The embalming process is fairly simple. You just need a canopic Tupperware container, and a needle or safety pin. I have some thread through the needle, because it adds some nice leverage when you are trying to poke through the egg shell. When you are poking at the egg shell, don’t be afraid to be firm with your pointy implement of choice. Egg shells are tough.

If you are having trouble getting the needle through, try using a very small screwdriver, of the sort used to adjust glasses. Make a hole in the top and the bottom, and really wiggle that needle around inside. You want to break up the membrane and yolk of the egg.

You’ll notice that this hole is rather larger than the one on the top. This is to make everything come out easier. How you may ask? Blow through the top hole and into the canopic Tupperware. The egg white and yolk should slough out easily, provided the exit wound is large enough. Stand there a moment, admiring the strangely hollow calcium deposit in your hand. Ponder smashing the shells over your own head, or others as a prank. Remember to rinse out the shells with water, you don’t want it to start to smell in a couple days.

Look, all clean and dripping water into the carton. Seriously, these will drip for a while. One of these eggs will be abandoned. Can you guess which one?

Get out your trendy walky-talky variant and call out, “Crafting supplies! Assemble!” You might not get the A team, but you will get a team. My team consists of Ribbon Ribboff the Russian rhythmic gymnast/grillmaster, Woody of the Elmer’s Glue Gang, and the Acrylic four! You may notice what looks like a square piece of bread with a hole in it. That is my handy dandy painting stand made out of salt dough, because what is a crafting article without wasting food? What about the egg innards from before? I fried them up in a large pan with bacon bits. Not wasted.

Starting off simply, I wrapped ribbon the long way around the egg, and glued it at the top and bottom. Keep in mind, there may be water still coming out of the bottom of the egg. Be sure to reapply glue if that is the case.

After waiting a bit for it to set, I made another loop.

Then a loop around the middle, and some that only reached that loop. It really helps to glue on the convergent spots, making everything below more firmly anchored as well.

Different egg, familiar paint. Egg shell is such a nice color that I decided to do some outline sort of bird figures. If you don’t like how part of your painting turned out, get the needle from before, and scrape away the paint.

Since I only had fall colors, I decided to make a phoenix. It looks a little wonky, but I added more and now it looks like it does in the header for this article. Taken together, there is a nice progression from egg to bird to fire chicken, and so I took a toilet paper tube and cut it a bit more than in half, thus creating a nice height progression.

Eggs Fabergé can be an exquisite art, gifted to Russian royalty, or it can be a fun afternoon activity. It turns out you don’t have to break a few eggs to make an omelet, you can make them into art instead.

Have I inspired you? Do you also have a terrible habit of wasting food? I would be very interested to see if others have followed in my rambling footsteps, so if you have made something inspired by one of my articles, take a picture and send it to ldsblogs@moregoodfoundation.org. Label it: Crafts for Brandon. If you do, that picture will be at the end of my next article, with your name attached. If you made something beyond the fantastic scope of my chronicle, you might consider writing a guest article and sending it to that same email address to be considered as a guest post. It is always inspiring to see what art you may see in the mundane.

Answer time: Which egg did I abandon? The middle, right one.

Brandon Quist

Brandon is originally from Olmsted Falls, Ohio. He has studied both at Baldwin Wallace college and Brigham Young University, and is currently pursuing Chemical Engineering, among other things. He considers himself a jack of all trades, and a master of none. In his spare time, Brandon enjoys knitting, guitar, reading, origami, writing, and photography.

LET US BAGEL

In the bread maker:

• 1 cup warm water
• 1 and 1/2 tsp salt
• 2 Tbs sugar
• 3 cups flour
• 2 and ¼ tsp yeast

In the big pot:

• 3 quarts boiling water
• 3 Tbs sugar

In a small bowl:

• 1 egg white

Set your bread maker for dough and put the stuff in. You now have about an hour and a half to do nothing, maybe stare into your fridge in search of the meaning of life and what are you going to eat, I had that recently, why do I buy what I always buy. For fun, you might skip down to the hamburger section, and start those things going.

