More Cubees

It was the evening before Valentine's Day and perhaps I should be making Val-09 ( http://www.cubeecraft.com/cubee/val-09 ), but I'm done with Valentine's Day years ago - it's just another day for the florists and candy stores rip the men's wallet. Instead, I made Darth Vader, partly to go with another project I was working on with my son. Just last week, for some reason son is suddenly interested in putting together the 3D globe that Aunt O gave him. It appeared difficult to assemble, but once you sort out all the pieces by number range, e.g. 0 to 100, 101 to 200, then even sub-sort the ranges, it was pretty easy. You have to go around the globe, but we are making pretty good progress. The Star Wars fan in me could not help thinking of the destroyed Death Star and I had to make a Darth Vader cubee to go with it. Eventually, I plan to make a bunch of Stormtroopers to line up as Vader march through the lines.


Darth Vader is my second Cubee. The first was Mario, of Nintendo fame. What scene can one possibly make with Mario and Darth Vader. How about, [heavy breathing], "Mario, I am your father!" ?

Cubeecraft.com

There is so much out there on the Internet it is next to impossible to keep up with the fun stuff available. Thanks to my Twitter follower Jake Marsh I learned about Cubeecraft.com. While the creation of Cubeecraft are paper-based, they are not origami as it involves scissors and other cutting tools. Still, perhaps because of the pop culture facet of the design, it is a lot of fun. I salute the designer Chris Beaumont for all the great work!

I decided to give it a try and chose Mario, from the Nintendo game, just because it is something my son would recognize. Much as I would love to use all the scrap paper I have, Cubeecraft toys really should be made with thicker paper, not your standard 20-lb office stuff. Using scissor is fine for the beginning, but when it comes to the small areas, an X-acto knife is ideal.

If you have the patience, give Cubeecraft a try. My first handiwork took me like about an hour, all done in one night. It is shown here atop my Time Machine network hard drive and next to a trackball, to provide a sense of scale. The pieces stay together without glue or tape, but are not strong enough to be treated as dolls, so they are good for display purpose only.