Deb Bassett - Urbanwide

GeekUp Leeds - Tomorrow, 6pm, The Lounge

This month after all the festive cheer, we’re back to our regular format of beer and 20:20s. We have two talks lined up:

• “How to PR yourself - online and offline” - Richard Hamer
• “How many geeks does it take to paint the matrix?: my personal experience of creativity and computing” - Helen Harrop

… and a big thanks to Helen for stepping in at the last minute!

Do tell us if you’re coming

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Cardboard Christmas tree project

Probably a bit late for this now, but I thought my cardboard Christmas tree project was worth a quick post as it’s been mentioned on a couple of friends sites now (cheers Recycle This & The Daily Chump) so I thought it deserved a home.

Here’s some background: a couple of weeks ago, I decided it would be quite cool to make a cardboard Christmas tree out of a very large cardboard box we had left over after buying a new mattress for our bed. The idea appealed for a few reasons:

• we had a big box and it seemed a waste to take it to the tip
• going out to fetch a real tree also seemed wasteful: a waste of petrol, time and also not forgetting it being a total waste of tree
• I couldn’t face hoovering up pine needles daily
• Richard Garside & I have a related ongoing project called “Cardboard Laptop Stand” (watch this space) so making cardboard versions of things tends to seep into my mind quite readily

It took about 3 hours to make the tree, and I felt super victorious after it’s construction was complete.
Stuff you need to make your own:

• a very large cardboard box
• a very sharp Stanley / craft knife and cutting board
• a metal edged ruler
• a diagram of the shape of your tree
• a pen
• lots of floor space
• hair grips to secure your decorations, although they mostly stay on on their own

As I was making the tree, I took photos of each step and uploaded them to Flickr, with annotations - essentially forming step-by-step instructions on how to build your very own Cardboard Christmas Tree

• Flickr set showing how to build your own Cardboard Christmas Tree