James here at sugru made these gorgeous hooks recently. We all instantly fell in love with them so he made an instructable to show us all how to make them for ourselves! Are they cute or what ?
My eyes are peeled for nice twigs now … I want to make some of these on the back of the office door…

Sometimes lovely smooth surfaces are great, but sometimes you need some extra grip, or you just want a more unusual or unique look.
With the help of a little soapy water to prevent it sticking, you can emboss or stamp your sugru with all kinds of textures before it’s cured. Watch the video to see how.

Oh and it’s fun as well to think of unusual things to use as texturing tools – you can find them everywhere when you start looking… we’ve seen people use the heads of screws, the tops of pens and even the soles of trainers!
Any more texture tool tips?

One of my biggest bugbears is uncomfortable shoes. So often you spend lots of money on a pair of beauties and then they bite you with blisters and end up sitting in the cupboard for months. What a pain.
Now sugru isn’t a miracle cure-all and it definitely won’t help if your shoes are uncomfy because they’re too small, but last year I had a lovely (and expensive) pair of shoes that sat had sat in the cupboard for a whole year because of a piece of sewing on the inside that gave me nasty blisters. I smoothed it out with sugru, and the shoes are now so well worn they’re my old favourites. Result!

After some of you wrote back to me saying you’d done the same thing (like Harriet’s high heels, and Hamish’s vegetarian boots below), we thought, let’s make a video and spread the shoe hacking word!
Now our neighbours will know why we were dancing so strangely on the pavement outside the office that day :)

Oh and if you’d like to mix colours and you’d like some help, you can download the colour guide here (PDF, 1MB).

Paul is a film maker and he used sugru to help him take arial footage with a kite:
“I fixed some camera attachments i have been using for kite filming, without Sugru the nuts and screws fall out and i spend ages looking for them in the grass.
We’re using the GOPRO HD Hero camera, we have been using it to film from bike handle bars to capture bike journeys for a film we’re making. We’re also using it to get arial shots of cyclists, hence the kite filming, its way to expensive to hire a helicopter so I’ve been experimenting with hinging a little camera from a kite line to capture whats below. You’re at the mercy of the wind and its direction but it a lot of fun as well.”
Here’s some of Paul’s kite filming footage !

sugru is developed to stick to things, but, sometimes it’s useful if it doesn’t stick.
So what can you do?
Wetting the surface you don’t want it to stick to with soapy water works very well and doesn’t leave a greasy residue like it would if you used oil. But don’t cover your eReader in soapy water. Or oil.
Eleanor used cling film to make this:
I used cling-film on the eReader to stop the Sugru sticking and more on a flat surface so I could press the outer face flat. The result is dust protection for the eReader ports, extra protection for the corners, and a happy me!

Clare (the inventor of the trabasack – check it out) has a disability that makes it difficult to hold her blackberry so she made this little handle for it from wire, leather and velcro… and now sugru! The sugru makes the handle generally more robust and stops it catching in things so easily as when it was raw wire. Cool texture too!

Thanks Luke for the title suggestion :) The last few days have been amazing to see so many people sending back their ‘first hacks’ – we’re so stoked that so many people are getting stuck into their packs as soon as they get them, and some of them are damn clever as well. Here are a few first hack beauties !

Aaron: “My iMac’s in a setup where it’s nearly impossible to look behind it to access the ports when I need to plug something in and due to it’s slightly unusual placement it’s not very easy to rotate either. So I tried something out with my first pack of Sugru to add ‘braille’ coded bumps over the ports so I can tell which is which purely by touch.”

Hamish: “My iPhone’s headphones’ rubber coating was starting to come off, and since I recognised from past experience that the jack was also about to go, while reinforcing both of these I also added a piece of double-sided Velcro so I’d have an integrated cable-tie!”

Matthew and Luke both repaired their laptops – I love how two completely separate people did the same repair and both chose orange !!
Luke also repaired his adaptor: “one of the handy flippy-out ear tabs on the mains adaptor, which allow you to coil the cable neatly, snapped off a while ago, leaving me to wrap the cord around the body of the adaptor – which is a pain. So I’ve moulded a new ear into the space left by the broken-off part and am hoping that when it has fully cured that it will actually work. Couldn’t resist inlaying some left-over sugru into the recessed apple logo on the adaptor to coordinate the whole thing with the laptop…”

Chris dove in and made his first ever hack – repaired his snapped curtain rail !

