Intro To Me As a Crafter

Introduction to me as a crafter and hobbyist. Showing some finished projects and some works-in-progress.

00:00 Introduction
01:17 Crafting table
02:27 Wooden sword
04:25 Puppet
05:36 1:480 Scale Buildings
10:53 Space ship

Hey there, I’m Coot and a few  weeks ago I broke my left wrist. Now, I’m right handed, so it’s  not a total loss for me right now but I just don’t feel like  crafting because of that. So what I’m going to do is  just kinda introduce myself, 

Show you some of my finished  projects and some works-in-progress  I consider myself a collector of hobbies so I do woodworking, I do some kind   of general crafting. I do computer programming  I play board games, I play roleplaying games I’ve been doing that for over 25 years 

I like to read. I like to do mini  painting, which I could also show some of  Although I’m not very good at that, to be honest I love buying tools, but I hate buying materials.  A lot of my projects are  made out of reclaimed wood 

Or just leftover lumber. Paper  is something I really like to use  and since I love buying tools so  much, my kind of general rule is:  If I’m not going to use it  right away, I don’t buy it. 

That gets me out of a lot of trouble at least. I guess the first thing – you’ve   already been looking at it. This tabletop. I did this via decoupage.  These are all just images from things that I like and a bunch of coats of polycrylic. 

Now, I also built the surface itself. I sometimes go into a local makespace.  They have a table saw. I don’t own one. They have a really nice table saw that   has some safety features and stuff. I don’t really plan on acquiring   a table saw anytime soon. So, I built the upper portion  

Of this and it’s got some shelves here. It’s got a bottom area that’s just made   of a piece of furniture I found on the  road – I don’t know – years and years ago. 

It’s got wheels on it and I had an old table  that I built that I used as a crafting table,   but it didn’t have wheels on it. So that was kind of the main   reason I built this. And also so I could  have this nice beautiful decoupage top. 

The local makerspace also has a laser cutter. I’d never done anything laser cut before   I built this tool holder. It holds pencils and scissors   and sculpting tools, I’m not much of a sculptor.  And I designed this from scratch and surprisingly  it actually came out on the first try. 

I didn’t have to recut any  pieces, which I’m really proud of. I had mentioned that I’m into woodworking,  and this is another finished project.  I didn’t really want to make it  realistic. I wanted a wooden sword.  Made primarily on a belt sander, although, you  know, it required a bunch of woodworking tools. 

Now, I decided I wanted to make a scabbard  for it and here’s the scabbard I’ve got.  It’s paper mache. I got this  texture by using a brown paper bag,   crumpling it up, and then doing the  basic paper mache flour paste stuff.  The metal parts are also paper  mache. They turned out OK. 

This, I basically consider done, but I don’t have  any way of attaching this to a belt or anything.  So what I started on was this. My brother-in-law is a big cyclist   and he has got a bunch of old bicycle inner tubes. And I thought they looked, basically, leathery. 

What I’ve done is glued them back-to-back so  you didn’t have any of the markings or anything.  And I started stitching them… and this is,  just really time consuming and not very fun.  So I just kinda stopped working on it. I plan on doing two lines of stitches down this  

Then trimming up the edges to make it look nice. Now I had tried painting these inner tubes to see   if I could get a more matchy leather type.  None of the paints I tried stayed on it,   so I’m just gonna stick with black. We’ll see if I ever get around to finishing that.

Another project I’ve been  working on is this puppet.  Now, ever since my daughter was  littler, I was wanting to have a puppet   that I could just kinda keep in my pocket and entertain her with in lines and stuff. The basic mechanism here is inspired by  a video of a little puppet called Bead. 

It’s got a mouth mechanism as well which I made. It’s just this little trigger here.  Now I want it to have a shit – a Hawaiian  shirt. I bought some material for that   and I don’t know what I did with it. And I’ve never sewn a shirt before.  

Not even at full size, though I guess  at this scale it’s a little forgiving.  I’ve got a pattern that I got from the  library and we’ll just see how it turns out.  I want him to have a little arm  that can maybe grab and stuff, too. 

We’ll see if I can figure out  a mechanism I like for that.  He needs a little paint job up here. As I  was doing all the mechanism work I ended up   drilling out the top of his head and  just repaired it with some plaster. 

This is all whittled from wood – bass  wood. And there’s some more inner tube,   just like on the scabbard. So I mentioned earlier that I try to not buy  a tool unless I have a specific project that  

I plan to do soon that’s gonna use that tool. And I’d been looking at the Silhouette Cameo   for a while because I like working with  paper and it works really well with paper.  I didn’t have a project, but about  a year ago I figured out I wanted  

To start building 1:480 scale buildings. I hope to someday have a little town of these.  Now they do actually make trains at  this scale – they’re called, I think,   T-gauge. I’m not really into model  trains, but maybe I’ll do it someday. 

