John Burridge

This year for Easter, I decided that I would attempt to use the ancient Egyptian hieroglyph, hpr, ( or 𓆣  ) on dyed eggs.  Hpr is an ideogram of a dung-beetle, and is used in words like "manifest" and "becoming."    In ancient Egyptian iconography, the dung-beetle is shown with a sun disk, and is symbolically related to the beginning of a new day and regeneration.  I used photos I'd taken of various ancient Egyptian artifacts as the basis for the design and fired up Inkscape.  Several hours later, I had a DFX file that I could import into Silhouette.  

 This is a note to me from my past self (11/15/2020)

This year for Halloween, make a Witch-King of Angmar style jack-o-lantern, with a high crown by giving it a narrow-toothed, jagged rim and then turn it stem-side down.  You might even try cutting a second lid for a multi-tiered affect.  Think of that one Ace of Swords tarot trump with a crown surmounting a sword. 

 ... you're working on creating heart shapes for a Valentine's Day project and the next thing you know, you've created a barn owl.

For October 31, I wanted to RollerBlade under the full moon light.  Traditionally, I've done this in my billowing black cloak; this worries Mark, who is convinced that I'm going to slip, knock myself out, and get squished by a truck.

This time around, I decided that I would work on white wings, which would show up, and then, in the very unlikely event that I did slip and knock myself out, I would be a white heap in the middle of the road, illuminated by the silvery full moon.   

I started construction on the first of the month.

I thought about how I might make some wings that weren't too horrific looking.  There's a woman on the Internet who made black wings, bird feet, and a beaked full head mask.  I didn't want my head covered because I wanted to be able to see, but her tutorial about how to put together wings from feathers based on actual birds was instructive.  I also thought I might be able to pull off something like the winged costumes used in Akhenaten.   

The first step was to make a small model of the wings in chipboard before cutting out feathers and wings from some sheets of cardboard that we had.  I thought I might be able to make the wings bend at the elbow; this might have worked, except that I didn't have a model arm to fit into the model wing -- so I didn't realize until later that my elbow doesn't bend in the same plane as the wing model did.

Luckily, I had the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Feather Atlas as a resource. The most difficult part was figuring out how to scale up the wings so they wouldn't look like dinky little hand fans or so that they wouldn't be so large that I would be unable to get out of the garage.   And there was also the question of how to wear my wrist-guards with the wings.   I had a rough idea of how long I wanted the tip-to-tip wingspan to be, and I spent something like three hours with a compass trying to work out proportions.  

Since I didn't want to have to keep track of ten or so chipboard pattern guides, I cheated a bit and only made four and doubled-up on similar sized feathers.  Then it was cut-cut-cut-cuting on the cardboard.   This wasn't so bad, as the weather was still nice, and I could work on them in the mid-October sunlight. 

The next step was cutting out the wings; I figured that by doubling up the cardboard and folding it, I'd have structurally sound wings with less of a chance for accidental, mid-flight molting.  It was around here that I discovered that bending wings wasn't going to work (luckily, we had enough cardboard that I could experiment with forms).  I experimented around with feather placement in the wings and determined that it wouldn't look too horrific. 

The wings did look a little less owl-like than I hoped; I was slightly bummed out about this until I decided that I was going to look more like Daedalus than an actual raptor.  And I tried to keep my mind off of Icarus (perhaps if I were younger and more buff....) 

 For a while, I've been thinking about ways that I might convert an Altoids tin into a kind of reliquary or shrine or portable diptych.  Serendipitously, when I last visited my folks, I discovered my Mom had about five hundred of the things -- she gladly donated five to me (my Dad was probably sorry that she donated only five...).

 I did some Internet research on portable altars, and lots of folks sand down and use paint stripper to prep their tins for a repaint job.  I suppose I should see if anyone pounds out the embossed "Altoids" legend, but so far folks have just dealt with the paint -- except for the one woman who encased her tin in Sculpey clay.

 Since I wasn't planning on taking my piece anywhere particularly wet, I opted for a paper liner on the inside.  For extra credit, I could maybe papier-mâché the lid, but this was more of a concept piece than anything.

The most fussy steps were figuring out the sizes of the lid and the box, which are a tenth of an inch different, so I could cut out a paper liner for them.  The compass came in very handy crafting the curved corners.  In theory, now that I have the measurements, I could use InkScape to cut out the two liner papers... I do wonder, however, how much fiddling I'd have to do have the measurements accurately come out on the Silhouette plotter-cutter.  That's another project...


 I figured I do a moon on the lid, and cut out a dark sky liner.  It felt a little pedestrian, but looking through various scrap paper shapes I had left over from previous paper art projects, it seemed obligatory that the sun be on the other side.
 The proportions of the shapes were in scale.  I wasn't sure what to do with the sun, which seemed a little lonely.  So I added some hills.  Bending strips of curve-cut green paper gave the hills some dimensionality.

So I gave the moon some hills, too.  The trickiest part was placing the sun and the moon to avoid a pareidolic face. 

At first I felt "terribly arty," and absurdly pleased with my own cleverness.  And then I realized this particular Altoids Diptych is dangerously close to Country Cute.

Oh well.

What works best in this particular example is the way the hills pop out of the box and are on both sides of the hinge.  Some other things I might try to add different levels would be making some Mucha-esque arches (the kind adorned with a frame of circles) in front of a Sarah Bernhardt figure.  In some of the Internet examples, folks had strung small beads or charms along the inside; it might be fun to try to work in an LED.   And if I were feeling intensely clever, I might figure out how construct and install a pop-up sundial...

This year for the holidays I made some ornaments.  I'd wanted to make something a little more complicated, but in the end opted out for something that would use (mostly) straight lines and wouldn't require glue to put together.
The ornament is based on a stellated  icosidodecahedron.  I cut out triangles with a circle cut out of the middle to give the design an airier feel.

The edge of the triangle is about two inches; anything smaller and it would have been too difficult to assemble.







Five triangles hooked into each other pop into a three-dimensional star shape.  (Pause to imagine giant triangles making some cool outdoor gazebo.)  The triangle edges are slotted so they'll make a five-pointed star wen assembled.










There are several ways to put the different colors together.  I like to start with five triangles of the same color to make a star.  Other times I'll surround a triangle of one color with three of another and make a banded effect.












I didn't actually link the stars together at their points... but you could, and get a giant snub dodecahedron... and I would have for this post, except that I didn't have enough triangles (it would take 60 triangles... eyes cutter-plotter).













Back to this project,... I decided to make a blue and a green star joined together with a band of purple.
Usually I put the triangles together directly into the sphere, but for purposes of illustrating how things go together, I made the two end stars first, being sure that I kept the slots on the triangles on the same sides

Here's an interior shot, showing the geometry of interlaced pentagons and hexagons.

















The last triangles require a little sphere flexing to fit together.


















The holes in the triangles are useful for turning the sphere into an ornament.  I suppose a larger construction could be used as light shades.

The school where The Child goes to wanted to make some mallets with the school's R logo on them.   Someone much cleverer than me in the ways of woodworking made the mallets, and figured out a way to use blank tiles of white oak to put the mallet together.







I had to convert the pixelated logo into a vector drawing of the logo in InkScape, which I surrounded with boxes the size of the wood tiles.
When I got to the Maker Space, I laid the side of a cardboard cereal box into the laser cutter, and had it etch the design onto a cardboard cereal box so I'd know where to put the tiles.

Arrh!  I'm pretty sure that the char marks on the outside will stay that way.  We've got some left-over glow paint, so I asked The Child if he wanted the inside to glow, and he did.