I got a watch! I've been wanting one for a loooooong time. So I began looking on Amazon for one. All the ones I saw were either junk, or really expensive. I found two that were each $40 and I liked both of them a lot, but then I couldn't make up my mind. It was driving me crazy. Then, my mom came home and showed me a watch she had gotten for me at Wal-mart. It was mainly a test watch to see if I would even like wearing a watch, since it was so cheap. It was $4 and is really nice for how cheap it was. It has a stopwatch, an alarm, the time and the date. When this watch wears out I'll decide if I want to spend $40 on a new one.
I made a cape. Long story short one day I wanted a cape, so I found some fabric, used Anne's sewing machine, had some technical difficulties, bought a cool clasp, then Anne hand-sewed the hood, and boom bata bing ringa linga ding I had a cape. Considering what I had to work with it turned out pretty good.
I found one of those little silica gel packets that usually comes in a brand new box of shoes or something like that. I decided to just ignore the throw away warning and have some fun with it instead. Fist I wanted to see how big they would inflate in water, but when I put them in a cup full of water they popped! I thought that was really interesting so I took around a half hour of footage of them popping and edited and deleted stuff until it was a 44 second long video. Enjoy!
I recently got a lock picking kit and I have been playing with it a lot. the technique I am using in this video is called raking the lock. What I am doing is applying pressure with the tension wrench and pushing down the pins with the rake. The clear lock is the practice lock and is actually really easy to pick. My fastest time for picking both locks is about 1 second. I learned how to make games on Scratch by looking at other people’s projects and by trial and error. I wanted to make a more elaborate game with radar and a mission map, but I would’ve run out of time, so I made a simpler game instead. This game took a long time to make mainly because of the shop in the game where you can buy weapons and upgrades. I had a hard time with the shop because the buttons kept on going back one more layer than the shop sprite so that you could not see them. In the end I like how the shop worked out, although it is a little confusing. I also had some troubles with the machine gun attachment because the other sprites would not sense clones. To fix that I made a ton of separate sprites for each bullet. This project took 1,779 blocks and 53 sprites. I drew all the sprites except for the clouds and the background buildings. They were from the scratch library. All of the coding was by me except for some movement bricks for the airplane sprite, but I understand how they work. I made the music in Music Maker Jam. If I re-did this project I would make it more complex. At 4H county fair, I got state fair delegate, class champion, superior, and trophy rosette. At state fair I got champion. Link-https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/374470297/fullscreen/ 4-H potteryFor this project I used clay that my siblings and I found in our stream in our pasture. I researched and watched Youtube videos on how to fire pottery at home. I made some pots and then fired them in a pit fire in our own backyard. To make the firing pit I dug a pit about 2 feet deep. Then I gathered a lot of punk wood and sticks because the fire would need to burn for 5 hours. Once the fire was going, I put the pots next to the fire to preheat them so they wouldn’t crack. The preheat process takes the extra moisture out of the clay. I let the pots preheat for about half an hour. Once the wood in the pit turned into embers, I carefully put the pots in the pit using sticks to poke them in. The fire is very hot, so you can’t get your hands too close. I put more wood on top of the pots, but had propped the wood above the pots with a bigger log so that the weight wouldn’t break the pots. I had to keep an eye on the fire and continue feeding it for about 4 hours. Then I let it smolder for about an hour, and finally filled the pit back in with dirt. This is probably to slow down the cooling process to lessen the chance of the pottery cracking. After several hours we decided the pit was cool enough to dig up the pots. (My siblings had made pots too.) We were impressed with how well this system worked. Unfortunately, my best pot was cracked. So, we all made more pots and fired them again on another day. I had researched on how to make a homemade glaze, and tried it with the second firing but it didn’t work very well. I want to try making glaze again and also try painting the pots. The pot I entered for my project was done in the second firing and does not have glaze. At 4H county fair I got state fair alternate, superior. 4-H photographyWhen I did this project, I learned to always be on the look out for a good photo opportunity. It helps to understand the habits of your photo subject (live animals). It was hard to get the camera to focus because I was using my mom’s phone camera. The phone also doesn’t take very good close-ups, so it was tricky to get a good photo. I had to take at least 50 photos to get a good one. I noticed that this toad had a habit of hiding in that hole. If I re-did the project, it would be fun to do a sequence of photos showing how the toad grew and can no longer fit in its hole. For 4H fair I got state fair alternate.
I saw Sammy making an RC boat and I decided, why don't I do that? So I got one of my RC cars and hacked away. Eventually, I got everything apart. Then I had to wait until mom and dad went to town so they could get some epoxy. Next I pulled a 3-D file off the internet and printed it. Once it was done, I faced another problem. The batteries and the receiver were so heavy that it could barely float, so I had to put foam on the bottom of it and put wings on it. I put it in water and it worked fine until the motors quit. Unfortunately, I didn't video it. : ( The motors still didn't work so I took them off and now I have a nice toy boat. : ) I plan to make a new one except this time without brushed motors.
(The reason the motors quit was because they were brushed.) For Christmas us boys got a triops growing kit. So when we got home we put the eggs in water, put that under a heat lamp, and within 1 day several little bitty triops hatched out. They were about the size of this period. Then in around 3 days hundreds of tiny triops hatched out! But then the bigger triops ate all of the other smaller one. So we separated the big one and the smaller one, so we had two. But the big one died so we ended up having three triops in the other tank that were too big to eat each other. They were a lot of fun but after a while the jar got really dirty and two of the triops died. I thought the other one was dead too, but when I went to dump the jar out I saw it swimming around! I transferred him to a new tank that was clean. He was more enjoyable when his tank was clean (and bigger). But after a while he died too :( I liked raising triops and I would do it again!
I made an igloo! This week it had snowed a lot and then drifted, which made it really easy to cut bricks out of snow. It was almost as tall as me and wide enough for me to curl up and lay down in it! I made it all by myself. It took me around 3 hours to make. The hardest part was the roof, because I accidentally made the doorway too large and I couldn't shut it off at the top. So I had to add on to the doorway to make it smaller.
|
AuthorI like to make stuff Archives
December 2021
Categories |