Check out this Perler Bead Pokemon Badge display that a friend of mine made a couple of weeks ago for his girlfriend’s birthday. Awwwwww.
He’s displayed the badges in a shadow box frame, set out from the backing on a few extra beads for that 3D look, and finished it with a Pokemon blue and yellow surround. The lady in question is apparently a huge Pokemon nut, so hopefully really appreciated his efforts! Who said romance was dead..?
Good job, Chubbs :P
Now THIS is a GeekCraft: A Boy And His Atom: The World’s Smallest Movie
Okay, so you need a $214 BILLION company to sponsor you to make one of these for yourself, but this is pixel art at its most tiny, and science at its most frivolous.
IBM this week released their mini stop-motion movie made using atoms. Yep, those dots acting as pixels are carbon monoxide molecules – two stacked carbon atoms – which have been manipulated frame-by-frame to create a story about a boy and his atom. It took a small team two weeks to complete using a scanning tunnelling microscope (STM), which uses quantum physics to move atoms and molecules around. The video has earned IBM a place in the Guinness Book of World Records for creating the teeniest tiniest stop motion film.
Want to know more? Watch the second film all about how they made it: Moving Atoms: Making The World’s Smallest Movie
Recently I had to have a late-night conference call for work. It went for two hours and ended at midnight. However, thanks to the wonders of hands-free kits I was able to do some geeky crafting at the same time, so it didn’t feel like much of my evening had been swallowed up by work stuff after all!
Itty bitty paper Nintendo Stars are really easy and quick to make, and the more you make of them the better they look. If you don’t know how to make these tiny origami stars, keep reading for a quick tutorial.
Whilst doing some research for my own geeky Stargate craft I came across this truly amazing Lego Stargate Model. It originally hit the Internet back in 2005 on mocpages.com, so apologies if you’ve seen this before a hundred times, but I just could not not post it.
It even has moving parts and light up chevrons! If I had this model, it would perhaps even bump my enormous Space Shuttle Lego from pride of place on the bookcase.
If you’re at all into Lego, make sure you take a look at mocpages.com as there seem to be endless* awesome Lego projects featured there. Who said these things were for kids?!
*358,359 Lego projects at time of writing
I’ve never actually tried needle felting myself, but this is such a wonderful use of the craft that I am definitely going to give it a go sometime. Check out this Needle Felted Solar System Mobile over on It’s a Knit House.
There’s a set of instructions for making your own Needle Felted Solar System Mobile. Although obviously, it’s not quite to scale. If you made a 2 inch diammeter version of the Earth in a scale model, the Sun would have to be 18 feet across, and you’d need 22 miles to fit the whole thing in, including orbits (or 29 miles if you want to include Pluto).
But for illustrative purposes this is an awesome geeky science craft! I want one.
Last week Make: Craft featured a post on glass beadwork on wooden beads. As a bit of a dabbler in bead-weaving myself I was keen to have a go, and soon found myself wondering how to apply the technique to something geeky, as you do. What do you reckon to my Pokeball bead and Inky from Pac-man?
It took some trial and error, and they aren’t the quickest of things to make, but enjoyable nonetheless. If you want to give it a go you’ll need lots of tiny seed beads (I used 3 mm), some tough beading thread and something to bead around. The tutorial uses wooden beads, but I used polystyrene balls from a craft store, so they are actually pretty lightweight.
The full beaded beads how-to can be found here. The tutorial is in Czech, but the images are easy to follow and you can see the Google Translate version of the page here.
If anyone has any suggestions for other spherical geeky things that could be beaded like this, post below!