with creationism and evolution is quite bizarre.
Well, here is to hope the faithful Jesus on a dinosaur model will facilitate dialog and mutual understanding between creationists and biologists.
If you want to build this, take care to get the center of gravity right: Since our little raptor is bipedal, he is prone to falling over if not balanced properly. I strongly suggest to glue a small coin to the center, like so:
Also, take care to align the legs properly, so that our dino and his holy master are more or less upright and stable. Another option would be to glue the raptor to a base plate, which would solve all stability problems. However, although not incredibly stable, the model will stand freely, and I find it looks nicer without a base plate.
I should mention that Jesus can dismount his dino friend, but he doesn’t look that good dismounted:
If you want to build this, you can download the PDF template here. If printed on US letter or DIN A4, this will result in a model about 10cm high.
It can sit on the corner of, say, your NEC monitor. In order to make that work, you have to glue a small weight such as a coin to the inside of the feet, like so:
This will give enough balance to keep the bird safely atop of any roughly right-angled ridge. The model itself is relatively easy, however the beak is a bit tricky.
If you want to make one yourself, here is the template:
Another year begins, meaning it’s time for a new calendar. It just so happens I made a weekly-calendar-enabled stegosaurus:
Now the most interesting feature of a stegosaurus, on which Wikipedia has to say quite a bit, are the plates. Large scaly disks, of which neither the exact configuration nor the function seems to be entirely clear.
Turns out for a papercraft calendar, the scales conveniently double as tabs for the weeks. Each week is printed on a separate page, the tab / plate indicating the first day of that particular week.
You can take the week cards out, scribble on them and sort them any way you need. For heavy duty scheduling purposes, you can flip through them or even lay them out on your desk.
And when you are not busy scheduling things, old stegosaurus will take care of your calendar cards just fine.
And, oh – did I mention this – you can build this guy yourself. Here is the template:
The first PDF contains the actual dinosaur template, the other PDFs contain six weekly cards each. You will need all 54 cards (52 weeks for the year, plus the last week of 2011 and the first one of 2013). Admittedly, a lot of cutting, but at least the cards need no folding / glueing…
There is a German version of the weekly cards, but I haven’t had time to prepare them for upload yet. If you are interested, drop me a note via the comments or the contact form.
Now that I have featured the fox, the crow and the bear finger dolls, I wanted to show you all three together.
All three being forest beasts, they go together quite well, the cheeky crow, the sly fox and the relaxed bear.
These are extremely easy to make, and should be doable for kids at elementary school level. If you want to make them, their templates can be found in the original posts for each:
As social creatures, we have the amazing ability to project a soul into virtually anything that has two eyes and a mouth. This opens up a world of possibilities when it comes to dolls. And sometimes the simplest dolls are the most loved ones. So I set out to create a couple of papercrafted fingerdolls. Voila the fingerdoll bear:
This one is very easy to make, and the only minor difficulty you may encounter is the relatively small size.
