Seesaw

There’s no gift better than risking life, limb and your favourite pair of overalls to make somebody something, right? My nephew was turning four and I wanted to make him a toy, so when I found this it looked good: small, easy and fun.

 Somehow, it took steroids, or got bitten by a radioactive spider, because it turned into this.

 

1. Cut top off two tyres. We didn’t want it too high, since he still only comes up to my hip, so we cut thirty centimetres off the ground. We started with the hand saw – nope – then the circular saw – nope – then the hand saw – yes, but be prepared to sweat – and eventually settled on the angle grinder.

2. Measure, saw and screw wood to each side of the tyre, with four screws on each side. (The two pieces will bend towards each other like Shakespearean lovers, so you may want to screw a block between them just to make the next assembly step a little easier.)

 

3. Cut a piece of board to the approximate length and width of the top of the tyre. Saw the corners off, because the kids are guaranteed to run into it at some point and the less sharp edges the better. Attach the board with screws, making sure you’re screwing into the wood bracing and not empty air. 

4. We used gum, which was strong enough to hold Lawrence and I without even a creak of protest, but just to be sure, we screwed a second reinforcing piece underneath the plank along the middle. Please note that the plank is upside down in this photo, and if you put the reinforcing piece on the top you will give your children enormous wedgies.

5. The last piece of wood is the one that will attach everything together. Measure the width of the plank and the two top boards: the three combined is how long it needs to be. Once you’ve cut it to size, find the middle: line up the edge with one tyre board and draw a pencil line that marks off the width of the board, then repeat for the other end of the piece of wood, leaving you with three sections marked. The middle section should be the width of the plank. Lay the piece of wood on top of the plank, lined up with the middle section, and drill two holes, one each side of the reinforcing piece underneath. These are for the bolts: it’s a good idea to actually put the first bolt in before you drill the second hole, to make sure it doesn’t move. Use a washer on both the underside and the top of the bolt to ensure it won’t pull through the wood and scatter flailing children to the wind.

6. The last step is, obviously, to attach the plank to the tyres. Rest the piece of wood roughly in the centre of the two boards, and put a couple of screws in to hold it in place. It isn’t bearing any weight, so two on each board should be ample. 
7. Sand, then sand the sides again, because little fingers are going to be gripping it (hopefully in delight and not in terror).

8. Paint. Outside, in winter, with rain forecast. Hope the weatherman’s prediction was out by at least a couple of hours.  
9. Clean melted tyre goo off face. Clean melted tyre goo off glasses. Clean melted tyre goo from hair. Clean melted tyre goo off entire first floor of house. Throw out socks. They’re a lost cause.

10. Realise that you still have to move the stupid thing over two hundred kilometres to give it to its recipient, and you don’t own a helicopter. Disassemble, wrap in bubble tape, tie to car and pray the cops are busy that night.

I did consider adding handles, which would have been easy: just a couple of large furniture handles screwed in would have been fine. However, I had nightmarish visions of one of the kids falling off with their fingers still holding on and breaking bones. I’ve already dropped my nephew on his head, I don’t need that on my record as well.

TARDIS Tissue Box

For the weeks leading up to the anniversary of my aunt’s death, I was miserable and wishing I’d told her I loved her while I had the chance. I needed a distraction, and it seemed like the appropriate way to honour her would be to pick ten people and make them gifts or cards or ridiculous acrostic poems covered in glittery confetti. This was meant to be Lyndon’s Christmas present before I got bored and decided to watch Big Bang Theory instead, so I already had all the materials and had found a tutorial from g33k, which I then proceeded to sort of follow.

 I don’t know why I always photograph Lyndon’s presents outside. His room isn’t hopelessly untidy, I promise.

I made it to the actual dimensions of the tissue box rather than square (which I suppose means Lyndon is stuck with the same brand of tissues for the rest of his life, or until this thing falls apart in a month or two). I was concerned that it would get saggy and wrinkly if there was excess material on the sides, but it also meant that I had to change the size of the windows and the squares, so pick your poison.

                                                                                            

It didn’t occur to me until afterwards that I could have done the letters a lot more neatly if I’d chalked them on the material and stitched the outline. But given that the chalk was in the next room and my bed was warm, I probably wouldn’t have bothered anyway.

The only thing I significantly changed was the top. I tried sewing two pieces of material together and stuffing it with wadding, and it was epic, epic fail. It looked like the TARDIS had taken up reading Cleo and discovered that berets are trendy this season. I ended up cutting four small strips of cardboard and gluing them together in a square then gluing a flat piece on top and wrapping the material around it. I ran a bead of hot glue around the inside of the cardboard strips to attach it to the rest of the cozy.

(Of course, the first thing Lyndon did was pick it up by the top, and I had to confess that that really wasn’t a good idea.)

Don’t think you can skip the lining because it’s on the inside anyway and nobody’s going to see it. Know what happens when you wriggle a hard-cornered tissue box in and out? It eats all those vulnerable exposed threads for breakfast. Also, don’t use a bent piece of cardboard for the base just because you’re lazy and Lyndon is coming home soon. Just don’t.

When I got up, I found Lyndon had slipped me this note under my door as a thank you.

It's on my project list.

