Itsumo Mawaru

Line Block Trimmed, originally uploaded by mizuhana.

Here is today’s project! It’s a new quilt block called the kaleidoscope block. I created it using my scraps. It is also my first ever paper piecing block. I used tiny grid paper with a tiny stitch and it was easy to remove with the help of a needle to run down the edge.

I don’t really want to make another full quilt, plus I don’t have enough scraps, so I will only make a few more of these and then probably frame it and make it into a wall hanging.

This has been the coolest project so far!

I learned from this site how to make crazy zany shapes that will tessel guaranteed. So I cracked out the grid paper and started making some!

Tesselations, originally uploaded by mizuhana.

For some reason, a lot of mine have turned out looking like ghosts. Maybe I’m using too many curved shapes. I enjoy the ones I’ve created with rigid cuts as well as the one where I did no secondary cut.

I think I will use a next project to import them into Flash or Illustrator such that I can easily tessel them around and change the colors and produce interesting backgrounds. I like the idea of taking art from one existence and using it another.

The best thing about this project was that I was making some of them when my friends were over, and one of them was perplexed yet amazed when I used a freshly cut shape as a stencil to prove it was a true tessel!

I am also interested in the possibilities of using tessels elsewhere in my artistic endeavours…

Two nights ago, I had inspiration. That inspiration was to create an actual website promoting my web design capabilities. Not only would this be good for business, it’s also a good way for me to really think about what services I want to offer, and to think of a price that is fair to both people.

Laying in bed, I took down a few pages of thoughts and notes. Yesterday I sat down in front of my trusty craputer and started designing.

Unfortunately I only had a few hours of spare time to work on the website, as the rest of the day was spent playing Descent, the board game that takes hours to play and you almost always die or forefit. And since I am writing this post from my laptop, I can’t show you a picture of my mockup! I shall add one when I get home today. Here’s a picture of my mockup so far:

The background is still a WIP. It’s purposefully big so that larger monitors have something interesting to look at, but smaller monitors don’t lose out on the functionality.

I took this opportunity to observe how exactly I build websites. I was 10 minutes in to designing my page before I realized that I was designing a site that looked the exact same as another one I’ve done. Boo. So I started over, using a color palette from the Colour Lovers site, and using a framework I don’t usually employ (that is to say, a site that DOESN’T have a horizontal nav bar). It was a bit uncomfortable at the start, using a palette that looked nice but in practice was a bit tricky to actually USE, ignoring the desire to go back to a horizontal nav bar, etc. However, things started to fit into place, and so far I have a pretty good looking website, simple yet effective.

Coding it will have to be another project itself I think!

I have been inspired by a random person online to start and do (or work on) a project a day. Bonus points awarded if the project is a completely new thing. We’ll see how many days in a row I can go!

Since it’s almost midnight now, I shall consider my first contribution to this project to be this post itself.

Here is a list of things that I can do to fulfull my Project a Day reqiurements:

- photography, always a fun one
- a new craft
- something new with the materials I already have (including things I don’t consider as supplies!)
- something inspired by another blogger
- incremental work done on one larger project
- something new that I would never really think of doing
- something I can eat
- writing down a thought or idea I have for a larger project
- some neat app or foray into programming
- carving a stamp, or using a carved stamp in interesting ways
- using Photoshop/Flash/Illustrator to create fun graphics (this requires learning Illustrator, maybe this could be a good way to do so).

One of my goals will be to spend as little money as possible. This means I will be keeping my eyes out for materials I can scavenge from other places, as well as using things that are already in my possession.

Finally, each day has to have the item featured in a blog post, complete with at least one picture, and the post must be made before Midnight of that day for it to count. And no stocking up in advance unless there’s good justification.