So this is the first one I made, over a year ago. This is a courthouse in Monroe County, NC.  Now, I’ve never been to this building. I  just used Google Maps and Google Earth to   help me get the size and look of it. [laughs] I ordered the Silhouette and  

I just got impatient and just started building.  So this is mostly built by hand. I had finished   basically the whole thing before it arrived. Now this is mostly chip board and cardstock.  There’s a little bit of  wire her for these columns.  There’s some wood for the  chimneys – popsicle sticks. 

I didn’t paint individual bricks on this because  at this scale they’re basically invisible.  Now, you’ll see on one of these  later ones that I tried something   like that and we’ll talk about that then. But I thought this turned out alright.  

The windows are a bit wonky, but it’s all  done by hand and it was my first attempt  so I feel alright about that. So after the Silhouette arrived I decided   to kind of push it and see what it could do with  drawing the details as well as cutting them. 

So this is a scale model of my house.  Now, I don’t know what scale this is.  This is just kind of the size that I  could make the details on the shingles   and the siding come out alright. You know, this is just one of  

These post-war box houses here in the US. Here is that same building, but to scale with   this courthouse. The shingles and the siding on  it are basically, you know, all the detail gets   washed away at this scale. But, it’s kinda fun. 

And the third building I made is this church  here. This is in Poland (Tum). It’s a Romanesque   church and I knew I wanted to do a Romanesque  building because the architecture is a bit more   blocky. It just kind of fits the material and my  skill a little better (than something Gothic). 

This is basically all cardstock again. It’s  painted acrylic, now I did individually   paint these stones and it was a huge time sink. And I don’t even like how it turned out. You know,   it was kind of a lesson in,  I guess, what not to do.

For my next building I knew I  wanted to do something where I   could get away with a little less  hand-work. I wanted something that   I could maybe even reproduce  a few copies of fairly easily.  What I went with was Albrecht Durer’s house in  Nuremberg, Germany. The cutting of the cardstock,  

Which is most of what you’re seeing here, and this  is chip board, was also done on the Silhouette.  And all of these wood panels  were also done on the Silhouette.  Now all of this was painted by hand in  acrylic. And I used some colored pencil  

To do some lines and actually some crayon  also to give it a little bit of texture.  Now this building – this side and this  side – are adjacent to buildings now,   so you can’t really see these sides very well. Now inside of this house they have a model and  

You can see pictures of this model  online that people have taken.  And in that model you can see this side. And so this side is based on what is in   the model of this house that’s inside this house. And this side is kind of based on what I could see  

From Google Earth and also, there’s a company that  makes a model of this house that I looked at a bit   and this side isn’t really based on that, but I  kinda took a little bit of inspiration from it. 

The roof actually has a texture to it.  And I got that by gluing cloth to the   cardstock and this is one of the tablecloth  leftover from my wedding years and years ago.  I had to try a bunch of different materials  and ideas for how to get a roof texture at  

This scale without going crazy and painting  individual shingles or something stupid.  Now this is even still, at this scale, it’s a  little bit big, but I think it looks really cool.   And I’m really proud of it. And I’ve got more of  this material that I’ve already got painted up. 

I might be able to just bang out another one of  these in a couple days which would be pretty cool. So the last thing I want to show you guys is what  I’ve been working on most recently, although it’s  

Been some week since I did any work on it. This little spaceship. This is the basic   form. The kind of inspiration for this is  a little house that the crew would live in.  And this is meant to be a little asteroid miner. It’s got these engines made from pen caps that  

Are gonna attach on either side here. And they’ve got these legs on them.  I was trying to go for kind of a hard  science fiction on this, so I took a lot   of inspiration from real space craft. So these are kind of based on,  

I think it’s the Falcon Heavy rocket – it’s one  of the Space X rockets. The one that can land.  I think they have three, but I figured since I’ve  got two of these rockets you only two on each of  

Them and that gives you a stable platform. The other piece that I took from a real   spacecraft – from the International  Space Station. They have this cupola.  It’s a bunch of little windows and  this is gonna go right here on what  

Looks like the chimney of the house. And that’s where the pilot of the ship   would go when they’re flying. The artificial gravity of this   spacecraft is generated by the acceleration  from the engines. As the rockets propel you   this way, it keeps you down on the floor. Once you get halfway to your destination,  

You know, you flip around and you  start accelerating the other way.  And you’re still down, although the pilot  wouldn’t be looking directly where they’re going,   but that’s generally flown by instruments anyway. One thing I’m thinking about doing with this is   to make a radiator – like a big  loop going between these rockets. 

We’ll see if I do that. It’ll just  depend on whether it looks cool or not.  Spacecraft – if they don’t go into the atmosphere  – there’s no reason for them to be aerodynamic,   but you look at a bunch of the  hard science fiction concept art  

And it honestly looks kinda lame. I plan on doing some panels on it   using paper. I know a lot of people like  to use foam and plastic, but I like paper   so that’s what I’m going to stick with. Let me know if you wanna know more about  

Any of these projects. The cast comes off in  a couple weeks, so hopefully I’ll have some   crafting in the next video. Thanks for watching. …and they’ve got these… …let me see if I can do this…  …bad hand… [laughs] alright,   uh… There we go! [laughs] alright.