In 2010 our friend Seth came up with the idea to make a “Candy Making Machine” that would turn slime into candy. He built the original version in front of his house in Silverlake, a neighborhood in Los Angeles. We helped him that night, making kids reach into a bowl of slime and instructing them to dump it into the machine and wait as the machine comes to life, bubbling and moving as the slime is processed into Halloween candy. Of course, behind the scenes are people turning cranks, triggering sounds, and dropping candy down tubes.

We took the concept home with us, and added a year’s worth of new ideas, and came up with something that amazed both the neighborhood kids, and their parents. (I think a lot of the time, the parents actually enjoyed it more).

Check out the video, (it’s missing the step where the kids drop the slime into the green tube).

Build Your Own

Machine Elements

I used metallic or weird looking objects I found around the house. Anything that looked otherworldly can work. The basics are:

• 8′ x 4′ piece of plywood for the face of the machine
• Various colors of spray paint – I used silver, black, a rusty orange, and a moldy green
• Two large diameter tubes – One for the “Slime In” and one for the “Slime Out.” I used the end of a leaf blower and the core of a roll of butcher paper

You can get fancy and use whatever you think looks cool. Some other items that I used include:

• Foam Core – used for the gears
• Small glass beads – spray painted them and used as “rivots”
• Lights – Strobe, different colored bulbs, black light
• Remote controlled electrical outlet – used to trigger lighting effects once slime has been put in the input tube

Slime

Check out the video to the right to get a sneak peek of your creation. It’s pretty cheap, and was better than I expected it would be.

You need:

• 1 1/2 cup of water
• 1/2 cup (4 oz) glue – something like Elmer’s – try to find clear, as white will make the slime more opaque
• 1 teaspoon borax
• food coloring (how can you not use green?)

Directions:

1. Mix 1 teaspoon borax in 1 cup water. Stir until the borax is dissolved.
2. In a separate container, mix glue with 1/2 cup water. Add food coloring, if desired.

Slime Video

I mounted a monitor to the back of the plywood, so the screen could be seen from the front, and found this great continuous slime bubbling video from VimeoRepeat.com. This played on loop the whole time. A few kids became transfixed on the bubbles, and paid no attention to the candy coming out. Super cute.

Sound Effects

I recorded a collection of sounds from the internet, and mixed them using Audacity, a free audio editing program. Feel free to use this file.

If you have fun ideas for trick-or-treaters, or new ideas for the Candy Making machine, post them in the comments below.

Each player starts the game with a board that includes cartoon images of 24 people and their first names. The game starts with each player selecting a card of their choice from a separate pile of cards containing the same 24 images. The object of the game is to be the first to determine which card one’s opponent has selected. Players alternate asking various yes or no questions to eliminate candidates, such as “Does this person wear glasses?” Well-crafted questions allow players to eliminate one or more possible cards.

Our rules follow the same premise, but differ slightly so we can get some fun reactions and dig into our teammates a little deeper. Our rule changes are.

1. You cannot ask questions about their physical characteristics
2. You cannot repeat a question

So, instead of asking questions like, “Does your person have brown hair?” we would ask questions about this person’s character or behavior in situations. We found that hypothetical questions worked well, and added many more laughs, as both teams had to speculate on what this person might or might not do. Here are some sample questions.

• Is your person in a long term relationship?
• As a child could you imagine your person sharing their toys?
• If you were on a sinking ship in the middle of the ocean, would being with this person make you feel more safe?
• If your person was participating in a school play, would they choose to work backstage?

Build Your Own

You need:

• Guess Who? game board. I bought mine on ebay for around $12.
• A group of 24 people who all know each other fairly well, I used my ultimate disc team
• Photoshop, or some other image editing software (the template files provided are Adobe Photoshop .psd files)
• 3 Sheets of cardstock paper
• Access to a color printer or you can use a copy center like Kinko’s

Template File Download

These are all built at 200dpi. Finding high resolution images of my friends online wasn’t possible, so I lowered the resolution to 200dpi. You can take these templates and increase the resolution to 300dpi for better print results.

• Download Guess-Whom-Individual-Template.psd
• Download Guess-Whom-Group-Template.psd
• Download Guess-Whom-Patterned-Background.pdf

Find a photo of each of the 24 people you plan to use in the game. The ideal photo clearly shows the person’s face, and has them facing directly towards the camera. You will need to ‘extract’ the person’s face from the photo so it can be placed into the template. After years of isolating photographs of stuffed animals for my work at Plushland, I have found that Photoshop’s Extract tool is the easiest method to knock out a background. Here’s a good Extraction Tool video tutorial on Youtube.

Remove the background from each of the photos of your group, and place them onto the Guess-Whom-Individual-Template.psd, sizing them appropriately. In the file, you will see three different “turtleneck” layers, one blue, one red, and one black. In the original Guess Who game, the draw cards, (the cards that you use to choose your player) all have the individuals in black turtle necks. Each board then has a Blue team and a Red team. Use the Guess-Whom-Individual-Template.psd to create the three colors of turtleneck for each person in your group. The turtleneck likely won’t line up for each person, so I left it as an editable path, which you can move to fit your individual’s neck using the pen tool. Here’s a decent Pen Tool video tutorial.