Similarly, the water in the big pot will take a while to boil, so start that maybe thirty minutes after you start your bread maker a’makin’. Now is also a good time to practice a culinary art you might use from time to time, the sifting of the wheat from-no, the separating of the white from the yolk.

Once you crack the egg, use the edge of one piece to cut the membrane holding the egg white to the yolk, then pour the yolk into that bit of shell. The rest of the egg white should slough into the bowl with that bit of persuasion, although you can pass the yolk back and forth until you are satisfied. You may want to save the yolk, it is objectively the best part of the egg, no questions.

Did the bread maker ding? No? Okay, well, you still have time to lightly flour a surface like a cutting board. You might want to start the oven at 375, it will take a bit to get there. Once the dough has risen to your challenge, put it on that floured surface and let it rest a bit. How long? I don’t know. Try cooking a hamburger patty or two. Then come back and cut the dough into rough ninths.

You may need to pinch off some dough form the big pieces to add to the runts in the corners. Now, dig your thumb into the middle of each of the nine pieces of eight, drink up me hearties yoho. I tend not to want the hole to be too big, maybe just wide enough for both of your thumbs to fit.

Also, square bagels have more bagel than circle bagels, not to mention how much cooler they look. It is at this point that you toss one or two of your dough rings into the boiling water, and find out if they are a witch or not. Let them float for 30 seconds, then flip them over so they can boil another 30 seconds. After all that, they will still be rather soft, so try lifting them out of the water with a nice spatula. Once they have drained a little, slide them into the bowl of egg white. I like to coat the entire thing, but it’s fine if you only want to egg the top of your bagel-to-be. Either way, toss that sucker onto a greased pan.

Now is a great time to put toppings on the bagels. Cheese, poppy seed, sesame seed, garlic, salt, the list goes on. Then throw your creations into the fires of tribulation for 20 to 25 minutes. They should look like a nice golden brown when they’re done.

It’s like a tray full of bellybuttons.

ASK NOT FOR WHOM THE BEEF THAWS, IT THAWS FOR YOU

Get out your note taking pens, this one is a doozy.

• 1 or 2 lbs. ground beef
• Some oil?
• Black pepper, aw yeah

For hamburgers, 1 lb of ground beef equals about four patties. Toss it in a bowl, and mash it up with your hand. It will feel gross and oily and slimy, and try not to think about how brains must feel, but this is the best way to break up the wiggly form of the beef. You can give the meat a bit more bulk with say, the egg yolk from before, and/or some bread crumbs. Make your patties about ¾ of an inch thick, and about as big as the palm of your hand. You will want the middle to be thinner than the outside, because that is where the most swelling happens.

Why are some patties on their own? Because I live for experimentation, and the world will bow before the curry burger. Seriously though, it takes a fair bit of curry powder to get through the beef flavor. I also have a smoke sauce patty and a soy sauce patty, which I have yet to eat. Or have I? It’s hard to tell.

Now get your least favorite or most cast iron pan, and put a thin layer of vegetable oil on the bottom. Turn on the burner to high heat, so on a scale from 1 to 10, maybe a 6 or a 7. The oil will shimmer when it’s hot and ready.

Now a word of warning: There will be beef fumes. Open a window. Open several windows. Curse the winter air with the fury of a destitute farmer.

When you plop the patty onto the pan, there will be oil flying around a fair bit, so be careful. Let it cook on one side for about 3 minutes, then flip it over for another 3 minutes. It should look like this:

Cooked through, if a little dark on the top and bottom. It shouldn’t actually taste burnt where it is darkest, rest assured. You may need to replenish the oil in the pan once or twice, depending on how much you cook.

MEAT. That’s 2 lbs of beef into 8 patties, and 9 bagels you may have also made. In the classic tradition of grilling and meat holders, you can never have the same number of meats and buns. Nevertheless, the bagel burger is quite delicious and filling, and it is my gift to you. You may want to share it with anyone who lives in the same house/apartment, the beef smell is everywhere.

Have I inspired you? Do you also have a terrible habit of wasting food? I would be very interested to see if others have followed in my rambling footsteps, so if you have made something inspired by one of my articles, take a picture and send it to ldsblogs@moregoodfoundation.org. Label it: Crafts for Brandon. If you do, that picture will be at the end of my next article, with your name attached. If you made something beyond the fantastic scope of my chronicle, you might consider writing a guest article and sending it to that same email address to be considered as a guest post. It is always inspiring to see what art you may see in the mundane.

