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 🙂
It is a new year and I am assessing my blogs and what not and I see I haven’t been posting about my art and craft properly for a while – so some back blogging and stuff needs to happen 🙂
Apart from that I have quiet a full year planned – I am hoping to be booked for more festivals and am going to be running a Science Art Exhibition at Centre Arts in Cheltenham.
I’ve signed up with Etsy and plan to put items I’ve made plus tutorials on their 🙂
And then there are the books I want to make. I’ve been mucking around with various Print On Demand things and have three books I want to create were Art and Craft are concerned.
1) Junk Art and Upcycling
2) Salaric’s 100 Things to Make and Do
3) Fantasmagrams and Illustrations
The third one sort of already exists on my PhotoBox but is very expensive so I am hoping to get ones printed that are going to be more financially viable 🙂
Craft wise I have decided to give up on Craft Fayres I am just loosing money everytime or braking even for lots of effort. I will stick to running workshops and try out etsy 🙂
Drawing/art wise I am trying to do more illustration this year – last year I managed to finish off The Little Book of Spoogy Poetry etc… but I want to work on my comic book for my writing. Drawing projects are:
1) It’s Raining (a picture book I have half drawn)
2) What Can I See Under The Sea (most of the pictures to this are almost finished and it should have been finished years ago!)
3) Percival’s Christmas Wish which I am doing to raise money for Shelter
4) Revalation – a comic or graphic novel based on the novels I am writing, I scripted it for Scriptfrenzy a couple of years ago 🙂
5) I want to re-draw and draw more of my Inspira pictures and maybe do something with them 🙂
Knitting and yarn craft wise I am refining my up cycled ‘knitting machine’ and still knitting away – the first part of the year is going to focus on knitting molecules and then poetry for various events 🙂
Feeling very happy about all of this and I’m sure there will be random papier machie and stuff thrown in 🙂