Weighted Companion Cube, Part 2

A few weeks ago I wrote about making my own Weighted Companion Cube, and today I finally got round to buy the material needed. Now when it comes to sewing material, the question "Where to get stuff like that?" comes into mind. Luckily, Paris is a city that has everything, and of course they do not have one shop that sells sewing material, they got 10 or so, all neatly arranged next to each other in the Area around Montmatre. Speaking of that Area: As Montmatre is on a hill, you can expect a lot of stairs and walking up/down. On the other hand, you have a gorgeous view of Paris from there! I went to the Marche Saint Pierre, which has 5 stories of cloth (and a horrible web site, but at least you can get the address and opening times from there).

Please allow me to go off-topic for a minute and have a rant. First: Paris is not that big actually, but it's a Maze. Make sure you get a proper Map of the Area. Previously, I always thought that there is always a Map nearby wherever you are in Paris. That is not the case, sometimes you have to walk quite a bit to finally find a map. When you find one, chances are that it may be a map of Paris rather than just one of the area, which makes it close to useless. And if you find an area map, there is also a chance that the nice little "You are here" sticker is missing, so you are still lost as it can be hard to figure out where you are because Paris apparantly has more streets than inhabitants (I made that claim up, but it feels that way once you've spend 1 hour looking for a Metro station in the Maze). Dear French Government: As a tax payer and an inhabitant of the fifth French Republic, please use some of the tax that you are taking off me every month to produce and deploy a few "Vous êtes ici" stickers. Merci. The second part of my rant goes to the people who just love to aprubtly stop walking. Dear people, it is nice to see that you are not alone and got friends or family with you, but if you want to talk to then, you can continue walking down the street. There is no reason to suddenly stop, especially because the streets in certain areas (like Montmatre) are usually overcrowded and you are hampering the flow of traffic.

Any way, back to topic. So I went on and bought the cloth that is needed for the cube. I did not know that there were so many variations of cloth, but there indeed are. But every variant, be it Satin or Cotton has one thing in common: They are expensive. Some still more than others, but it's not really cheap. I also ended up buying quite a bit more than I needed because the sheets were 1.80 Meters long (and you had to pay per Meter of Width), but I think it cannot hurt to have some spare stuff. I also got a bag of Fill Material, so that I can stuff the Cube.

My complete shopping list today:

1. Light Pink Thread (Fil a Coudre), 100 Meter, 3,05 €
2. Filling Material (Tapissier), 1 Kilogram, 9,50 €
3. Light Pink Cloth, Cotton, 1.80 Meter x 1 Meter, 8,80 €
4. Light Grey Cloth, Cotton, 1.80 Meter x 1 Meter, 8,80 €
5. Dark Grey Cloth, Cotton, 1.80 Meter x 1 Meter, 8,80 €
6. White "Net", 1,80 Meter x 1 Meter, 2,75 €

So for a grand total of 41,70 € I should now have everything for my Cube (I have different colored thread and sewing needles already), which means I will now start actually building it. And I will make sure that GLaDOS will not let me burn it for sure 🙂

The one remaining problem is that the original sewing pattern uses imperial units (inches) and that a simple 1:1 conversion to the metric system does not make much sense, unless you want to work with 7,62 or 12,7 centimeters. If I happen to have a dual Metric/Imperial ruler I might just use imperial units, otherwise i'll try to properly make a pattern based on metric units.