Geek Crafts

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

• More pixel art on Geekcrafts.com
• More Science on Geekcrafts.com

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There really isn’t a whole lot that I can say about Adam Wallacavage’s tentacle chandeliers, other than they are stunning and beautiful and I want one of them! According to Adam’s website, it looks like he started making these beauties way back in 2006 until at least 2010, and they all have such sexy sounding French names. Gizmodo lists the prices on some of the chandeliers from $8,500 to $10,000.

• Octopus Tentacle Chandliers

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Flickr user Caroline (AKA Carexcore) stitched up this awesome – and totally badass – Stegosaurus on an iPhone case. Her Flickr photostream is filled with all sorts of clever geekiness like this, but I’m a total sucker for dinosaurs.

• Caroline’s Flickr Photostream
• More dinosaurs on Geek Crafts
• More geeky Cross Stitch

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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.

• Needle Felted Solar System Mobile over on It’s a Knit House
• Other Science-based crafts on GeekCrafts

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I don’t know much about Dee, the creator of this fine crustacean, but I do know that she is a magician with polymer clay. Snakes, bugs and Pokemon are her muses.

• Dee’s polymer critters

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Some of you may have heard of the acronym STEM: Science Technology, Engineering and Math. A respectable, geeky term in it’s own right, but probably a little stuffy for us over here at GeekCraft.

Recently, however, there has been a lot of talk about STEAM, which takes the stuffiness of STEM and adds an “A” for arts, injecting all sorts of coolness and excitement. In all seriousness, advocates of STEAM argue that arts provide school-aged children with a lot of skills valued in the world like design, problem solving, creativity, stick-to-it-ivness, etc., It is in that spirit of STEAM that I wanted to take this Friday round-up to focus on activities that you can do with young people in your life that promote this important intersection of art, science, engineering, and craft:

First up, just in time for those of you celebrating Easter, we’ve got egg geodes from Tinkerlabs. It’s some good chemistry (my favorite) and can lead to a nice conversation about geology. AND..and…it is colorful and fun.

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