inspiration roll

A few links of things that caught my eye:

Matt and I recently bought the Playstation 3 video game Little Big Planet. In the game you customize your character, a little knit sackguy. After that you can go on to customize and build your own levels to play and share with other online players. Last week I discovered this flickr pool group where people are creating their own real life sack guys based on their player characters. How inspiring is that? I want to build my own sackguy. He is the white one pictured above. He is wearing a red and white striped undershirt and undies, an elizabethan collar and bunny ears.

My next link I’d like to share is a post about printmaking with styrofoam food packaging. I found this link on Craft Magaine’s blog. When I was in college I probably took enough printmaking classes to have a minor in it, but they didn’t offer minors in printmaking, or at least not for the degree that I earned. I know, I tried at the time. Anyway, with all the printmaking I’ve done, I’ve never printed using styrofoam. I feel like it was one of those missed life experiences that all kids have in elementary or middle school. Printing with styrofoam and pinhole photography from a coffee can/oatmeal box. And since I missed both of those rights of passage I’ve always wanted to desperately do them. Well, seeing this post only added to that desire. After printing with litho stones, etched metal plates, carved blocks of wood, and silk screens, I imaged the quality of styrofoam would be, ya know, ehh, but don’t these pieces look fabulous?

And now my last link for right now is another tutorial I found via Craft magazine’s blog. This post is for a two step tutorial on how to make Japanese kusudama, or an origami ball. I thought it might be really beautiful to make a whole bunch of these to decorate an entire Christmas tree. You can use old newspaper ads and they would be colorful, recycled and still just as beautiful.