kalikai

[kalikai]

Been practicing with kumihimo braiding.

FIL gave me the marudai jig he made himself a few years ago and never got around to learning how to use, plus the instructions he had for it: photocopies of half of a library book about kumihimo patterns.

Figuring out the process from an incomplete set of written instruction was a fun exercise.

I've just been using some cotton embroidery threads that I found lying around, plus the bundles of double-ply cotton thread I was given with the marudai. From top to bottom (down the right side of the image):

8 strands of double-ply thread: 4 blue & 4 purple

8 strands of half-thickness embroidery floss: 4 black, 2 orange, 2 teal. (4 regular strands each divided in two)

8 strands of embroidery floss: 3 orange, 3 brown, 2 teal

6 strands: 2 blue, 2 purple, 1 teal, 1 orange. Blue and purple are bundles of three lengths of double-ply thread each, to bring them up to roughly the same thickness as the embroidery floss.

These are all round braid. Haven't tried square yet. The instructions I have only covered 8-strand braids, so the 6-strand one was a freeform experiment following the 8-strand pattern.

They're perfect for begleri. Lovely grippy texture.

[kalikai]

The cat bit my favourite kbone in the middle of the night 😭😭😭😭

Easy enough to remedy at least. Just add back more sebum and you can hardly tell it was even damaged at all! I've only just woken up and haven't washed yet, so there was plenty of grease on my face to rub the kbone through. It's gross but that's the human body for you...

The two tiny burrs left in the wood from her teeth marks will come smooth on their own in time; the restorative power of hundreds of hours being actively handled and riding around in pockets and whatnot.

I love fixing problems. Goes a very long way toward making me feel less sad about them.

[kalikai]

Houseplants update:

Japanese Birdsnest Fern has been evicted from my bedroom on account of being too annoying. MFer has an 8cm pot but a 40cm canopy! Takes up like 5 plants' worth of room. Plus it's in such a short short can that it can't even allow other plants to fit beneath its canopy. So very obnoxious. Now it's residing on the bathroom bench where it will get the morning sun but not much else. It'll be okay there. I'll probably do a macrame pot-hanger for it at some point tho...

Brought pineapples inside for the winter. Too cold for them outside, and they haven't yet learned how to grow wings and migrate north, so they're now occupying my bedroom windowsill until favorable conditions return. They get bucketfuls of direct sunlight there, and it's nice and warm thanks to being indoors and also my little electric radiator.

The runt of the litter is still extremely tiny, and it turns out that this is because its repotting was so traumatic that it decided to restart growing from scratch. So that cutting is now growing twins.

Unfortunately, bringing the pineapples indoors caused an infestation of fungus gnats to come with them. >:(

Fungus gnats, FYI, are real bad for your plants because their babies live in the soil and eat your plants' roots, which makes it hard for your plant to be alive.

My remedy for this problem is The Little Old Scarface Who Swallowed A Fly aka Hypoaspis Mites

SAY HELLO TO MY LITTLE FRIEND!

These teeny tiny itsy bitsy little guys are voracious predators of soft-bodied soil-dwelling invertebrates. The eggs and larvae of my fungus gnat infestation are a delicious feast to them.

So I bought a litre of them online (20,000 mites) and applied a generous scoop to each plant, and now all I gotta do is sit back and wait for this to happen:

[kalikai]

Ecosphere updates

Aquatic jar - 1 year & 3 months old:

Macroscopic animal life greatly diminished. Handful of ostracods pottering about; nothing else visible. I hope there are still worms in the substrate but don't have any evidence.

Filamentous algae still growing thickly, but beginning to die back thanks to the very cold weather we've had. It looks a little like a forest of trees. 😊

The cold-weather die off is somewhat buoyed up by the little heater I run in my room somedays, plus the 6 hours of full sun they get on clear days, but the algae is definitely thinning up top

It's really cool to see the separate layers of sediment that are clearly visible on the far side of the jar: the original layer scooped from the storm drain, now with many thick black patches of anaerobic sludge; plus later additions in grey and brown from animal poop and dead algae.

Marine jar - 10 months old:

Green algae beginning to grow at the base of the jar

Couple of big fat bubbles down there too, trapped in the sludge layer on the far side of the jar. Oxygen from algae?? Methane or something else from decomposition?? Who knows? I'm certainly not going to open up the jar for a sniff 😅

[kalikai]

Loads of moss growing on my orchid pot 😄

[kalikai]

Improvised greenhouse for my pineapples.

Weather is getting colder. Hope this helps the pineapples stay warm. They'll be losing some amount of sunlight from this setup, so I'm certainly going to keep looking for a better option, but for now it'll do.

