Gift wrapping and Ciphers!
Hey Reader,
I know you are sitting there in the first week of February reading this and wondering why I am posting about Christmas gifts. It is because I am great at blogging and search term optimization. Just kidding, in reality it is because it is my blog and I do what I want. So there.
This Christmas, I wanted to get really fancy with the gift giving. Last year, due to obsessions with the television show Gravity Falls, I learned a lot about ciphers and coded messages. I wrapped gifts and covered them completely in complicated ciphers that took weeks to solve.
This year, I wanted to take a slightly different tactic
and make the gift even more interactive. I created this cipher wheel and you can too! Print it out and make your own!
Here is how to make it:
1. Print out a copy and place your paper on a piece of cardstock. Then cut out the circle, mark the center of your cardstock with an awl (or a push pin like I did).
2. Cut the out outer ring and use the smaller circle you are left with to make a smaller circle in cardstock.
3. Repeat until you have 4 circles in cardstock.
4. Glue or tape the rings of letters or symbols to the outside of the corresponding card stock circles.
When you are done, you will have a complete cipher wheel. I used a collectible pin to hold it all together as a secret bonus gift, but a brad would work just as well. It is very important that your circles are cut cleanly and that you are marking the exact center. Each wheel needs to spin independently, and if the center hole is not perfect it won't line up right.
Congratulations, you now have a cipher wheel. Lets simplify right now and just use the two outermost wheels. The outer wheel is the alphabet - obviously. For the ciphers I made, the outer wheel represents the final message. To encode it, replace all the letters with the letter under it on the inner wheel. So, in the picture above: A=I and B=A and so on. If I wanted to write "JoshPrime," it would be "LsncJvexe."
The cool thing about this is because the wheels spin independently, you can change the code by rotating the inner wheel. Then the person trying to crack the code needs to know where the inner wheel goes in order to understand your messages.
Without the wheel it is pretty hard to figure out what the messages state without having a lot of text to work with. If you code a long passage of text, it can be solved by looking for word patterns - but that's a big job.
The same principle applies to the other two wheels. The exception is that with the numbers you have a lot of choices. Since no number is repeated, you can use either two digit number for your code. This makes your code even harder to crack because every letter has two possible codes. You could also get really fancy and use all the wheels at once. Then every letter would have 4 possible codes for it, making solving extremely challenging without the wheel.
I don't want my codes to be completely unbreakable though, so I won't be doing that. I did want the gift to be a little challenging though. As you can see, I put most of the gifts in this shoe box and hid one of the wheels inside under the wrapping paper. I made sure there was a clue in my ciphers about needing to open the shoe box to crack certain ciphers. I also gave a clue about hot chocolate, so that I could hide the final wheel on the hot chocolate box.
It made for a really fun mini scavenger hunt, and since there was no reason to believe there even was a third and fourth wheel, it created a nice surprise AFTER the gifts were already all opened.
I also found these awesome lock pick sets and clear acrylic locks. It is on theme and a really unique toy. I tied the box of presents shut and locked it with the clear padlock so that there would be another layer of silliness for this gift. I know that making puzzles won't be the ideal gift for everyone, but it certainly made opening gifts exciting!
Keep making cool stuff!
Until next time,
JoshPrime
I know you are sitting there in the first week of February reading this and wondering why I am posting about Christmas gifts. It is because I am great at blogging and search term optimization. Just kidding, in reality it is because it is my blog and I do what I want. So there.This Christmas, I wanted to get really fancy with the gift giving. Last year, due to obsessions with the television show Gravity Falls, I learned a lot about ciphers and coded messages. I wrapped gifts and covered them completely in complicated ciphers that took weeks to solve.
This year, I wanted to take a slightly different tactic
and make the gift even more interactive. I created this cipher wheel and you can too! Print it out and make your own!
Here is how to make it:
1. Print out a copy and place your paper on a piece of cardstock. Then cut out the circle, mark the center of your cardstock with an awl (or a push pin like I did).
2. Cut the out outer ring and use the smaller circle you are left with to make a smaller circle in cardstock.
3. Repeat until you have 4 circles in cardstock.
4. Glue or tape the rings of letters or symbols to the outside of the corresponding card stock circles.
When you are done, you will have a complete cipher wheel. I used a collectible pin to hold it all together as a secret bonus gift, but a brad would work just as well. It is very important that your circles are cut cleanly and that you are marking the exact center. Each wheel needs to spin independently, and if the center hole is not perfect it won't line up right.
Congratulations, you now have a cipher wheel. Lets simplify right now and just use the two outermost wheels. The outer wheel is the alphabet - obviously. For the ciphers I made, the outer wheel represents the final message. To encode it, replace all the letters with the letter under it on the inner wheel. So, in the picture above: A=I and B=A and so on. If I wanted to write "JoshPrime," it would be "LsncJvexe."
The cool thing about this is because the wheels spin independently, you can change the code by rotating the inner wheel. Then the person trying to crack the code needs to know where the inner wheel goes in order to understand your messages.
Without the wheel it is pretty hard to figure out what the messages state without having a lot of text to work with. If you code a long passage of text, it can be solved by looking for word patterns - but that's a big job.The same principle applies to the other two wheels. The exception is that with the numbers you have a lot of choices. Since no number is repeated, you can use either two digit number for your code. This makes your code even harder to crack because every letter has two possible codes. You could also get really fancy and use all the wheels at once. Then every letter would have 4 possible codes for it, making solving extremely challenging without the wheel.
I don't want my codes to be completely unbreakable though, so I won't be doing that. I did want the gift to be a little challenging though. As you can see, I put most of the gifts in this shoe box and hid one of the wheels inside under the wrapping paper. I made sure there was a clue in my ciphers about needing to open the shoe box to crack certain ciphers. I also gave a clue about hot chocolate, so that I could hide the final wheel on the hot chocolate box.
It made for a really fun mini scavenger hunt, and since there was no reason to believe there even was a third and fourth wheel, it created a nice surprise AFTER the gifts were already all opened.I also found these awesome lock pick sets and clear acrylic locks. It is on theme and a really unique toy. I tied the box of presents shut and locked it with the clear padlock so that there would be another layer of silliness for this gift. I know that making puzzles won't be the ideal gift for everyone, but it certainly made opening gifts exciting!
Keep making cool stuff!
Until next time,
JoshPrime
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