Brandon Quist

Brandon is originally from Olmsted Falls, Ohio. He has studied both at Baldwin Wallace college and Brigham Young University, and is currently pursuing Chemical Engineering, among other things. He considers himself a jack of all trades, and a master of none. In his spare time, Brandon enjoys knitting, guitar, reading, origami, writing, and photography.

I decided to start with a snake. Tubes are relatively easy, and if you make it wavy, it looks like a snake. I cut into the leg of the pants, getting two roughly similar pieces and some odd gray fabric I hadn’t realized was along for the ride.

From there, I got a needle and thread, and started hand-sewing the two pieces together along the sides. A possible technique to use here is to poke the needle through the fabric from the same side every time, looping back to the front. In general, look at the hems of your clothing, and see if you can’t figure out what the path of the thread and therefore the needle is. At any rate, I sewed the pieces together, leaving the mouth of the snake open. Ostensibly, this is where I should have worn a thimble, but it was never the same finger that the needle pricked – the spiteful thing.

Here’s where you can learn from my mistake. See, that gray cloth which will be the inside of the snake’s mouth, should be on the inside of the mouth right now. I thought I was being clever, but no. When you turn the snake inside out, you can also turn the weird little pocket the gray fabric makes inside out. That way the entire snake is round and photogenic. Also, make sure to sew one gray mouth bit on both mouth flaps on the original snake. They are the hard and soft palate, I guess.

Looking at that snake, I feel as though it belongs in Nightmare Before Christmas. If that’s an aesthetic you are going for, that’s cool too. Now, that is one hungry snake. To keep it from devouring the souls of your sleeping roommates, try stuffing it with the very fabric from which it was cut. You can use cotton batting, like what you might find in stuffed animals and pillows, but I knew my stitching wasn’t particularly tight, so the stuffing would show through.

You’re a crafter, Harry. At any rate, wrap some cloth around a chopstick or pen and stuff it down the snake’s throat. You may find that it won’t reach all the way back, so you should bunch the snake up around the chopstick and push the material off into the dark bowels of your misshapen creation. You may need to pack it in with the chopstick, and then stuff more cloth after that. Once the body is firm, put some of the scraps into the little mouth pockets from before. This will give the snake a sense of maturity instead of appearing as a sock-puppet.

Crikey, what a ripper! Sadly, I only thought of that quote once while making this thing, and did not say it aloud. At any rate, once you have everything stuffed, it’s time to sew the mouth shut. Specifically, at the back of the throat, where the pocket edges meet.

Like so. You can even attach a wire hanger to the bottom of the snake’s jaw, and you will have yourself a Muppet. Now you can entertain younger relatives, quote Indiana Jones, and throw snakes at people. Use this power wisely, and you will gain great influence throughout the land.

Have I inspired you? Do you also have a terrible habit of wasting food? I would be very interested to see if others have followed in my rambling footsteps, so if you have made something inspired by one of my articles, take a picture and send it to ldsblogs@moregoodfoundation.org. Label it: Crafts for Brandon. If you do, that picture will be at the end of my next article, with your name attached. If you made something beyond the fantastic scope of my chronicle, you might consider writing a guest article and sending it to that same email address to be considered as a guest post. It is always inspiring to see what art you may see in the mundane.

Brandon Quist

Brandon is originally from Olmsted Falls, Ohio. He has studied both at Baldwin Wallace college and Brigham Young University, and is currently pursuing Chemical Engineering, among other things. He considers himself a jack of all trades, and a master of none. In his spare time, Brandon enjoys knitting, guitar, reading, origami, writing, and photography.

