calend'art 1

This calendar is set to April 17. Get it? I gave this as an engagement gift for AnnaOne and Lank. I don't even know if it will work with their home decor! But they were very kind and didn't say anything contrary, so I'm rolling with it.

simple frame, paint, beads, hemp string

variant 2 ingredients

wire. beads.

2: ingredients

frame, drill, more wire & beads

introducing variant 2

I figured I'd have more control if I used beads and wire, rather than trying to adjust the length of the string and loops and stuff.

here's all ten bits

in two rows, ready for painting. The finished version of this was given to Spidere. Another one will be made for some SF friends, some St. Paulites, and at least one more for folks in the greater Chicag0 area.

holes

drilled holes for putting in the wire

one of the finished variants.

Mailed as a gift to zer0gee. This is intended as a desktop model and this view is looking Down at it. In my mind, I was thinking of the gold and silver sides = 1, regular sides = 0. Remember read right to left; top row months, bottom row days. This is June 11.

hexadecimal using beads

The idea here was to have a necklace that could display the month and date along a line representing the hexadecimal system 0 thru F (which is 15). You'd need some way to show the difference between month and date, and some way to put in 2 bits of information for the date, since the highest one bit can show is 15 and you need to go at least as high as 31. Incidentally, this layout has some significance to the colors, but they're not the primary thing. The pale beads at start and end correspond to 0 and 13-15, all numbers that don't get used in the 12 month year. The black beads are winter months, light ones are spring, green for summer, and red/brown for fall. Get it? It's just a little bit of metadata, not crucial to the functioning which is all about position.

hexadecimal wearable calendar charm necklace

As photographed here, the zero position is right to F on the left (I suppose left to right from wearers perspective). But what's important here is knowing what the bead charms are, really. Because they drive what position they should be in. The month charm is the light colored wooden one and the day charms are the warm and cool glass ones. Where blue=1s, red=16s. So this is set to 6 0 C which is the same as June 12. For September 13th--the planned date of MN Journey to the End of the Night, for example--the pale charm would be hung from the first pink one, the blue would be on the light bead third from the left, and the red would be on the far right. This necklace was sent to Julian Muffinbot. More of these will be made, fairly quickly, and given to players from all over. Chances are if I've asked for your address lately, you'll get one of these from me in the next 90 days. As far as these go, I'd have to say this is the most practical of the calend'arts in terms of helping someone keep track of the days whatever the conditions, because you could keep tabs on things while walking thru a post apocalyptic wasteland. With the addition of a fourth bit charm, one could add a day of the week marker.

materials

some lovely variety glass beads

wire

Philosophical question time: if you had to choose for the rest of your life, would you rather have access to duct tape or good stout-but-formable wire? You only get one. Discuss amongst yourselves.

1 bit

this is the 1 bit from my other necklace idea.

3 binary bits

this would get you 1, 2, 4, enough to show 7 months. I added one more position, enough for 15 months. You hang a 1 or 0 off the little loop. So with 4 loops, June would be 0110. December would be 0011.

matching earrings

"the match" here is that they use beads and the little coils motif in the wire. Otherwise, these are hexadecimal earrings.

hexadecimal earrings

Enough earrings to show the day of the month in hex (hex requires only 2 bits to show a number up to 255, more than enough to show 31 days of a month). The right ear, "the sixteens place" would have a 1 or 0 in it, and the left ear "the ones" would have 0-F (0-15). The 1st would be 01. The 13th would be 0d. The 25th would be 19. And so on. very simple math.

gift

As you can see, this binary/hex calend'art jewelry set was given as a gift to a player friend of mine, who wears it fairly well. More of these are being made for some players. It's quite time consuming, so some of you (certain Bostonians and Texans, for example) will have to wait a little, sorry. (I also think it would look great on a beskirted Dax. watch your mail in uh...uh...a month or so, Dax!)

the process for making paper flowers

1: cut tissue to relatively square size. As small or smaller than a "standard" piece of origami paper.

making paper flowers

2: layer papers. The next step is to pierce them with wire and ...well, just watch the video...

cool color

mixed up water and paint in a jar to dye the cool colored flowers.

dipped and dripped

just hung the wire flower stems over the rim of our laundry room sink to dry.

warm and cool flowers

The cool flowers were splashed or dipped. The warm ones were hand painted with water colors.

binary again

the same principle applies. Outer ring would be months, inner ring would be days. I even labeled the holder right to left with 1, 2, 4, 8, 16 (in roman numerals). Then you use a warm colored flower for 1 and a cool colored flower for 0. This shows the flowerpot calendart set to June 12: 00110 01100 This is a gift for Ink Tea. I don't know if I'll make any more.