Paper City (Valentine’s Edition)

My lab and I order a lot of primers… which means a lot of rigid envelopes from IDT to be recycled.  They’ve seemed like they could be generally useful (for example, I’ve previously used them to make stencils), so I’ve been holding onto a couple hundred of them above my desk at work.  One of my proposal ideas that didn’t quite make the cut was building a paper city in the living room, with certain buildings hiding various objects (with one of them, ultimately, being a jewelry store holding an engagement ring).  While I didn’t need it for my actual proposal, I made a derivation of this for Valentine’s day this year (with some of the buildings holding things like wine, beer, snacks, etc).  I started with 124 IDT envelopes, and ended up using around 100 of them.  I knew the envelopes were kind of ugly, so I cut out various shapes (like peoples’ silhouettes) using a razor, and put one of two dozen LED tea lights (and two flashlights) in them to simulate houselights and give contrast in a darkened room.  I banished Anna into the bedroom for twenty minutes while I dragged them out from the back room where I had constructed them, set them up in the living room, and surprised her with a paper city in the middle of our living room.

I built Anna a nighttime #city in our living room using old IDT (think FedEx) envelopes. #valentine #valentines

A photo posted by Kenny Matreyek (@k.matreyek) on Feb 15, 2016 at 1:30am PST

It looked much better in real life (with the flickering LED tea lights, and better contrast), which wasn’t well captured in the photograph. Oh well, that’s ok.

Now comes the next fun part — figuring out fun ways of destroying it. My current favorite idea is hiding dog treats within the buildings and watching as our (relatively) godzilla-sized dog ravages the city in search of them.