3 cups powdered sugar

6 Tbs cocoa powder

¾ cup powdered milk

½ cup of butter (one stick)

½ cup corn syrup

1 tsp vanilla

Chocolate playdough is pretty simple. Combine the dry ingredients in one bowl, and the wet in another. Make sure to really beat the butter-syrup-vanilla mixture, until most of the lumps are either gone or small. It should look like this:

The powders should look like fluffy hot cocoa mix; in fact, you should try it as hot cocoa. It seems like it would work out well. At any rate, add the dry to the wet in 1/3 increments; a lot of the lumps will mix out as the combination thickens. A quick note here: powdered milk can be rather granular, and give the dough a rougher texture than what you may want. Try to get some milk powder that is very fine grain, or perhaps run it through a wheat grinder. Maybe go without entirely and substitute in some flour?

It should look like this, which is to say, the best part of a brownie, the soft middle. At this point, powder a surface with flour and/or powdered sugar, and knead the dough until it smooths out a bit and looks shiny.

I added a little oil to this to keep it from sticking as much, and it still needed a fair amount of kneading and powder infusions. At room temperature, the dough is pretty soft and still a little sticky. The solution is to toss it into the freezer for a little while, perhaps 30 minutes? As long as it’s cold it’s stiffer, and ironically easier to work with. Now what do you do with a drunken sailor? You can flatten it out an use cookie cutters, or shape a heart by hand.

If you want to make something a little fancy, take a piece off and flatten it into a long rectangle-ish thing. Curl the end back and up a little to make a little bud, then roll the strip of dough up. Next, grab some more of the dough and make petals like in the picture above, the thinner the better. Apply those petals to the sides of the roll, and keep going until it looks like a rose.

Oh yeah, you got romance in the bag. For some other ideas, scroll back up to the picture at the top of the article. I personally recommend that mustache; everyone loves fake mustaches. Keen-eyed readers may notice a rather large thing on the left. Your hawk sensibilities have you salivating, because that is a rabbit. Yes, not only can you surprise your loved ones with roses and mustaches, you are now ready for Easter.

Cute enough to eat, eh? In fact, if you have done everything this far, and not eaten a bit of the dough, you have my admiration, tinged with fear at your inhuman self-control. For those wondering, the flavor is rather familiar; this dough tastes like a tootsie roll.

And there you have it, a way to salvage whatever mistakes you may have made on Valentine’s Day. Of course, like Christmas, it is important to carry the spirit of the holiday with you always, giving your loved ones handmade chocolate sculptures as you are moved to do so.

Hmmm… it also looks like poo, so there may be some pranking opportunities there. Food for thought.

Have I inspired you? Do you also have a terrible habit of wasting food? I would be very interested to see if others have followed in my rambling footsteps, so if you have made something inspired by one of my articles, take a picture and send it to ldsblogs@moregoodfoundation.org. Label it: Crafts for Brandon. If you do, that picture will be at the end of my next article, with your name attached. If you made something beyond the fantastic scope of my chronicle, you might consider writing a guest article and sending it to that same email address to be considered as a guest post. It is always inspiring to see what art you may see in the mundane.

Brandon Quist

Brandon is originally from Olmsted Falls, Ohio. He has studied both at Baldwin Wallace college and Brigham Young University, and is currently pursuing Chemical Engineering, among other things. He considers himself a jack of all trades, and a master of none. In his spare time, Brandon enjoys knitting, guitar, reading, origami, writing, and photography.

Now, I said popup book, but I will mostly be working with pulled tabs and other things. For instance, what I have done here is cut little holes in the black paper. The tabs are made of black paper as well, except for the very tip, which is white. This way, when you pull the tab, it looks like a white dot is traveling from one hole to the next. Keep in mind, when you pull the tab, you have to have black paper behind so that the holes keep that illusion of motion and stillness. That backdrop also helps keep the tab in place.

Are you ready for some popup action? Are you? Okay, you are. First, fold the paper in half, then fold the crease side at an angle. Open it back up and reverse some of the fold lines, and you get this. It’s a pretty bland popup, but we’ll fix that.

Is he a dot, or is he a speck?
When he’s underwater does he get wet?
Or does the water get him instead?
Nobody knows, Particle Man

Asking the deep questions, this song. So, to get those lovely waves, put your piece of paper on a cutting board and get your old friend, Mr. “Raise the stakes” knife. Cut wavy lines, bonus points if they are symmetrical, and push in every other wavy part. Not pictured here is gluing the paper to a piece of white printer paper for a background. It totally happened later though.

