Category Archives: 366 Creativity Journal

My partially completed year long project that started in Jan 2012!

Day 76: Earrings

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Day 76’s assignment was “Make something inspired by and /or that fits on or around an ear (yours or someone else’s).

I try to avoid craft stores like Michael’s. Not because I don’t like getting crafty, but because I will go to Michael’s for a specific purpose and then spend another $30+ dollars on things I don’t really need.

Like last year: Sibling 1 needed to go to Michaels to get something and I accompanied her. I walked out the store with all these clearance jewelry pieces that I was convinced I would make into necklaces.  Continue reading

Day 71: Laver’s Law or the Rule of Fashion

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Day 71’s assignment was: “Time travel. make something that seems like it came from another era in history.”

I decided I wanted to illustrate Laver’s Law. James Laver was a writer and a fashion expert. He developed a rule of fashion that is “an attempt to compress the complex cycle of fashion change and the general attitude towards any certain style or period into a simple timeline.”

To do this project, I first did some research into various fashion trends of the 1900’s. Originally I was going to do the flapper style dress from the roaring ’20s, but decided to make it slightly more relevant by choosing an ’80s style of acid wash denim instead.

As you might of recognized, this is a picture of Robin Sparkles taken from the video “Let’s Go to the Mall” ( from the show How I met your mother)… It was hard to find a good picture of acid washed denim so I used this spoof instead.

I complied this all in Pixlr.com, which is pretty awesome for a free version of photoshop. However, I ran into a few problems when I tried to rasterize the texts layers (the position of the text moved around so that it didn’t line up like it was supposed to.) It was very annoying and took longer than it should have to go back and fix it. :/

It’s funny how my project  correlated with what I saw at Macy’s yesterday. One of the styles from the 80’s was wearing high heels with ankle socks. I laughed about that, thinking how ugly that looked and that no one would EVER wear that again.

But what do I see at Macy’s?

 

A mannequin wearing high heels and blue ankle socks!  Definitely you can see the revival of the ’80s coming back into fashion.

 

I think for me high heels and ankle socks is possbily a style that will never seem fashionable again much like shoulder pads… WHY?

 

Day 72: Let’s fix some shoes

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Day 72’s assignment was “Use all of the shoes in your household to make something, or work on a single pair of shoes that were destined for the thrift store.”

The people who know me well know that I own a fraction of the number of shoes most girls own. Oh, I do have a lot of shoes, especially compared to most guys.  But in general, I don’t care that much about the shoes I wear as long as they are comfortable.

Except for these. I love these shoes.

 

They don’t look like much after 4 years of wear and one year sitting in my closet. But again, I have to say I love these shoes. My feet are kind of big, but thin, which can make finding the right evening-out sandal difficult.

I had been looking for shoes like this for a while and it  was fate that lead me to Target the day I found these perfect silver sandals in my size. Not to get sentimental or anything, but it was like God himself came down from heaven and decided that these were the ones destined for my feet.

Isaac Mizrahi sandals

I loved these so much that months later I scoured ebay looking for the gold twin of this very same sandal (Target stopped carrying the brand Isaac Mizrahi which made it quite difficult to find the gold version of this in my exact size.)

I’m obsessed. I’ll admit it. I wish you all the best finding your own perfect sandal.

But back to today’s assignment. My silver sandals were toast. They were falling apart, the color was fading, I lost my right heel and they had no traction. A year ago I ended up replacing these with an inferior silver sandal and put these in the closet. My perfect shoes were meant for the trash bin when I could finally get the heart to throw them out.

Today however, was a big day. With nothing to lose, I decided to see what would happen if I spray painted my shoes black. I am in need of black sandals and figured this would be an interesting experiment.

It actually turned out better than I expected.

 

The black look is a great improvement on the faded out silver. I still have the problem of the crappy soles, but I might go see how much it would cost to re-sole them. If it’s cheaper than buying a new a pair of black sandals I will probably do it just so I don’t have to retire these re-vamped shoes.

Once again I am indebted to this 366creativityjournal project which makes me do the things I have procrastinated on!

 

Day 69: In the land of optical illusions

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Day 69’s assignment was: “Make a puzzle or make something using pieces from a puzzle.”

