It was fun, but the size was quite limiting. I wanted to work on a bigger canvas, but large weaving frames turn out to be quite an investment.

So I decided to build my own.

I still had this huge drawing board laying around, that I've been barely using - since it didnt fit on my desk. So I decided to give it a second life, by sawing a total of 73 slits into each side - making it a 76x50cm weaving frame.

The first big project I made was this walrus tapestry. Even though technically, this was part of a uni project for my illustration class, it can be classified rather as an extracorricular activity. It was in no way part of the assignment, I just wanted to try out my new big weaving frame with that one

I found this old digital camera at my parents' appartment. I can't quite remember where I saw this first, but I had the idea in my head of making it an infrared camera. As the sensor inside picks up an even wider range of the light spectrum than the human eye can see, there's an infrared filter inside. For this camera it looks like a small sheet of iridescent foil, that you can simply remove.

But first I had to disassemble the entire digicam, which proofed to be a little more complicated than expected. Eventually, with a lot of pacience and soldering paste, it worked.

However, simply removing the infrared filter doesn't automatically make it an infrared camera. The sensor now just pics up more light in the far red spectrum. You also need a filter for the visible light spectrum. To achieve that, I ordered some foil called "congo blue". By putting around 6 layers of that where the IR-filter used to be. Assemble it all back together and pray your non-existent soldering-skills are enough to make it work - Now we have an infrared camera :)

This year I've tried out cyanotype for the first time on a student trip to italy, where a fellow student gave a workshop. It was so much fun, that I had to try it again at home some time.

My dad is a craftsman - more precisely he's a metall worker - but he practically knows how to do anything crafts-related. At home, where I grew up, he has this big workshop that used to be his parents' pigsty, full of machines, workstations and mostly scrap he believes to find use for at some point. (I wonder where I got my hoarding problem from)

I guess that's one thing I quite miss since leaving home to live in the city - having the privilage space to do practically whatever that I now wish I'd have made use of more often.

But one project I've made use of this privilage back than was this selenite lamp I built with his support.

For the base, I used a piece of wood I found in his pile of woods scraps. The selenite I already bought some time ago at some esotheric shop.

I carved out the shape of the crystal and the recesses for the cables using a miller

All of the electronics I used have been recycled from old devices. I found a cute small swich, an old powersupply with a cable and a bunch of other things I needed for the inside. The only new thing I used was an LED.

All in all, quite a fun project - might do again.