Every Friday I pick a random product on Instagram, I disassemble it, examine it and make a stop motion story with its parts. Every week the result is completely different and unexpected.

Here I share how it all comes about!

I choose a cassette tape last week because I’ve been piling up side projects that I wanted to do and wanted something simple to animate that week, or so I thought! Knitting on its own is very time-consuming, let alone stop motion-ing it!

I don’t know how to really knit. I learnt the basic stitch when I was in primary school, in Egyptian education we had this ‘home economics’ class where they taught girls all about sewing, cooking, all those house wifey stuff, and the guys took ‘agriculture’ or ‘plumbing’ class. Now all this might not seem very economic so I bet it's now history. In private schools, they only gave like 2 classes the whole year and skipped on the rest for more important subjects like science or math. Anyhow, somehow I still remembered the basic stitch, I found it so therapeutic and it is something that I never forgot! Ask me what I ate yesterday, won't remember! Isn’t that funny!

I like textile design; especially weaving and I find it very weird that some people don’t even know how the clothes they are wearing are made. I find weaving very fascinated! My first design job was at a startup design studio that weaved plastic bags into textile-like material and designed products out of it. I really enjoyed developing the material and the whole process.

I thought I’d weave the tape somehow, but one of my dear supporters challenged me to take on knitting, she’s a professional knitter, not like my lil creature there, she’s still a newbie.  So once I opened the cassette tape I just saw it, literally. I saw a lil creature with big black tape eyes, knitting its eyes out.

Maybe it’s a form of productive sadness, maybe it means that whatever sad thing we are going through at this moment will help bring something else to life. Maybe it means that she would see the world through her art now. I don’t know. I just saw her knitting her eyes. And here she is knitting her eyes.

I watched this youtuber last week, I found her explanations the clearest and she had a couple of interesting workarounds.

I am not happy with how the animated knitting part turned out, I sort of do things as I go when I animate, I am not an animator, but I learn from my mistakes every week! So hopefully I’ll have the time to give it another try.

I also created a youtube playlist for all the tinker videos I watch to learn new things every week! So nerds like me who like learning can explore this in their free time.

That's it for this week! Stay tuned for this week's Tinker Product and follow along on Instagram (if you aren't already) Don't forget to subscribe to The Tinker Mail!