Once you have isolated each person, and made the three color versions, bring them into the Download Guess-Whom-Group-Template.psd. This .psd has guidelines that you can use to align your newly formed images. Make one  sheet each for the black, red, and blue turtlenecks. This file is sized to print, so you can print directly to your own printer, or save as a .pdf, and bring the files to a Kinko’s. Don’t save as a .jpg and try to print using the Windows image printer. That application tends to stretch and resize images to fit onto pieces of paper. If you can’t print directly from Photoshop, save as a .pdf and print that file without any scaling.

I printed the Guess-Whom-Patterned-Background.psd on the backs of the black turtleneck set of cards. It’s optional, but it makes it look a little slicker. Cut out the cards on the dotted line, and stick them into the Guess Who game board. You’re done!

We have played the game with two people, and with an entire team. Just split up evenly and take turns coming up with hilarious questions. It’s a ton of fun, and provided my ultimate disc team with hours of entertainment. Have fun with it!

If you have photos of a Guess Whom game board that you’ve made based of this post, send me a link in the comments. I’d love to see what other people come up with.

USA Ultimate, the governing body of our sport, requires matching uniforms for teams to compete in the Championship series, so our team needed two different colored jerseys, matching shorts and a team logo.

Creating a strong identity for the team gives its members additional motivation to succeed. It puts the “team” ahead of individuals, and in a team sport like ultimate, believing in the team is a huge step towards success. Knowing this I created the concept of the team being an aristocratic “Golf and Polo Club.” The concept fit into our “7 Figures” name. Adding the notion of an elite club took the abstract idea of “7 Figures” and turned it into something specific.

With this new direction in mind, I wanted our uniforms to stand out. The typical uniform is a a pair of  colored sports tee shirts. Making one of our jerseys a collared polo shirt like golfers wear worked perfectly with the team’s golf club theme. For the alternate color, I wanted something that also worked with the golfing theme, and wanted to avoid the standard athletic tee. The idea of a “sweater vest” came up as something that someone would wear over a polo shirt, and a layered sleeveless V-neck over the polo became  the alternate jersey.  Adding an argyle print as the front design to the sweater vest sealed the concept.

Making the jersey concepts into a reality was the next challenge. I have a sublimation printer at work which I planned to use as the graphic application method. The sublimation process requires 100% polyester material to print on, and works best when printing onto light colors. Using spot sublimation to apply the team logos, numbers, and graphics on the jerseys seemed like the most practical technique. Since we need to run, sweat, and print on these shirts means we need a material that can breathe, is lightweight, and is suitable for printing on. I also need them in a number of different sizes because these need to work for both men and women. After hunting for a shirt that fits this criteria, I found these. The colors are perfect. A baby blue vest over a sandstone polo.

• Putty Polo - http://www.blankapparel.com/Devon-Jones_DG385.htm
• Carolina Blue Sleeveless V-neck - http://soccer.epicsports.com/prod/11354/xdri-performance-womens-sleeveless-v-neck.html

The material in both is very breathable, and light enough for the sublimation printing process to clearly show the graphics.

The next step is designing the graphics that will be printed onto the jerseys. The numbers are Letterror ‘Federal’ Font, a font based on the font used on dollar bills. The word “Figures” is broken into three segments separated by commas to create “F,IGU,RES” so it looks like the separation used when writing out numbers in the millions, (7 figures). The polo jerseys should look like shirts that a golf club would give to its members, so I created a crest mimicking the look of a ritzy polo club that would be printed on the chest of the jersey. The fronts of the shirts are uncluttered and clean, a novel concept when most current uniforms overuse modern printing technology and crowd uniform designs with graphics.

The 7 Figures uniform has been the best received uniform I have seen in our sport. Every tournament our team attends has had numerous players from teams we play and onlookers comment on how incredible they are, and ask for spare uniforms if we have any. I have seen people ask for jerseys, but never have I seen such enthusiasm for our team’s theme, look, and execution.

I love creating team uniforms. If you are an ultimate player looking for help or advice on your team’s look, please feel free to contact me either by leaving a comment, or using the form on the contact page. I printed the jerseys after hours at my work, but I also have a friend with the same printing setup as I have. He can be reached through his website at http://www.ninjachicken.com/

The project lasted a year, and every day, we would take a photograph of something that reminded us of our new time together. Often times, the photographs show a specific event that we attended together, or a night where we went out to dinner with our friends. Other times, the photos show us cooking a meal together in the quiet of our home, or eating breakfast together before heading off to work. Even as mundane as some of the activities in a collection of the photos are, I can still remember the moment when the photo was taken, even if it was several years ago at this point.

Looking back at these photos now reminds me of the great times my wife and I had as a newly wed couple. Times have changed. We have moved out of Los Angeles, switched jobs, grown years older, but these photos still feel bring back the memories of that first year.

We have brainstormed ideas for add on topics. We plan to continue the blog once we have our first child, taking a photo each day of our first year as a family. If you have other ideas for a year’s worth of photos, please post them in the comments.