Twitching party guts

For those of you who are both creepy and crafty, a website specializing in Halloween prop projects and related antics has documented how they created a set of severed, twitching legs. There’s even a video of the finished product in action. It’s how a pair of pants can scare the pants off of partygoers.

• crafts
• special effects

Compubeaver

Kasey McMahon decided to combine an interest in taxidermy with her PC. Fearing that the natural world is being replaced by technology, the artist installed a working computer inside of an idle beaver. First, she crafted a computer from the motherboard up, tested it, then hollowed out a stuffed beaver and molded the two together using spandex spray, resin, and fiberglass. After three months of work, the result was Compubeaver, followed up by its accessory, Text-o-Possum, a stuffed possum that’s equipped with a laser in its back leg that projects a virtual keyboard. McMahon was generous enough to provide a 29-step guide for the rest of us, in the hope that we’ll each case mod a beaver and create our own animal-based data processor. Just imagine using a raccoon laptop at Starbucks. Perhaps that would inspire them to provide free WiFi.

Update: See also installing Linux on a dead badger. (thx, michael)

• art
• computers
• crafts
• taxidermy

Snack in a box

An interesting way to hold onto summer would be to engineer a lunchbox that comes with its own outdoor setting. For those who are craftily inclined, this article contains instructions on how to pack more than a sandwich with your mid-day snack, using turf, an image of the outdoors, and some old fashioned ingenuity. With lunch inside the box, nestled among a handmade diorama of the outdoors, complete with a patch of grass, the “Green Space Travel Case” provides a tiny slice of countryside for those confined to a concrete cityscape. Ants and screaming children packed separately.

• crafts
• food