Month: April 2013
Upcycling #1 and Pranks
two things we’ve had a lot of fun with lately are upcycling (because i don’t like wasting) and harmless pranks! i have some fun step by step upcycling posts to share later, but for now i have some small finished projects that i did to redo a wall in our living room.
my grandma gave me a whole box of old cameras, lenses and filters etc. i had them sitting in a box for the longest time not knowing what to do with them. we did a little redecorating and wanted to do movie/camera/film sort of theme. so this is what i did with some of the lenses and filters:
and a few flashes – i wish i didn’t have to use so much glue but i couldn’t figure out how to keep them in there. they are also in an old crayon box i picked up from an antique store 🙂
and this one is a bit more personal. my grandparents had all of their 8mm home movies in a box stored away for decades. i can’t remember why i had them, but we finally digitized them and ended up with all the boxes which i couldn’t throw away. they are just so cool looking! so i made a little collage of them. the fun part about them is that we’ll be able to show our kids what our grandparents had to do in order to see their home movies!
and we also put a little montage of outdated maps together. these are all cities we’ve been to:
now for the prank. it all started when we were watching gentlemen broncos with our friends over at zelo photography. they made a time capsule and blew on a friendship stone…well it’s kind of a weird movie and you just have to watch it. aaaaanyway…so since we live about 2 miles away from each other we talked about giving each other keys so we can watch each others’ houses when we’re out of town.
so this is how they gave us our key:
we were laughing so hard, especially when we opened it and found the key on top of the friendship stone 🙂
so, we had to come up with something just as good for giving them our key. my grandma also gives me things that aren’t so useful sometimes, like these ‘old’ cameras from the 90’s. i did save them just in case and then when we were at a flea market, i thought of it!!
a camera with antlers! random i know, but i think it turned out pretty cool.
and her’s the finished product and we put the key in the film slot 🙂
and, since they happened to be out of town when we finished it, we thought it would be fun to play a little prank and sprinkle their place with army men. unfortunately i couldn’t find any army men so cowboys and indians it was 🙂
i think it fits in really well on their entry table!
oh and these picture frames below were empty so we filled them too.
Sendai, Japan – ’12
another one of our last minute adventures. we knew we had some time to go somewhere but weren’t sure where to go…tickets to europe were out of control because of the olympics and we found out that japan wasn’t as expensive as we expected it to be, and we’d both always wanted to go there so off we went.
we went in august which is a time of year that they have a lot of celebrations so we tried to go around and find places where we’d be able to see some neat things. first stop, sendai! many of the celebrations in august have to do with the dead, specifically tanabata festival. it’s a long story but in short the stars align and they are able to commune with their dead ancestors, but bad spirits are allowed to come too during this time so there are lots of ghost stories. they make a bunch of things out of paper to put out their wishes to the dead. all these beautiful hanging streamers must have taken an incredible amount of time to make! they were so cool!
we really wanted to be in hiroshima on the 6th but it didn’t work out that way, it would have been cool to see the floating lanterns in celebration.
jared was REALLY grossed out that i got this but it was soooo good!
japanese love their malls and there are enclosed shopping malls like this everywhere!
they also seemed to be shooting news or tv shows in every town we were in, so we made sure to walk in the backround of each one, hopefully we made some japanese TV!!
yup, makes sense…
that’s MISTER donut to you!
people in japan also love everything that is cute…and there is a lot of cute in japan 🙂
people can write their wishes on slips of paper.
there were lots of mocktography opportunities this trip 😉
see, cute! he dyed his dogs’ tails…cute or weird…not sure.
there aren’t a lot of gringos (err gaijins) in sendai so we’re not sure if they were having everyone do this or if we got made fun of a little…we still don’t know what this was all for but they made us put on these robes and pose for a picture. random!!
yep…err what?
soda…water…beer…just a normal vending machine.
and then we were off to our next spot on the bullet trains, stay tuned for more!