Triangle Man, Triangle Man
Triangle Man hates particle man
They have a fight, Triangle wins
Triangle Man

Some tension enters a song otherwise dominated by carefree accordion solos. Seriously, look it up. Particle Man’s tab is pretty much the same as the ones before. Triangle Man, however, wiggles around at the end of a tab that passes through a curved line cut in the paper. On the back, I also taped a band of paper over the tab so that it can’t go crazy wiggling around. As for the dramatic triangle vs particle fight, Triangle Man is simply on a little L tab that slides him along a horizontal slit in the paper. Particle man is a square glued to the paper for reasons known only by Particle Man.



Universe man, Universe man
Size of the entire universe man
Usually kind to smaller man
Universe man

The man war has escalated quickly. Also, this is the only popup man, which makes him mighty. When making popup elements like this, it’s good to start with a folded in half paper. That way it’s symmetrical and it knows what to do when the page turns. Universe Man is directly on the crease, and those triangles at the bottom are the only things holding him there. Those folds also are the pivot for when the page turns, so it looks like Universe Man is bowing every time you turn the page. He’s very polite.


He’s got a watch with a minute hand,
Millenium hand and an eon hand
When they meet it’s a happy land
Powerful man, Universe Man.

Unsurprisingly, Universe Man is a hippy. Now, while that page looks pretty static, that isn’t good enough. The circles on the watch actually turn. To accomplish this, I poked a needle and thread through the bottom two circles and the arm (sorry, Universe Man, but it’s for art. He understands.) Then I taped the thread down on the underside of the arm, and as close as possible to the center of the top circle. That way, the two circles below turn like wheels, and the one on top like a circle on a thread. It looks like this:
_
|
|
_
Except, you know, try to have as little slack on the string as possible.

Person man, person man
Hit on the head with a frying pan
Lives his life in a garbage can
Person man

As if the interactions of sentient particles and universes weren’t deep enough, now we get to the human condition. As for the construction of this page, there’s not a lot to say. The frying pan is on a tab through yet another curved cut, and I had to resort to origami paper and grey cardboard to get the colors I wanted. Oh, and each of these pages is cut down to 11X8.5, which leaves me with handy strips of paper in the same color as the page.


Is he depressed or is he a mess?
Does he feel totally worthless?
Who came up with person man?
Degraded man, person man

Harsh, but to be fair, he does live in a garbage can. This is why I interpreted the scene a bit more lightly, with a little tab that can make him smile and frown. I had to cut through both the head and the paper under the head, but it works. The flap covering the sitting form of Person man is only taped on one side, hence flapitude.


Triangle man, triangle man
Triangle man hates person man
They have a fight, triangle wins
Triangle man

Who saw that coming? Truly, we are dealing with a sophisticated story, not afraid to have the classically noir ending of geometric supremacy. The entire fight scene is filmed on a single tab, all the better to wiggle it around and back and forth to get that shaky-cam effect. In the end, Triangle Man spins around on his thread, pretending really hard to be an equilateral triangle, when he is more accurately an isosceles triangle. Perhaps his feelings of inadequacy about his angles fuel his aggression? There is such depth and convoluted backstory, it boggles the mind. At least now, he is happy.

And so our story ends, where I tape all the edges of the pages together and then to a brown piece of construction paper for a binding. Perhaps someday I will read this to one of my grandchildren, emulating the grandfatherly love and kindness exemplified in the Princess Bride movie. Either that, or I will place this book on a window sill and guests will pick it up and read it.

May you too set an epic song to construction paper and glue, with wiggly bits and more tabs than is reasonable.,

Have I inspired you? Do you also have a terrible habit of wasting food? I would be very interested to see if others have followed in my rambling footsteps, so if you have made something inspired by one of my articles, take a picture and send it to ldsblogs@moregoodfoundation.org. Label it: Crafts for Brandon. If you do, that picture will be at the end of my next article, with your name attached. If you made something beyond the fantastic scope of my chronicle, you might consider writing a guest article and sending it to that same email address to be considered as a guest post. It is always inspiring to see what art you may see in the mundane.

