Catan Coasters
Apr. 26th, 2015 12:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kerravonsenSo, here are photos of the melty-beads coasters I made on a "Settlers of Catan" theme.
Top right: wheat
Top left: wood
Bottom right: brick
Bottom left: wool
The wheat was the first one I made. That dark spot is a hole made by one of the beads falling off when I moved the board. I didn't notice this until it was too late, after I had started melting the beads. I found the bead on the floor later.
The wood was the next one. You can't see the outline of the tree so well, but if you hold it up to the light, you will see that it is translucent. The wood coaster is where I discovered the... embossing effect, because I'd put a tile on it with the back side facing, rather than the front side, and, well, there were dents. The fact that they were hexagons was a coincidence. I tried ironing it again, but wasn't able to remove the dents.
The brick one was hard to design, because it's not really possible to make rectangles on a hexagonal board. So these bricks are pavers. I also didn't want the bricks to be invisible, since there didn't seem to be that much difference between the two shades of red, so I outlined them with a pinkish/orange -- I don't have any orange beads, alas; Lincraft didn't have any. Not sure if they were out of stock or simply didn't stock it. An annoying omission.
The sheep one, well the white blob is supposed to be wool. The green is a lighter green than the green used for wood (like what is that - two shades of green and no shades of orange?) This hex looks a bit more melted because I ironed it for a second time after I'd made all the hexes to try to make it thinner and wider to match some of the others.
Top left: mountain
Right: desert
Bottom left: water
I had difficulty figuring out what colours to use for the mountain, because I didn't have any grey, I didn't want to make the sky black, but I also wanted to save the blue for the water. In the end I made the sky blue anyway. The main mountain is purple, and the two mountains behind are glow-in-the-dark blue. Perhaps they are mining uranium. Or phosphorus.
Since I didn't have any orange, the desert was a mix of opaque yellow, translucent yellow, opaque red, and translucent red. The pattern is very carefully random. I set it up so that there would be an even distribution of the four colours, but the placement of the colours is truly random. How I did that was that I picked an equal number (12) of each bead, put them into a container, shook it about, and picked out each bead at random to put down next in the line (I went back and forth from the bottom to the top of the hex). When I ran out of beads in the container, I put another four lots of twelve beads into it and continued on. That evened out the distribution of colours, but still ensured that the placement was random. If I had just put all the required beads in the container at once, there would be more chance of huge random splotches of one colour or another -- because that's what true randomness is, it isn't an even shuffle; I could have ended up with twenty red beads in a row, which would not have looked very interesting.
The water hex is my favourite; it is the prettiest. I initially thought I would do just horizontal zig-zags, but I ended up doing the zig-zags from the outside in. This ended up having threefold symmetry, rather than sixfold, so it thankfully doesn't look like a snowflake.
This is the box lid and the box, viewed from the top. As you can see, the sides of the box aren't perfectly even. Oh well.
The bottom of the box spirals in one direction, and the lid of the box spirals in the opposite direction. Since I didn't have any orange, I had to use the pinky-orange beads instead. (Pssst! They are orange glow-in-the-dark beads. Cool.)
This is the box lid and the box, viewed from the bottom. You can see the difference between the melted and the non-melted side now - this shows the non-melted side. For the box I only ironed one side because I didn't want to risk the pieces of the box not being the same size. I added a rim to the box lid so that it would fit without sliding off. The piece I made originally for the rim was too large and wouldn't fit inside the sides of the box, so I broke it up into pieces, and glued them each to the lid separately. But I went too far in reducing the size of the rim, and it is now too small, and the lid slides around. Oh well. It's still better than having no rim at all, and I don't feel like trying to fix it up, since I might ruin it instead.
There is a tradition that is held by both Japanese pottery makers and Persian carpet-weavers, that one must put a deliberate mistake into the work because only the gods are perfect, so making perfection would be an act of hubris. Personally, I'm coming to the belief that putting a deliberate mistake in is an act of hubris, because it assumes that if one didn't put a deliberate mistake in, it would be perfect, because there would be no accidental mistakes. And I assure you, there are always accidental mistakes, well, that's what mistakes are.
In the above pieces, there are two mistakes in the designs. I already told you about the missing bead in the wheat hex. Can you tell me what the other mistake is? I'm not talking about the misaligned sides of the box - I couldn't really do anything about that. This is another, preventable mistake, which I didn't notice until well after it happened. And I'm kind of amused by that.
Top right: wheat
Top left: wood
Bottom right: brick
Bottom left: wool
The wheat was the first one I made. That dark spot is a hole made by one of the beads falling off when I moved the board. I didn't notice this until it was too late, after I had started melting the beads. I found the bead on the floor later.
The wood was the next one. You can't see the outline of the tree so well, but if you hold it up to the light, you will see that it is translucent. The wood coaster is where I discovered the... embossing effect, because I'd put a tile on it with the back side facing, rather than the front side, and, well, there were dents. The fact that they were hexagons was a coincidence. I tried ironing it again, but wasn't able to remove the dents.
The brick one was hard to design, because it's not really possible to make rectangles on a hexagonal board. So these bricks are pavers. I also didn't want the bricks to be invisible, since there didn't seem to be that much difference between the two shades of red, so I outlined them with a pinkish/orange -- I don't have any orange beads, alas; Lincraft didn't have any. Not sure if they were out of stock or simply didn't stock it. An annoying omission.
