Salaric

I’ve not really kept up with the updates on the knitting! I’ve been going for almost two years now! I didn’t manage the sock challenge but will maybe reattempt next year! At the moment I am trying to finish off the Berry Bear blanket in time for Mary’s 3rd birthday but the circular needle is breaking so I am attempting a sugru fix with the knitting insitu (wish me luck!). But I also have a little niece due in August so have started knitting baby toys - just six balls to start with and then maybe a duck!

I am also knitting a toy for my eldest - it is going to be a creeper which is a creature from a game called Minecraft which the whole family are a bit obsessed with!

I tend to knit whilst watching films or at festivals. I really enjoy it but can’t over do it as it acts up my RSI which sucks

Incase anyone wants to follow/befriend me I am on Ravelry and I have an etsy shop where I sell off excess!

Also I hope to soon release the patterns for the molecular knitting which I put together for Science and Engineering Week earlier this year. I have lots of ideas (as always) of stuff to knit but am trying to finish projects off before starting new ones though I am going to attempt to knit Christmas presents and stuff this year so we shall see - I’ve packed away the olympic knitting and wont be getting it out until the Winter Olympics.

I did a lot of knitting around Christmas for friends weddings which was fun

This wonderful knitted poem was on display at the Cheltenham Poetry Festival - it is hung in the stair well of the Waterstones in town. It was knitted by the local knitting groups as part of an initiative set up by Centre Arts. The poem is Jonh Hegley’s The Price of Art in Luton from his collection Dog.

There is also a knitted homeless guy and his dog sitting on the blanket who are full of character.

A few days back on Google Plus I saw a post about a drawing challenge - now I was in the middle of not only trying to run a poetry writing drive but trying to do the drive myself as well as plan things for a science-art exhibition this month and start gearing up for festival season - so I thought I would join in

Insane yes!

The challenge as set by Margareth Osju and is to draw 100 birds in 100 days - I am off course already lagging behind but hope to catch up!

There is a Google Plus circle and Margareth’s blog.

I shall be posting the pictures on my Picture Books and Illustrations blog Orange Monster.

This first one has been done as a request for my husband, most of the drawings will not be this style at all. The picture is called Gaia and is part of my visual poetry journal.

I have joined a site called Pinterest after some nagging from friends who want to see my cake pops on there. It is a lovely platform for sharing inspirational images and useful tutorials. I’ve only been on their about a week but am having lots of fun posting links to my websites - it picks up photos from the blog post but links back to your site. I have also been re-pinning some of the fantastic images and useful things on there. Unlike Facebooks share facility it is easy to tack back where the image has come from and it collects together all the pins (me adding things) and repins.

The pins/repins are all catagorised into boards which you give titles too. So far I have Gaia which are about nature and the Earth, Magiks which is pretty stuff with a bit of spiritual thrown in, Body Art; which is all the tattoos and nail painting and the like, Make and Do which is craft and DIY. Lastly there is one I’ve named Food and Drink which is about food and drink and parties

My user name is 5affy (Saffy with a five instead of the S).

I was very excited to find that people had already shared some of my photos on their - mainly from this and my cooking blog

I have a new camera thanks to birthday money from family. It is the best one I’ve ever had and was £80 reduced from £125. I had been wanting to take my photography forward slightly and was finding the old one very frustrating with it’s lack of function and optics. It was not as good as the first digital camera we had that we lost during the floods but it sustained me for 4 years of happy snapping and many an arty shot!

My photography site has been running for just over a year now and the more I look at my photos the more I see how I could improve them. It is still not one where you can remove the lenses (I don’t think anyway - I still need to read the manual).

I mainly use photography to illustrate my blogs - not least of which is this very blog. I take photos of the different stages of making things to help illustrate a point. I also like creating art within the photo itself and this has led me to be able to just go through my stock of photos for album covers and things.

The camera is also essential for the production of my Wiggly Pet stories or web-comic.

