50 things · 1 categories
50 things to make by hand
Made by Hand is a list of 50 things of art and making, from any field. Turn a room into a camera obscura, grind paint from rocks, bind a book, mend a bowl with gold, forge a knife, build an automaton, write a story without the letter e. Some take an afternoon and a tin can, some a workshop and a teacher. Tick each one off with the day you made it.
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- Art & Making 100%
Art & Making 50
- Turn a room into a camera obscuraHow to do it
- Take a photo with a pinhole camera made from a tin can
- Print a cyanotype with nothing but sunlight
- Make a wet-plate tintype portrait
- Develop my own film in a darkroom
- Grind my own paint from earth and rocks I found
- Make ink from oak galls and write with it
- Cut a quill pen from a feather
- Make paper from plant fibers or old rags
- Marble paper on a bath of floating ink
- Sew and bind a book by hand
- Print from a woodblock I carved myself
- Set a line of metal type and print it on a letterpress
- Etch a copper plate and print it
- Lay gold leaf on an illuminated letter
- Mend a broken bowl with gold, the kintsugi way
- Patch worn clothes with sashiko stitching
- Weave a length of cloth on a loom
- Spin yarn on a drop spindle
- Dye something in an indigo vat
- Print leaves onto fabric with their own colors
- Make a piece of bobbin lace
- Tuft a rug of my own design
- Make a pair of shoes I can walk in
- Carve a spoon from green wood
- Weave a basket from willow I cut myself
- Forge a knife at an anvil
- Pour molten metal into a sand mold
- Fire a pot in a raku kiln and pull it out glowing
- Build a stretch of dry-stone wall
- Bend glass tube into a neon sign
- Burn a picture into wood with a hot pen
- Build an instrument that plays in tune
- Build an Aeolian harp for the wind to play
- Punch a tune into a music-box strip
- Make all the sound effects for a film scene by hand
- Animate a stop-motion film one frame at a time
- Make a zoetrope and watch my drawings move
- Put on a shadow puppet show with puppets I cut
- Build a marionette that walks
- Build a wooden automaton that moves with a crank
- Balance a hanging mobile of my own
- Build a tiny world inside a matchbox
- Make land art from leaves and stones and leave it to the weather
- Draw the same tree in every season
- Draw a map of a place that doesn't exist
- Make glitch art by editing an image file as text
- Write a program that draws something I didn't plan
- Make a blackout poem from a page of an old book
- Write a story without the letter e