[kalikai]

Been making more monkey fist begleri. It's really fun. Some with 4 passes per axis, some with 5; some with the rope's core removed, some intact; and all with different sized ball bearings in the core (8.5mm, 11mm, 12.3mm, 13mm)

This one juuuuuust barely fit lol

And then after tightening it was like 10 inches between the knots

[kalikai]

[this has been sitting in my drafts since November 2024 and I just noticed it. The photos weren't attached, so I've had to guess at which ones I was describing. It looks like the text was copy pasted from an Instagram post. I didn't end up continuing to play with them once the novelty wore off. Straight back to begleri for me :) ]

After loads of experimenting with different lengths and widths, I finally settled on this bone shape for that set of #chetki I've been working on.

The heads are weighted with some recycled meccano to further boost their momentum for better flipping. 2x1 plates visible here on the outsides, so that the corner beads stay aligned, plus some of those itty bitty meccano hex nuts in between the wooden beads.

My muscle memory is defaulting to #begleri moves, but imma keep playing with it and seeking that uniqueness that I know is in here.

Playing with them, the sense that I get is that chetki are like Polarised Begleri.

If I just flow with them and let my begleri muscle memory take the wheel, then I keep ending up with a twist in the chetki and that, y'know, Feels Bad. So with chetki you really have to be respectfully disciplined with your planes. Your prop is two dimensional now, and not just a 1D line-segment where you can safely disregard any and all twisting accumulated by the rotation of your hand/wrist/arm.

Like, begleri flipping has the absolute sloppiest planes out of all of the flow arts. Practically non-existent, even. Most people who play with begleri wouldn't even know they're there or what the fuck I'm even talking about, beyond maybe having some loose vague intuition of, like, inside/outside or over/under. That's a whole mode of thinking right there which you can only develop from spinning with other circus toys and then transferring over to begleri; it's not native to begleri.

But chetki says "that sloppy carefree attitude is no good here. Pay attention to your torque or fuck off!"

And that is really interesting. :)

[kalikai]

My autumn-planted pumpkins* are just starting to put out their flower buds, but the plants are being killed by insects. Aphids or thrips or some other kind of little shit from that genre of pests. 😡

Dad-in-law said to spray it with pyrethrum, so after a trip to Bunnings that's what I've done. Fingers crossed they come good.

(*cause I didn't know anything about correct planting times or nothin. I just had a fistful of pumpkin seeds that I stuck in the dirt on a whim.)

[kalikai]

One of my pineapples is taking off like a rocket!

Look at that big boy go!! 😍😍

The rest of them are coming along nicely, as are the pumpkins that I planted at entirely the wrong time of year (hooray for global warming 🙃)

In other houseplant news, I've got a hankering for carnivorous plants again, so I'm gunna get myself a sundew. Had a few of them a few years ago and they were so fun to grow.

This one I'm going to put in a floating pot and float that inside my terracotta orchid mount. Will be a handy dandy water-level indicator, as well as not taking up any extra space on my windowsill by virtue of sharing the orchids' footprint. 😊

[kalikai]

Made a nice little set of rainbow monkeyfist begleri. 😊

[kalikai]

First seam done. The pace picked up the further I went along. Maybe because I was stitching through stitches I had just cut myself, and so the holes were fresh & open, & not the worn holes of the old snapped stitches. Or maybe it's just good old fashioned getting better with practice.

I think the floss was a good choice. The bright white stitches look nice against the brown of the leather. :)

Having a go at restoring some old leather bags. Like, small duffel sized. Overnight-bag sized.

One I got for free from the local Men's Shed when they were giving away a bunch of old random junk as I happened to be walking past, and the other one I got from an op shop.

The op shop one is a 'softer' leather with a brass frame, and the Men's Shed one is a stiffer leather with a wire spring frame.

Both could use a thorough cleaning & a high amount of leather conditioning TLC, both are suffering from corrosion of their fastenings, and both have very many damaged seams.

I'm starting with the Men's Shed one, which is branded as being made by Savoy Luggage, of NSW.

With both bags I'm going to tackle the stitching before anything else, as the stiffness of the leather is very helpful in holding the seams aligned, which allows me to easily reuse the original holes pricked through the leather.

On a whim I'm doing the stitching with dental floss, 'cause that seems like it'll be super strong and durable stuff compared to the regular cotton thread I otherwise have at hand. And I'm doing a saddle stitch because that also seems like the best idea.

Starting with the completely-gone part of the seam, and using the remaining stitching to hold everything in alignment, and then when the new reaches the old I'll begin unpicking the old as I go so that way the new stitches will be holding the alignment. We're Ship-of-Theseus-ing this thing.

