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Book Safe (Secret Santa)

I made a book safe for my Secret Santa via Make in Belgium (Facebook group, also known from Koterij with Henk Rijckaert). It’s based on arduino. I did everything myself: programming, creating and printing case. I truly didn’t enjoy cutting in the book. It was a lot more work than anticipated.

Parts list:

  • chinese arduino
  • 2 buttons
  • 1* 4-digit 7-segment display
  • 1 relay board (to shut off after 30 seconds or so)
  • one matrix keyboard
  • 1 servo motor
  • 2 rubber bands
  • 1 book (sacrilege!)

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Playing Cards

In 2021 I developed a card game to play with colleagues. After almost 2 years into the pandemic, we barely knew each other. There were also a lot of new faces in the crowd. This game was a nice way to mingle during the first staff party in ages.

It’s a combination of the classic Quartets and Technical Quartets* with some new “Rules of Engagement” and a third engagement option called “climate bombs”. Fun guaranteed!

* The internet has yet to learn what a Technical Quartets is. On the cards there are properties about the subject. Example: “My -person- has the most kids, how much has yours?” Player with the most kids wins both cards.

Luckily I have a superb colleague who’s a designer and she spent a LOT of evenings making these cards. I had another team who pressured colleagues for intimate information that we could put on their cards. I illustrated the “bomb” cards myself.

One of the things they had to do, was to choose a favourite food. I put it on the card in guesstimated (kilo)calories. By the time we played the game, everybody had forgotten what they had chosen. That wasn’t a good design choice, but… the game was a smashing hit! 🙂

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Christmas Cards

Somewhere in November 2014 I decided to make a whole lot of Christmas cards for friends/family. They were actually based on the person(s) they were meant for.

It was also the first time I used “PEEN” as my signature. I will elaborate on the many, many meanings of Peen in another post.

All cards were drawn on 12*12cm cheap blank cards. After a while I came to understand what worked, and what not. One day I will redo the best of them.

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Blocking Tool (for knitting)

Apparently, when you knit something, you should “block” it. Meaning: making it wet and stretch/attach it to something to get (or keep?) the right shape. When I have to wash a knitted item I tend to panic. I’m really not into knitting. Someone else was however, and she wanted “something with measurements” to make the blocking easier for the many little pieces she was working on. Might have been blankets for a whole family of mice, I don’t know.

So I made a 20*20 cm thing in Fusion 360, with logo and 1 cm intervals. You can download it here.