A Humane Turtle

Christmas is the one time of the year where I get to see family, where all siblings are back home at the same time. That is what Christmas is for me: family time.

I recently shared a bunch of ideas on how to make gift wrapping out of trash. I wrapped another set of gifts today. While the first set was made of trash I found in my apartment in Oslo, I had to find stuff around my parents’ house this time round.

One thing to look for is shopping bags. Some stores have bags with awesome designs, and they work really well for gift wrapping.

The paper bag of the local supermarket reads “Everything is going to be alright.” Isn’t that perfect for gifts? All I had to do was add some details: some birds, and the gift card as dot on the i.

For this gift I used a plastic shopping bag. The blue handle worked surprisingly well as decoration.

I have tons of reinforcement rings that I haven’t used for ages. Well, until today, that is. I used them to make a hole-y tree The ribbon is made of the material that the rings came on. No waste at all!

A CD wrapped in CDs, is that possible? I say yes! Cutting CDs is a bit messy though, I added tape around the edges to prevent additional mess. For this particular wrapping, I used old Knoppix 5 and Kubuntu 6 installer CDs. I will not miss them.

I also found a piece of a shirt that I had cut up for another project. The leftover I found was the bit around the shoulder. The seam there makes a nice line in the final wrapping. I added color with a stitched star and the stitches around the edges. I tried backstitch for the bottom edge, but I changed to  straight stitch for the other two edges. It made the wrapping easy to open, and the reverse side looked much nicer.

So far, I had used paper and plastic trash, but I hadn’t used food scraps yet. I decided that tangerine zest and and nutshells where both available without end and perfect for the season. And they look nice, don’t they?

For the last gift I didn’t experiment much with new materials. Well, I hadn’t used paper towels before (and no, I didn’t take those out if the trash – I used new ones). But this gift isn’t really about the materials; it is about the looks. It’s a double-cream hazelnut cake with a whole bunch of cream topping. Yum!

Almost a month ago I posted about my white-board Advent calendar project, the Creepy Creature Calendar. Thanks to Claudio I know that this technique is called exquisite corpse (check out this exquisite book!).

24 days later the calendar is all filled out, thanks to my colleagues at work. It was a fun experience, and I think this has potential to become a tradition. The creature has lots of eyes, a bunch of heads and feet, and there is a bird. Also, the creature is (at least partly) female, and she is exploited for her milk.

Here is an animation of how she came into being:

I started taking a picture every day, but my phone got stolen, so I had to create this progress animation from the last photograph.

Here are pictures of some of the creepy creature’s features:

The cross-eyed siamese teddy bear.

Swinging udder.

Arms and legs and… the creature is reset to 0. Or something

The peaceful bird, scratching into the heart-adorned arm.

Mr. Floating Pumkin, and Mr. Angry Meat-Eating Plant.

“I’m in the middle but nobody likes me”-dude.

Eye-tongued trident-armed dragon head, aiming to kill that bug.

Thanks to the following people who participated in this fun little project:

1. Espen
2. Erle
3. Esteban
4. Tommy
5. Daniel
6. Øyvind H.
7. Axel
8. Arjan
9. Petter
10. Oleg
11. Thomas
12. Øyvind Ø.
13. Yenny
14. Anders
15. Karianne
16. Helge
17. ?? (a mystical person who participated over the weekend)
18. Stein Cato
19. Tony
20. Roar
21. Arne Martin
22. Alex
23. Eirik
24. Aleksei

Update: I posted a part two now.

The other night I wrapped some gifts for loved ones. I’m not the wrapping paper kind of person though. When it comes to wrapping gifts, I want to recycle as much as possible. But I still want gifts that look nice! So, most of the materials I used I took from the paper trash. For books, I often used parts of the packaging they were shipped in. Here are some detailed shots of the gifts:

For the first gift I used the original packaging and painted it with acrylic paint.  I like the purple (front) side much better than the back.

Here I also used original packaging, added stripes of old printouts  and a picture I found in an old magazine.  Then I added some gold paint to make it look a little fancier.

Here I cut up a toilet paper roll as decoration.

I wrapped one gift in a magazine ad. The ad was about organic products (not all vegan, unfortunately). The card is a piece of a pasta carton. I put it all together with rubber bands.

Old bags from a local deli and a bit of string make nice gift wrapping, too. The card is made from a piece of a tea box.

And last but not least: bits of cardboard  make Tetris-style gift wrapping (card included).

If you have followed this blog the last few days, you might have noticed my modest excitement for Advent-y stuff. Now, I wanted to have a physical, potentially collaborative, Advent calendar at work (in addition to the other Advent stuff I set up). So I made one on the whiteboard this morning:

Each day until Christmas, someone can continue drawing parts of the creature(s). Today it got an additional set of eyes

Yes, just like Tim Minchin I quite like the songs, the Christmas songs with nice cords and dodgy lyrics. I made a collection of traditional Christmas songs and new interpretations thereof, and wrapped them in an online Advent calendar. 24 songs for you, one a day (more a day, actually, if you happen to check out the album that the song is on). I present the songs as Spotify URL’s, so unfortunately this calendar only really works if you have Spotify.

Now check out the calendar!

I really like Christmas
It’s sentimental, I know, but I just really like it
I am hardly religious
I’d rather break bread with Dawkins than Desmond Tutu, to be honest

And yes, I have all of the usual objections
To consumerism, the commercialisation of an ancient religion
To the westernisation of a dead Palestinian
Press-ganged into selling Playstations and beer
But I still really like it

I’m looking forward to Christmas
Though I’m not expecting a visit from Jesus

I’ll be seeing my dad
My brother and sisters, my gran and my mum
They’ll be drinking white wine in the sun
I’ll be seeing my dad
My brother and sisters, my gran and my mum
They’ll be drinking white wine in the sun

I don’t go in for ancient wisdom
I don’t believe just ‘cos ideas are tenacious it means they are worthy
I get freaked out by churches
Some of the hymns that they sing have nice chords but the lyrics are dodgy

And yes I have all of the usual objections
To the miseducation of children who, in tax-exempt institutions,
Are taught to externalise blame
And to feel ashamed and to judge things as plain right and wrong
But I quite like the songs

I’m not expecting big presents
The old combination of socks, jocks and chocolate is just fine by me

Cos I’ll be seeing my dad
My brother and sisters, my gran and my mum
They’ll be drinking white wine in the sun
I’ll be seeing my dad
My brother and sisters, my gran and my mum
They’ll be drinking white wine in the sun

And you, my baby girl
My jetlagged infant daughter
You’ll be handed round the room
Like a puppy at a primary school
And you won’t understand
But you will learn someday
That wherever you are and whatever you face
These are the people who’ll make you feel safe in this world
My sweet blue-eyed girl

And if, my baby girl
When you’re twenty-one or thirty-one
And Christmas comes around
And you find yourself nine thousand miles from home
You’ll know what ever comes
Your brother and sisters and me and your Mum
Will be waiting for you in the sun
Whenever you come
Your brothers and sisters, your aunts and your uncles
Your grandparents, cousins and me and your mum
We’ll be waiting for you in the sun
Drinking white wine in the sun
Darling, when Christmas comes
We’ll be waiting for you in the sun
Drinking white wine in the sun
Waiting for you in the sun
Waiting for you…
Waiting…

I really like Christmas
It’s sentimental, I know…

Tim Minchin, “White Wine In The Sun”