Brandon Quist

Brandon is originally from Olmsted Falls, Ohio. He has studied both at Baldwin Wallace college and Brigham Young University, and is currently pursuing Chemical Engineering, among other things. He considers himself a jack of all trades, and a master of none. In his spare time, Brandon enjoys knitting, guitar, reading, origami, writing, and photography.

See the letters? That’s so I can remember what colors go where later on. Also, since black is ‘B’, blue has to be ‘U’, clearly.
C04
Look, a handy little scale on the side to set the order right. As for what you use to cut the construction paper, that is up to you. An exacto knife is traditional, but I’m not sure what kind of cutting board you would need, and I don’t have one. Instead, my weapon of choice is my steak knife. The cutting board is just a cutting board, the flexible plastic kind, for easy clean up.

Now, this may be a bit counter-intuitive, but you don’t cut the construction paper of the color written in the diagram. Instead, you cut the next color up to have a hole for the lower color. Not pictured here is a featureless white rectangle deathly afraid of knives. Joke’s on him; there will be scissors in the end.

I then proceed to ignore the statement I just wrote about leaving holes for the lower color, but that is because I realized I wanted a bit of depth to the streambed. I gave it a darker background, as well as some character flaws. See the diagram up there? Since I have to cut through it to make the shapes in the construction paper, it gets rather frazzled and shifty. Keep a steady hand on it, or it will tear or move right in the middle of a line you were making.

Light blue is pretty simple, just a bit narrower than the shores of the stream, letting that deeper blue in around the edges. Light blue is chill like that.

Green went much the same way. At this point, I trimmed down the edges of the layers in a very broad fashion. This is because paper doesn’t like being cut, and will wiggle and squirm away like a child fleeing the prospect of pants.

So I had glued down most of the elements, but I wasn’t satisfied with the look of it all. Turns out large, uninterrupted blocks of color can be a bit bland. That’s when I decided to get fancy with light blue over there, and carve out a few black circles for rocks.

Looks pretty good, but now the stream is overdressed for the party. While I do advocate improvisational artistry, this is one of the drawbacks. To make up for my addition, I had to add more detail to the other areas of the piece.

Good thing I saved the scraps from the previous cuts. Now, this art form is hardly limited to landscapes; anything with strong shapes will work. Especially mildly embarrassing pictures a sibling takes with your camera.

(What do you call an agreement sent through snapchat? A verbal agreement? A digital agreement? At any rate, my sister okayed the use of this picture.)

Have I inspired you? Do you also have a terrible habit of wasting food? I would be very interested to see if others have followed in my rambling footsteps, so if you have made something inspired by one of my articles, take a picture and send it to ldsblogs@moregoodfoundation.org. Label it: Crafts for Brandon. If you do, that picture will be at the end of my next article, with your name attached. If you made something beyond the fantastic scope of my chronicle, you might consider writing a guest article and sending it to that same email address to be considered as a guest post. It is always inspiring to see what art you may see in the mundane.

Brandon Quist

Brandon is originally from Olmsted Falls, Ohio. He has studied both at Baldwin Wallace college and Brigham Young University, and is currently pursuing Chemical Engineering, among other things. He considers himself a jack of all trades, and a master of none. In his spare time, Brandon enjoys knitting, guitar, reading, origami, writing, and photography.

Cut away the corners, giving yourself the tail end of a tear-drop shape. That way it looks more bird-like. Then find the center of balance by trial and error, and mark it somehow. This can be a little difficult, since writing exerts a certain amount of pressure, which will make the whole thing tilt and probably fall if you aren’t careful. It is at the time of taking this picture that I developed empathy for all the left-handed photographers. As you can see, my right hand is occupied, and my camera really wasn’t meant to be operated in a sinister fashion.

Remember that center of balance? That is now the bird’s beak. Cut away the front edge to get that wing shape that is so very important to the illusion of the thing. Having said that, be careful that you don’t cut too deep into the heart of the cardboard, or you may very well end up with a center of balance that is not part of the thing itself.

