Mod Mischief

We've been keeping busy. I've started making chainmaille from pop tabs, following this great instructable . It's pretty easy and a good way to keep myself occupied while watching Netflix. Unfortunately, I still need to collect many, many more pop tabs before I can make anything beyond a couple inches of maille. In an effort to make our apartment look less like a scene from Hoarders, we dismantled the dinosaur that's been living in our bedroom for over a year. Looks like Little Al won't be getting his legs after all. We've salvaged most of the materials from the body for future projects, but we did keep his head intact. I've got new plans for it. Finally, in other news, I've gone and joined twitter . I'm still trying to get the hang of it. Yes, I'm totally behind with the times.

My dinosaur isn't completely finished but he still managed to turn a lot of heads over the Halloween weekend. We still need to tweak a few little things and attach the allosaurus legs.

I hope you're having as much fun this weekend as we are!

With all this talk of rocket packs you might be wondering whether I've made any progress on my dinosaur . I have! Not as much as I'd like to have done at this point, but it's starting to come together. So far I've managed to do most of the scultping on the head. Papier maché pulp is awesome. This was my first time making paper clay and I can't get over how easy and cheap it is.

I guess I have a habit of taking apart cute stuffed animals . I recently took apart two Furby Babies I picked up on kijiji for $5. Unfortunately, Furby Autopsy wasn't much help since the Furby Babies are put together in a different way, but I was able to figure it out. Much like the full-sized Furbys (funky pluralization, I know...), Furby Babies have one motor that runs a bunch of gears to get all the adorable animations moving in sequence. When you get rid of the circuits that control when the motor starts and stops it simply cycles through all the motions continuously. It's this feature that I plan to exploit for my dinosaur. Did I forget to mention that the dinosaur I'm building is going to be animatronic? In case you're wondering, I've already given away everything from the pressure sensors to the Furby pelts on freecycle . I'm hoping they'll be used to build an awesome robot but they might just wind up as misguided cyberpunk art.

As it is Velociraptor Awareness Day , it's a great day to tell you why the dinosaur I'm building is not going to be a velociraptor. You can't ride a velociraptor. They're just too tiny. So instead of building a puny little velociraptor, I'm working on a young allosaurus. I think I'll call him Little Al.

I'm building a dinosaur. It's one of those crazy project ideas that got stuck in my head and now I'm determined to actually do it. And I don't want just any dinosaur, I want a life sized dinosaur that I can ride on. I've been doing some research online and watching every dinosaur movie I can get my hands on (yes, that includes all 3 Jurassic Park movies) but that didn't quite cut it. I decided I needed to go see some real dinosaurs to get a better understanding of their scale. Chris and I made plans to go to the Nature Museum but as soon as we told anyone we were headed there they eagerly asked to join us. Before we knew it we had so many friends interested it warranted a group reservation! Our dinosaur hunting expedition turned out to be a great success and I can't wait to go back to the museum after their grand reopening in May. The photos I took didn't turn out great because I had my camera settings all wrong, but they're still going to b...