Arts & Crafts

Calligraphy is one of several hobbies I’ve started dabbling with. I’m practicing by writing information sheets for random Unicode characters, which gives me an excuse to share some typographic trivia!

Today’s entry is U+237C RIGHT ANGLE WITH DOWNWARDS ZIGZAG ARROW, also known as angzarr. This is an unusual “ghost character” that nobody knows the meaning of. Jonathan Chan has an ongoing series of blog posts tracing the history of the character to the Monotype foundry between 1954 and 1963, but is no closer to discovering the original purpose.

Before we left for Japan, I tried my hand at making my own stamp to use on the cover page of my eki stamp book. I think it turned out pretty well for my first attempt!

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The stamp is made out of a 1/8” thick rubber gasket material. I used an X-Acto knife to carve it into a stylized rose design, glued it onto a wooden coaster, and sanded it down a bit to allow ink to stick to it.

In 2007, New Zealand paint company Resene decided to name this specific shade of teal “zomp”.

Leah and I have really gotten into Magic: the Gathering. Our favourite ways to play are sealed deck and Jumpstart, both of which involve opening new packs and making decks out of what you open.

Since it would be wasteful (not to mention expensive) to buy new cards every time we play, we only buy a certain number of packs each set and re-use the cards we open to make our own packs for later games.

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We originally tried coin envelopes and a product called Cubeamajigs, but neither was as nice or convenient as the side-loading papercraft boxes I made with my Cricut.

The above SVG image can be imported into Cricut Design Space to make boxes of your own. Or, if you want to make a box with different dimensions, a tool called Templatemaker can make similar patterns.