I hope you saved those cardboard scraps from earlier, because now we are getting topographical. This is also when you can learn from my mistake. As you can see, the wings are pretty lumpy on this side, which makes the trick to the balancing bird a bit obvious. What you can do is to glue the pieces over the wings as you see in the picture, wait for them to dry, then flip the entire thing over and glue the body pieces on the other side. This way the wings will look like they are being swept low, as opposed to arched high. Once this is done, it still looks rather angular and obviously cobbled together. The solution?

Waste food. Yes, that is some printer paper torn up and dipped in a flour-water solution we all know and love as paper mache. It doesn’t take much; I mixed up the stuff in a cereal bowl. Once you have your bird smoothed out, keep in mind that the flour will dry yellow on the paper. If that bothers you, feel free to paint that bird with all the colors of the wind, or your acrylic bottles.

That’s how it looks when it’s dried. You are now ready to entertain nearly anyone for the entirety of their child-like attention span, which is to say ten minutes at the most. After the novelty wears off, make a game of perching the bird in odd places. Alternatively, if you paint it really well, you can glue it to a hummingbird feeder as a decoy. Fly on over, the sugar-water’s fine.

To read more of Brandon’s articles, click the image.

Have I inspired you? Do you also have a terrible habit of wasting food? I would be very interested to see if others have followed in my rambling footsteps, so if you have made something inspired by one of my articles, take a picture and send it to ldsblogs@moregoodfoundation.org.  Label it: Crafts for Brandon. If you do, that picture will be at the end of my next article, with your name attached. If you made something beyond the fantastic scope of my chronicle, you might consider writing a guest article and sending it to that same email address to be considered as a guest post. It is always inspiring to see what art you may see in the mundane.

Brandon Quist

Brandon is originally from Olmsted Falls, Ohio. He has studied both at Baldwin Wallace college and Brigham Young University, and is currently pursuing Chemical Engineering, among other things. He considers himself a jack of all trades, and a master of none. In his spare time, Brandon enjoys knitting, guitar, reading, origami, writing, and photography.

At this point, I started thinking of other ways to have cool melty patterns. It turns out that simply laying crayon pieces on some paper and trying to melt them with the thinking man’s flamethrower is a bad idea. They just roll around. What about drawing on some paper, and melting the drawing? Pretty much no difference. No, if I was going to melt that wax, I needed to confine it.

So I broke off some chunks of crayon and folded the paper around the edges. As you might guess, that wax took a little while to get melty. Halfway along, I helped it reach its full potential like a good sports coach; by squishing it flat.

From there, I picked it up and moved it around. I kept the infrared emitter trained on it, and watched the wax flow in different directions.

Is that an eight-legged horse stuck in taffy? Or is it like 90% of those ink blots, and actually a…

Butterfly. There were some lumps left over, so I gingerly scrapped them off and saved them for later. To cover up the surgery scars, the sirocco wind-waker spent a handful of seconds softening the edges.
At this point, I had spent all of perhaps 33 cents of my dollar store crayons. Determined to make up for lost time, I got out the foil.

The only sensible way to shake hands with the devil. Anyways, there is no lamer pun than “do you need a hand?” The best way to pull it off is to be on the receiving end, and to have a third hand on standby, preferably as a piece of art.

There is some irony in Disney’s Frozen crayons being melted here, but mostly I got them because they were large. The ol’ therminator took a little while to melt all that wax, but it didn’t give up.

The little pyroclastic flow simulator that could. You are looking at about a dollar of wax made to look like highly suspicious jello. That wasn’t enough for me. I had to add the other one dollars’ worth of wax.

It isn’t pretty. Those crayons have gone through a soul-darkening ordeal, and I got tired of peeling paper off of ungrateful sticks. In the end, they all melt alike, they always do.

I did make some effort to remove the empty papers from the mold, and it looks like I was picking through a wet ash tray. The nice thing is, wax is relatively easy to get off of your skin, provided you didn’t heat it up too much.

After letting it cool for hours, I peeled the foil away, revealing a rainbow hand. Go ahead, scroll up to the header to see it in its morning glory. Now scroll back to me. Old spice. Australian “odd space.” Now you too can tell your friends, “No, I already got one, and it’s very nice.” French accents are optional, but recommended.