After searching google for inspiration, I decided to make my own optical illusion using this tutorial.  It was  simple  to do and once I had my images ready, I just looked for a wordpress plugin which can do image/mouse rollovers.  This plugin was super easy to use, unlike a few others ones I tried.

DIRECTIONS: 

Stare at the dot for 20-30 seconds. Then, without moving your eyes, move the mouse over the image. The image will look like it’s in color until you move your eyes.  

 

The original photo can be viewed on my flickr! The colors are more intense in the normal photo.

Day 67 (part 2): Zombies!

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This is part 2 of Day 67’s assignment which was “Write a 10 word science fiction story. Bounus: Illustrate it.”

This story was inspired by a post on 9gag.com (original zombie picture taken from here):

 

 

 

Which prompted my friend Crystal to come up with:

 

 

I love when things like this go hand in hand. 🙂

And although this wasn’t the post that inspired this zombie apocalypse stories in the first place, I thought this was well done:

 

Day 67: Aliens & Blondes’ Brains

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Day 67’s assignment was: “Write a 10 word science fiction story. Bounus: Illustrate it.”

The first thing that popped in my mind was this:

But upon further reflection today I wondered if  instead the aliens would ONLY  want blonde girls’ brains because they are “stupid” and easy to manipulate. So I made this as well:

 

Which one do you like better?

(made in ragemaker.net and picnik)

 

 

 

Day 60: Bad Photo, Vintage Effect & Helvetica challenge

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Day 60’s assignment was: ” Make something that casts a shadow and document only the shadow.”

After procrastinating on this assignment, I finally dragged my friend’s sister into posing with me for a shadow photo. Then, since all the photos were kinda terrible, I decided to do Visual Assignment 52 where you take a bad photo, add a vintage effect and then add a silly phrase in helvetica.

I edited the photo  in Pixlr (amazing free photo editing website!) then asked my friend for suggestions for a phrase to use.  One of them is slightly negative and the other one is more positive. I couldn’t decide which one I liked more so I ended up posting both:

 

caption by Aitak M

lyrics from the song: We are young

Day 49: discovering the connections

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Day 49’s assignment was: “Quantity over quality. Work with a lot of something. It could be dried grains from the kitchen, a jar of buttons you have in your closet or all your t-shirts.” 

I was both super behind on this assignment and yet also super ahead. Let me explain:

When I was on flickr about a month ago, I saw a photo someone had uploaded displaying their Facebook network connections. I thought it was a really interesting graph and that I would love to do one for my own network connections. I downloaded the program Gephi and using this fabulous tutorial, got to work.

About halfway through with messing with this, I got distracted by a side project and left the graph unfinished. Flashforward to Day 49’s project which I should have done 13 days ago (oops!). I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with this project, hence why I put it off for so long.

Then I remembered that I had my graph (filled with many, many connections!) half undone. I got back to work on it, using this other tutorial to help me color my different network sets.

The result:

 

Basically what I have here is 7 main groups in my network:

1. College Friends (Purple)

2. Family & their/our friends (Pink)

3. Friends from my American Contiki Tour (teal)

4. Friend from my NZ Contiki Tour (green)

5. Friends from my Australian Study Abroad Experience (Orange)

6. High School Friends (Light Blue)

7. Friends from the Camp in HS (dark blue)

plus a few randoms here and there whom do not have connections with any of my other friends.

 

I find it interesting to see a visual display of my friendships like this because the size of the node doesn’t always correspond to my real relationships with these people.

For example, two of my best friends from HS whom I talk on the phone with all the time and we hang out a lot, are just tiny specks on this graph. You can’t even see their names.

Also, a lot of the friends I made while doing those Contiki Tours have fairly large sized nodules. While I did make some pretty fabulous friends from these tours, I think the reason that they make such a big appearance on the graph is that I have a lot of pictures with/of them. So while some of these people I only hung out with them in person for 2-3 weeks, I might/do have more photos with them than I do with friends I have known for years.

However, the people with the largest nodes are definitely the people who I communicate the most with (or at least I do on facebook!)

Overall, I think it’s really cool what you can do in Gephi to chart your network connections. I’m curious to see how this all changes over time.