Batman Furniture

Two days before his birthday, I sent Lyndon this email: ‘Start preparing tearful speeches about how you couldn't possibly deserve a friend as incredible as me, because I just finished your birthday present and it is exceptionally cool.’

In hindsight, I might have oversold it a little.

After two hours in the secondhand bookshop flipping though Batman comics to find the ones with the best VENGEANCE IS MINE catchphrases, I was ready to start. I bought four comics for both pieces of furniture and it was plenty, even after I accidentally stepped on a couple of pages. I did a cursory sand of both the table and chair before I started gluing, but Mod Podge is strong enough to decoupage the surface of the moon, so it’s probably not essential.

With uncharacteristic generosity, I’d volunteered to play taxi for Zoe and Jess, so I had until 2 a.m. to play with the layout. I didn’t want to lay them out overlapping like Bombus does, because then you wouldn’t be able to read the soulful declarations of ‘AND THAT ELEGANT COMBINATION SPELLS YOUR DOOM!’, so I had a lot of piecing together to do. I worked from the centre out, starting with my favourite strips and filling in the gaps later, always trying to make sure I had a variation of colour, to the maximum extent possible in a comic where the hero never changes his clothes.

For the chair, I’d worked a ten-hour day and wanted to go watch Gilmore Girls, so I slapped strips on with even less planning than Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, and it turned out just as well as the table. I’m still not sure whether to be pleased or distressed. 

 This time I wrapped the strips around the edge and underneath so it looked good from the side as well. My experience with corners is that you’re probably going to end up with a wrinkle, so succumb to the inevitable and just keep it small.

I’d thought it might be too lumpy to sit on, but I didn’t overlap the strips excessively, and after a few coats of varnish it was almost smooth. I started both off with Arbee Crystal Clear Handcraft Spray Varnish, then five coats of polyurethane, which is not as excessive as it seems given that beer-and-chocolate encrusting is not so much a possibility as an inevitability. Since Nan might be reading this, I’m obliged to tell you that you should sand lightly between coats of varnish.

I’m pretty happy with them – they’re not bad for someone who was pronouncing decoupage “de-coop-adge” just a couple of weeks earlier.

Tile Picture

‘This is going to be excellent,’ I thought. ‘Ninety cents for tiles and two dollars for tissue paper? Best Christmas present that’s ever been bought completely out of parking money.’ I didn’t factor in the hundred or so hours it took me to make the gods-cursed thing.

The tutorial from Instructables was simple and straightforward, which means it missed out so much detail I found it almost impossible to follow. The basic process was good, though, so I just filled in the gaps as I went along.

Photos that will look the best are the ones with light backgrounds, because it blends into the tile and looks like the people are painted on, whereas photos with dark backgrounds look like you printed it on tissue paper and stuck it on a tile.

Eventually, after trying hundreds of free programs that would split only half the image, or declared excitedly that I was the winner of a FREE iPod but wouldn’t actually split any of my image, I found TileMage, which was simple and effective. For cutting each square, I went with the low-tech approach: dropping each square into a Publisher document and cropping the edges in by 0.5 cm. I don’t even have a Facebook, okay. Photoshop was way beyond my technical prowess.

I tried all the techniques for printing on tissue paper suggested in the Instructables comments, from ironing it onto regular paper to gluing it on the paper with Mod Podge. The only thing that worked for me was cutting out squares of tissue paper slightly larger than the image and sticking them onto regular paper with masking tape around the edges, which won’t melt in an inkjet printer like it would in a laser. An entire ream of paper and two ink cartridges later, when you finally have nine decent images, cut them out with a ruler and a Stanley knife.

The gluing step will work far better if you’re not poor and you have a laser printer. The only laser printers I know of are at the university, and I suspected that lying on the library floor with my scissors and masking tape would probably get me kicked out of law school, and possibly also deported. The best method for gluing tissue paper is to lay it on the tile and paint the glue lightly on top of it, but if you try this with an inkjet printer, the ink will run like the cops are chasing it.

The trick is to be so gentle the paper just thinks it’s lying down and choosing not to get up again, and doesn’t realise it’s actually been glued. Use a very thin layer of glue and wait until it’s tacky but not quite dry. If you use too much then when it dries you’ll be able to see the streaks through the paper, though you can’t when using normal paper, and the ink may also discolour in spots. Get a bird’s eye view and lower the tissue down slowly, because once it makes contact, the only way it’s coming off is in pieces.

I also tried the ironing method at this stage (which is the most I’ve ever used an iron: since I don’t iron my clothes, it took me almost thirty minutes just to find it – I wasn’t sure if we even owned one). The advantage is that because it uses even pressure, it doesn’t smudge the ink like finger-smoothing may, but it also doesn’t do a particularly good job of getting rid of wrinkles and air bubbles. Pick your poison.

Quite obviously, I wasn’t going to seal them with Mod Podge. I used three coats of Arbee Crystal Clear Handcraft Varnish, which doesn’t produce a particularly tough coating, but since I wasn’t planning to use them as coasters I figured it didn’t matter.

                                                                               

                                                                                            

Of course, the frugality of the present was somewhat undermined when Mum went out and had it professionally framed. Don’t think this is some great reflection on my artistic skill, though: if I sneezed on a piece of paper, she’d put it on display in a glass cabinet patrolled by security guards.