Brandon Quist

Brandon is originally from Olmsted Falls, Ohio. He has studied both at Baldwin Wallace college and Brigham Young University, and is currently pursuing Chemical Engineering, among other things. He considers himself a jack of all trades, and a master of none. In his spare time, Brandon enjoys knitting, guitar, reading, origami, writing, and photography.

Go to any grocery store, and you will probably be able to nab a nice shallow box like this one. Specifically, the dollar store, where you may also find those large glass gem thingies. It turns out you only need one bag, but it was only a dollar, so I played it safe.

It is important to glue the middle gem with the flat side facing up, so it can lead all the other sheeple glass gems in its hipster glory. But seriously, that one has to be upside down. The rest you can glue however you like, but try to make it symmetrical if at all possible.

Like that. Now just hang it on a wall and give it a pretentious name, like “Maruchange the World of Glass.” Actually, don’t. That’s a terrible idea. Instead, carve a hole on opposite sides just behind the center-edge glass gem. A hole the size of a quarter should be good.

Note that incredibly valuable coin sitting on the hipster shepherd. Pretentious wall art has become the great arena of taking turns flicking a penny. The game is penny hockey, and the goals are carved into the very board. Pretty simple, pretty cheap, pretty fun.

But that’s not enough for you, is it? I hear your time-shifted voices, dear demanding, hounding, unreasoning readers. You echo in my ears and move my hand, preemptively answering your cry for more cardboard shenanigans.

Ironically, that yardstick does nothing to give you a sense of scale, since you cannot see either end, nor the unit markings. Rest assured, that pencil has got your back, telling you that what you are seeing is a large square of cardboard. What that yard stick did do is provide the width and the straightness of the columns on the cardboard.

The jig is up, the game is afoo- no, it’s chess. Admittedly, with a 14X14 board. That’s almost wide enough for two whole chess sets on either side, minus the second king and queen and attendant pawns. If you do decide to go that way, I would recommend being able to move two separate pieces a turn, or it will take forever. Also, as you fill in 98 squares with black marker, go from the top down so that you don’t mark up your palm-side so much.

Of course, it would be a shame to waste all that space in the middle with unending plains. Enter the step hill thingy. Cardboard doesn’t want to do all those right angles, so you have to get persuasive with tape. For rules, consider that a piece cannot stop on a vertical space. Thus hills become impassable walls for pawns, and hideous speed bumps for bishops.

You can also go with blank spots, where nothing can move over. For another element, flip it over and it becomes a ramp passable only to rooks and queens. Not pictured is a piece that bends space, or possibly a wormhole from one space to another. Try mixing in some battleship, where a sheet in the middle blocks you from seeing how your opponent is setting up their board. Play a few turns, then remove the sheet and play as normal.

Chess is celebrated as an unsolved, closed game. While that is true, it doesn’t have to be, if you dismantle the thinking box and rebuild the game in your own image.

To read more of Brandon’s articles, click the picture.

Brandon Quist

Brandon is originally from Olmsted Falls, Ohio. He has studied both at Baldwin Wallace college and Brigham Young University, and is currently pursuing Chemical Engineering, among other things. He considers himself a jack of all trades, and a master of none. In his spare time, Brandon enjoys knitting, guitar, reading, origami, writing, and photography.

You know, as I am writing this, I realized I should have made that dragon thing over there into a backpack for one of the guys. That would have been pretty cool, but I guess I had to go with giving it legs.

A warning about working with wire: it will always be rounded at the edges. It just doesn’t bend sharply enough to really emulate claws or fingers on a small scale.

As you can see, working with two kinds of wire can give you nice contrasts. You may also notice that the legs were rather long, and now the wings are somewhat more proportional. That tends to happen, but since this is an additive art, it is relatively easy to just make everything bigger to match.

Majestic, bunny-eared dragon.
Now you too can make jewelry, and a dragon to hoard it. Or maybe combine everything, and make bejeweled chainmail armor with dragon wings. Yes, perfect.

Brandon Quist

Brandon is originally from Olmsted Falls, Ohio. He has studied both at Baldwin Wallace college and Brigham Young University, and is currently pursuing Chemical Engineering, among other things. He considers himself a jack of all trades, and a master of none. In his spare time, Brandon enjoys knitting, guitar, reading, origami, writing, and photography.