I am looking forward to playing lots with the camera

It’s 14 megapixel 18 X optical and has a bit sticking out the side to hold it which has already reduced the shake I tend to get on photos without flash and the pics it can take at low light levels is amazing

I made this little Visual Poetry booklet as a source of inspiration to other poets and writers I meet up with. I looked through magazines and selected the words I wanted - chosen for what they said and the type face used. I then cut strips of card using the bell scissors out of my shape cutting scissors. I punched a whole in the corner of each strip using a whole punch, using pritt stick I glued the words onto the card strips and selected some lovely varigated coloured eyelash wool which I used to tie it together.

Because I am running the WoPoWriMo (World Poetry Writing Month) website this year and am going to be meeting up with writers I’ve had my Tea pictures turned into postcards and stickers. I’m really pleased with how they have turned out

I love the thought of helping people with craft and discovered a few years ago the Craft-Activist Movement which is interesting in itself.

So when I saw a call for workshop ideas to help show people how important plants are to the planet I put forward my Upcycled Flowers project - it allows a talk on plants and is recycling at the same time!

I am excited that it is going to be used in the Botanical Gardens through out the UK

Yay! Go me!

We love Sugru which is a putty like stuff that you can form into shapes, sticks to just about everything and is flexible - it is basically a funky silicon rubber from my understanding. When we first heard about it we couldn’t get hold of any and so had to wait as they had sold out but the wait was worth it!

Since then we have used it for tonnes of things from embedding electronics in hair pieces, making creatures for the visually impaired, fixing fridges, shoes, adding little feet and buffers to all things electronic, fixing broken mugs and making jewellery. I plan to fix my electric guitar with it though need to see how it reacts to having glitter added to it!

But it is more important to me than it’s usefulness. To me Sugru represented something more, when it appeared I was struggling with both scientists and artists telling me that there was no cross over between the two areas. My tag line o twitter is that I am The Artist Scientist or Artistic Scientist and to see this product - the result of something an artist (ok design student) had produced, being so wonderful for science/tech and artistic endevours.

This was the sort of fusion of art and science that I was sure should exist but was being told didn’t and my examples of how the modle builders of film dinosaurs had ended up solving the mystery of joints and movement that paleaontologists has been struggling with was falling on deaf ears.

So I turned up at The Cheltenham Science Festival debate on science verses art that year with my sugru bracelet and my ESA t-shirt I’d won for Celestial Montage and found that people didn’t seem to really cae on either side of the divide, they have their opinions of the others and that is that. Stuck in the middle as all ways I gritted my teeth and looked for more science-art related things and found it under the title science communication.

Recently Sugru posted their life story so far and asked what inspired others, so I told them - they inspired me! They provided the evidence I needed that science and art can create wonderful productive and helpful things by learning from each other, they are an example of a dream that was followed and they provided the very material I had been trying to work out how to make myself - I was mucking around with resins casting, silicon mould making and fimo in order to get something like sugru and I was failing and could not make the projects I wanted. I hadn’t even thought of applications beyond my own ends and there WOP! appeared sugru ready to go and so I went and so did Al and he has even written up one of his repairs/hacks for their website!

Just before we moved to the new house about a year ago, I came up with the idea of Lojbani Chicken, a character who would help my little girls or anybody else understand and learn Lojban (a constructed language) but I wanted it to be more than that. I wanted some sort of all languages web-comic thing which is obviously very complex and so it never happened - there were some biro sketches in the back of a note book and that was that.

Then last week I saw it was Lojban’s 25th birthday and so I sat down and revisited the idea of my chicken. The result was more biro sketches and Mother Lang and her two daughters Coni and Nat, they live on a farm where Lojbani chicken is one of the animals.

A full first story will hopefully be appearing on my Wiggly Pets blog soon

Once the image above is digitally edited (this is just what I russeled up using my new birthday pens and colouring pencils.) there will be speech bubbles saying such things as fi’i - meaning welcome.

Other existing characters include Esperanto Cat and Toki Pona kitten. I haven’t decided yet what creatures should represent any of the natural languages - mainly due to worrying about offending people :/ I might do something like have made up creatures for natural languages and real animals for the constructed languages - suggestions welcome