Idk, this is my first time doing any kind of leatherwork whatsoever and I'm just improvising as I go. First time saddle stitching too.

Here's the Savoy bag:

And here's the amount of stitching I've completed so far before getting super bored and taking a break:

It's like six inches lol. Saddle stitch is sloooow.

[kalikai]

Having a go at restoring some old leather bags. Like, small duffel sized. Overnight-bag sized.

One I got for free from the local Men's Shed when they were giving away a bunch of old random junk as I happened to be walking past, and the other one I got from an op shop.

The op shop one is a 'softer' leather with a brass frame, and the Men's Shed one is a stiffer leather with a wire spring frame.

Both could use a thorough cleaning & a high amount of leather conditioning TLC, both are suffering from corrosion of their fastenings, and both have very many damaged seams.

I'm starting with the Men's Shed one, which is branded as being made by Savoy Luggage, of NSW.

With both bags I'm going to tackle the stitching before anything else, as the stiffness of the leather is very helpful in holding the seams aligned, which allows me to easily reuse the original holes pricked through the leather.

On a whim I'm doing the stitching with dental floss, 'cause that seems like it'll be super strong and durable stuff compared to the regular cotton thread I otherwise have at hand. And I'm doing a saddle stitch because that also seems like the best idea.

Starting with the completely-gone part of the seam, and using the remaining stitching to hold everything in alignment, and then when the new reaches the old I'll begin unpicking the old as I go so that way the new stitches will be holding the alignment. We're Ship-of-Theseus-ing this thing.

Idk, this is my first time doing any kind of leatherwork whatsoever and I'm just improvising as I go. First time saddle stitching too.

Here's the Savoy bag:

And here's the amount of stitching I've completed so far before getting super bored and taking a break:

It's like six inches lol. Saddle stitch is sloooow.

[kalikai]

Following the naming convention of the hand-and-a-half bastard sword, I'm re-christening the Infinity Something as the Bastard Cuboid, and here she is:

It's not an Infinite Cuboid, because there's at least one folding that is a complete dead-end which binds up the entire toy:

and the only way to get it unstuck from this state is to unfold it back the same way you came in.

This thing is one hell of an ugly duckling. 12 cubettes does not square root itself anywhere nearly as neatly as 16 does, and so it doesn't play very nicely at all with the right-angle geometries of the cubettes. MANY foldings require oblique angles or asymmetry or both.

Sometimes it wants to be 2x6 and other times it wants to be 3x(2x2), and as you're folding it this way and that you'll discover there's this incredibly janky 3x4 hiding in there too, partially out of plane that it is:

this offset 2x6 is fun:

You get to that via a 3x(2x2)

The most impressive thing though is this:

No idea how you would notate that. Call it a Four-Square.

This has got me thinking, and I think four Infinity Cubes ought to be able to be combined into one, cause 32 is a power of 2.

My intuition is that three-in-one won't work though. It'll just be Double Ugly Duckling and inherit all its problems. Very curious to try it though.

[kalikai]

I got bored with the Infinity Tesseract and wanted Cubes again, so I took it apart and separated its cubettes based on the numerical stickers I gave them. One set covering 1-8, and the other covering 9-16.

Put them back together in these paired-Ls which are very pleasing:

I'm going to disassemble them again and try to form an Infinity Something with 12 cubettes. There'll be 4 left over that I don't think I'll be able to do anything with, but oh well.

Major breakthrough in the field of fidget toys: I took apart two aluminium Infinity Cubes and figured out how to combine them together into one Infinity Tesseract!!

(And then painstakingly glued numbered labels onto every surface of every cell so that more information can be seen from the photos)

This thing has a mind-boggling amount of permutations you can put it through!

First three collages show the main transformation cycle:

Fourth collage shows a kind of rotation-based auxetic transformation it can do when its cells are laying flat in a 4x4 arrangement:

Remaining collages show 30 or so random different arrangements I found:

[kalikai]

More shapes

Major breakthrough in the field of fidget toys: I took apart two aluminium Infinity Cubes and figured out how to combine them together into one Infinity Tesseract!!

(And then painstakingly glued numbered labels onto every surface of every cell so that more information can be seen from the photos)

This thing has a mind-boggling amount of permutations you can put it through!

First three collages show the main transformation cycle:

Fourth collage shows a kind of rotation-based auxetic transformation it can do when its cells are laying flat in a 4x4 arrangement:

Remaining collages show 30 or so random different arrangements I found:

[kalikai]

Jar has been sealed for nearly a full year now. 4 days until its birthday. ^_^

Filamentous algae going very strong.

Ostracods present. Sunning themselves on the sunny side of the jar.

Can't see any worms or other things. Probably too sunny for them.