The sheep one, well the white blob is supposed to be wool. The green is a lighter green than the green used for wood (like what is that - two shades of green and no shades of orange?) This hex looks a bit more melted because I ironed it for a second time after I'd made all the hexes to try to make it thinner and wider to match some of the others.
Top left: mountain
Right: desert
Bottom left: water
I had difficulty figuring out what colours to use for the mountain, because I didn't have any grey, I didn't want to make the sky black, but I also wanted to save the blue for the water. In the end I made the sky blue anyway. The main mountain is purple, and the two mountains behind are glow-in-the-dark blue. Perhaps they are mining uranium. Or phosphorus.
Since I didn't have any orange, the desert was a mix of opaque yellow, translucent yellow, opaque red, and translucent red. The pattern is very carefully random. I set it up so that there would be an even distribution of the four colours, but the placement of the colours is truly random. How I did that was that I picked an equal number (12) of each bead, put them into a container, shook it about, and picked out each bead at random to put down next in the line (I went back and forth from the bottom to the top of the hex). When I ran out of beads in the container, I put another four lots of twelve beads into it and continued on. That evened out the distribution of colours, but still ensured that the placement was random. If I had just put all the required beads in the container at once, there would be more chance of huge random splotches of one colour or another -- because that's what true randomness is, it isn't an even shuffle; I could have ended up with twenty red beads in a row, which would not have looked very interesting.
The water hex is my favourite; it is the prettiest. I initially thought I would do just horizontal zig-zags, but I ended up doing the zig-zags from the outside in. This ended up having threefold symmetry, rather than sixfold, so it thankfully doesn't look like a snowflake.
This is the box lid and the box, viewed from the top. As you can see, the sides of the box aren't perfectly even. Oh well.
The bottom of the box spirals in one direction, and the lid of the box spirals in the opposite direction. Since I didn't have any orange, I had to use the pinky-orange beads instead. (Pssst! They are orange glow-in-the-dark beads. Cool.)
This is the box lid and the box, viewed from the bottom. You can see the difference between the melted and the non-melted side now - this shows the non-melted side. For the box I only ironed one side because I didn't want to risk the pieces of the box not being the same size. I added a rim to the box lid so that it would fit without sliding off. The piece I made originally for the rim was too large and wouldn't fit inside the sides of the box, so I broke it up into pieces, and glued them each to the lid separately. But I went too far in reducing the size of the rim, and it is now too small, and the lid slides around. Oh well. It's still better than having no rim at all, and I don't feel like trying to fix it up, since I might ruin it instead.
There is a tradition that is held by both Japanese pottery makers and Persian carpet-weavers, that one must put a deliberate mistake into the work because only the gods are perfect, so making perfection would be an act of hubris. Personally, I'm coming to the belief that putting a deliberate mistake in is an act of hubris, because it assumes that if one didn't put a deliberate mistake in, it would be perfect, because there would be no accidental mistakes. And I assure you, there are always accidental mistakes, well, that's what mistakes are.
In the above pieces, there are two mistakes in the designs. I already told you about the missing bead in the wheat hex. Can you tell me what the other mistake is? I'm not talking about the misaligned sides of the box - I couldn't really do anything about that. This is another, preventable mistake, which I didn't notice until well after it happened. And I'm kind of amused by that.
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no subject
Date: 2015-04-26 03:40 am (UTC)I love the box too with its spirals! What are the sides like, plain black?
I can't see any mistakes apart form the missing bead. BTW the Quakers have that tradition too with their crafts.
no subject
Date: 2015-04-26 04:41 am (UTC)8-)
Can you melt a yellow bead into the wheat one using the point of your iron?
No, because the melting made the hole smaller as the beads melted into each other, so there isn't enough room to shove the missing bead into the hole.
I love the box too with its spirals! What are the sides like, plain black?
8-)
No, I was running low on black beads by that point, so only the corners are black. Half the sides are white and the rest are different colours.
I can't see any mistakes apart form the missing bead.
Which I suppose demonstrates why I missed it myself. It's there, though. Do you want a hint?
BTW the Quakers have that tradition too with their crafts.
Interesting.
no subject
Date: 2015-04-26 05:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-04-26 05:21 am (UTC)Nope.
You can see it clearly in the last photo, though. And in the second-last photo, but not so clearly.
no subject
Date: 2015-04-26 06:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-04-26 06:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-04-26 06:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-04-26 06:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-04-26 09:57 am (UTC)So odd they didn't have orange.
no subject
Date: 2015-04-26 12:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-04-26 04:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-04-28 01:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-04-28 01:45 am (UTC)Obviously it wouldn't be modular, but it would still be fun enough, since the value tokens could still be random.
what do we do with the roads/settlements/cities?
Make them out of felt, and pin them to the "board". 8-)
no subject
Date: 2015-05-04 01:15 pm (UTC)hmmm. Maybe I should work out how big the hexagons need to be to mostly cover a queen sized bed (in the 5-6 person layout), and then make freestanding hexes with black binding. Given it will take me a while to get those made, I can worry about the rest later!
no subject
Date: 2015-04-26 07:31 pm (UTC)They are wonderful!
no subject
Date: 2015-04-26 10:14 pm (UTC)Thank you.
no subject
Date: 2015-04-27 05:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-04-27 10:08 pm (UTC)