Brilliant ! What’s going to be your first sugru hack?

Kent is an awesome maker we met at Bay Area Maker Faire. Here he shows how to make an ipad stand that turns it into a neat little desktop that can be angled as you like:

I wanted to add a suction cup from a Garmin GPS system to a PanaVise base. The ball was too small to clamp into the PanaVise so I added a coating of sugru to size it up larger.

I covered the sugru with a plastic wrap so it would not adhere to the jaws of the PanaVise. I placed the plastic wrapped sugru into the PanaVise jaws and tightened to shape the sugru, and carefully removed the plastic wrap.

The PanaVise iPad holder – I now have a way of holding the iPad higher and at any angle I want.

Inspired !
Kent’s website is http://www.kentkb.com, check it out!

Inspired by these, Matthew made this awesome framed mount for his fossil. He explains how he did it:
“I used two 5g packets of black Sugru to make a custom mount for a fossil specimen I got at the Tucson gem and mineral show last February. I put three screws into the wood backboard to give the Sugru something to hold onto. Then I covered the fossil edges in plastic wrap to keep the Sugru from sticking. After I formed the Sugru around the screws and over the edges of the fossil I let it dry overnight. I finished by sliding the fossil out, removing the plastic, and sliding the fossil back in. Fits like a glove.”

Awesome Matthew!

Mag was driving last week when here iTrip connection started shorting out… she discovered a loose cable. That could have been just a simple sugru fix, but look what happened instead !!
“Fortunately I had Sugru in my purse, …what modern girl doesn’t? I cut open the package with my multi-tool (also in my purse) and started the repair. Since I’d happened to have written a blog post earlier that morning about the fantastic phosphorescent hack featured on the Sugru blog, it occurred to me that black-on-black repairs have no drama. So I took some eyeshadow out of my purse and rubbed it into the Sugru surface, creating an iridescent finish. I love the look!
I had extra Sugru left over so I hacked the back of my iPhone case with a Tree of Life design to give it more grippiness, and once again iridescent-ized the finish. It’s a great way to sex up a monochromatic Sugru hack don’t you think?”
I think it looks fantastic Mag! How is it holding up to wear? Does the eyeshadow bind into the sugru surface?
Love it !!

Amy volunteered with sugru at Maker Faire Bay Area (she’s a really cool knitting-crazy person), she said she never thought of mixing and marbling colours until she saw people doing it there.
And now she made the perfect hack with it !!

I met Alvin at the Maker Faire last weekend, and he said he wanted to try adding phosphorescent powder to sugru to make it glow in the dark – well he tried it and this the result!

He says: “I tried out the glow powder. I added a relatively large volume of orange glow phosphorescent powder to a pack of orange sugru. After it hardened, there was some loss in elasticity as compared with “unpowdered” sugru. The glow picture is overexposed and the actual glow is more muted but it’s noticeable.”
So so cool! Alvin, is the loss of elasticity enough to be a problem, or is it ok?

I’ve been meaning to post this hack for ages! Isn’t it cool?
It’s by a fun guy called Trevor who we met at Maker Faire Newcastle back a few weeks ago. He wrapped the sugru around a pen, and stopped it sticking by moving it every so often. Then the next day, it was a nice springy curly cable tidy ! If you’d like to make one of these for yourself, I’d recommend using either soapy water on the pen or covering the pen in cling film to stop the sugru sticking .

Toolgirl made this beautiful hack. (and the bit left came in handy too – read her blogpost here!)

Florian sent back this picture and I loved the texture, so I asked what he used. He said:
“simple! make a little sugru ball. lay it where the foot belongs.take a screw. breathe on it. press down. done!”
I got inspired and used the same technique on my squash racket.
Anyone else found a good tool to create texture with?

Every month (starting now!) we award 5 packs of sugru to the most inspiring hack or repair. The first award goes to Cary for hacks with a level of detail and decoration we haven’t seen before !
We loved @piscues juggling clubs for his free style hacking, Jeremy’s iphone stand (we’re also excited that he made a site for his sugru hacks!), Radiorental’s mintyboost phone charger and Peter’s repaired canyon boots for his ‘test it out’ approach… but in the end we got giddy about Cary’s crazy twisted hacks that feel like they could be props from a David Cronenberg movie!