Salaric

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 🙂

This vase of flowers was made from an old copy of the magazine New Scientist.

Items needed for this project:

1. an old magazine

2. Pritt Stick type glue

3. Copy dex or decoupage glue

4. Scissors

5. Cleaned and de-labeled tin can (if you are doing the craft project with kids then it is advisable to put a strip of heavy duty tape like gaffa tape along the top of the can and fold it down either side to cover any sharp edges).

6. On old jumper or scrap cloth

First of all I removed the pages and cut some of them in half across the text so I had ‘fat’ rectangles rather than ‘thin’ ones. I put these to one side and then cut some other pages into quarters.

I took a quarter and smothered one side of it in Pritt Stick and then rolled in up over itself to make a tube. Some people may find this hard to do in which case a wooden skewer or bamboo stick can be used to wrap the paper around. Those who do a lot of paper craft may have a special tool for this but it is. Be careful at what angle you roll the paper at as it produces different styles and strengths of straw. I prefer rolling from one corner at an approximately 45 degree angle.

This creates paper construction straws relatively short for sticking to the side of your tin can. How many straws you will need will depend on the size of your can and on how tightly you rolled the straws, the tighter the better to be honest. When you get to the end of rolling a straw it is important to put just a little bit of glue on the tip before laying it flat on the side of the straw If you do not do this you will have a flap on you straw which will get caught and slowly unravel it.

I think covered the tin can in copydex glue and wrapped a a half sheet of magazine around it. this didn’t quiet go all the way around so I suck a second one on making sure that there was some paper sticking up over the rim of the can.

I then snipped the over hang of paper with a cm gap inbetween each cut so I had lots of tags sticking up. I then glued this down over the rim of the tin can.

I then had a tin can covered in magazine paper.

I then snipped off on of the pointy ends on all the paper straws I had made. And using the copydex still began to glue them onto the side of the tin can in an upwards direction.

I left the straws pointy at one end and different lengths to imitate actual straw that grows and has been used for making corn dollies and things for centuries but you can trim them down and maybe make a rim for the vase if you like.

I then made the flowers to go inside the vase, today this I cut more pages into quarters and then folded each sheet into quarters. I then cut a leaf or petal shape out of the rectangle of folded paper being careful not to cut too near one corner which is where the middle of the sheet actually is! This gave me a nice four petalled flower. I used the Pritt Stick to lay two or three lots of petals together with the petals off set slightly (I put the second sheet down so that the petals were inbetween the first sheets petals). I placed the petal sheets over a loop I’d made with my thumb and fore finger and pushed the center of the flower in, I pinched the pushed through bit and twisted it which made the flower bit of the flowers.

For the stems I simply made larger construction straws using the half sheets I’d cut at the beginning. I snipped of the top pointy bit and using a blob of copy dex glued the flowers to the stems and left them to dry for a bit.

I then cut a strip of brown fabric from an old top and tied it around the vase and then placed the flowers in it. I ran this as a workshop at the Green Unconference in Long Ashton which went really well.

Yesterday I attended the first ever Green Unconference in Long Ashton near Bristol, organised by Daniel Lewis. It was an amazing setting with brilliant speakers – I only wish more of the people I’d invited had turned up but apparently most of them hadn’t seen the FaceBook invite until the event was actually taking place 🙁

I have come away saddened but optermistic and re-energised about the stuff I do to try and be a bit more friendly to the planet. Everything from government policies to how to garden to how to save/use waste food to feed those who are increasingly needing to use the food banks in this country was covered. I myself did an Upcycling and Junk Art workshop – complete with a mini talk and slides.

It was the most gorgous setting for a workshop and I had my visual poetry stuff with me as well which a couple of people stayed on to do as a mini workshop. The workshop was making a vase of flowers out of old magazines.

My little girls were about as well behaved as I think I could realistically expect :/ I think Jeany eat most of the buffet before we officially had stopped for lunch!

I’m glad that people are taking on board that the average family can not afford or percieves at the least that they cannot afford organic food and that steps are being taken towards sorting this out. I wish I had managed to catch a few more of the talks but they clashed with my workshop and we had to leave early due to having triple booked ourselves for the day :/

I am going to attempt write up a few more of my junk art and upcycling projects. In making the slide show I realised I had a lot of material which I may try to collect together into at minimum an ebook. I have had people asking me to do this for a while now but haven’t had time what with all those workshops and other publishing projects on the go 🙂

And talking of e-books don’t forget to download your copy of The Little Book of Spoogy Poetry before midnight on the 31st of October! Click the image below for your free PDF.

Image is a link to a free PDF of the book!

A few years ago to entertain my then just turned 4 yr old I wrote a series of kids poems and we made a little book with me handwriting the poems and drawing some quick pictures in felt tip pen. My little girl liked it so much she took it to school with her where to my embarassement the head master saw it and thought it was great.

I typed up the poems and took photos of the book assembly – for this blog and thought that was the end off it all – especially when the book got a cup of water spilt on it (much to my annoyance and the tears of a little one). But I then ended up writing a Little Book of Poetry for all sorts of other events and festivals like christmas and the birth of my second child and to stop the heart ache of the first ones destruction I scanned the pictures I drew.

People kept telling me that I should release the books but I thought I should digitise the pictures so I spent ages trying to draw the pumpkins and things but I found that it just came out looking like a cheap hobbled together image and that was not what I wanted. Then I came to the realisation that this was not needed and that the felt pen look was a good for kids books. So I drew pictures and have run them through a few filters and things to clean them up etc… (I found that different sketch books have slightly different coloured paper in them which needed to be sorted etc…).

But the up shot of all this is that tomorrow I am having a virtual launch party of an e-book (PDF) of The Little Book of Spoogy Poetry. I will be giving things away and there will be author interactions etc… The PDF will be available for FREE until midnight on the 31st of October 🙂

Enjoy.

Last year not that many months after starting to knit I decided to try and knit a witch for Halloween. However I was still knitting it two weeks after Halloween so I popped all the bits in a box and this October I got them out and stitched it altogether and stuffed it.

My little girl has called her Anna and is now inseperable – it did have a hat but that is already missing!

She now wants me to knit an entire witch family to go with Anna! I mean while am attempting a pumpkin for her younger sister! I got the pattern from an old how to knit toys book – I will attempt to dig it out and review it/amazon link it at some point.

I am also thinking I might have to write some stories to go with this toy 🙂

I wanted Mary to be able to make something for Halloween and she loves monsters so I had already cut up an old jumper for Jean to make a trick or treat bag with so I just used one of the sleeves to make a little cuddly monster for Mary.

I sewed across the bit where I had chopped it off the jumper. The almost all the way across the bit just below the cuff. I then turned it inside out and stuff it, arranging the cuff for a tufty hair look.

I then sewed up the remaining gap so the stuffing wouldn’t come back out and fixed the cuff in place (this was quiet a tricky thing todo so not sure I would repeat it).

I then got my little girl to stick self adhesive monster eyes made of felt on it. Obviously these can be a choking hazard so I sewed them on securely after wards but she enjoyed being able to take part.

October is coming and that means my little one is already excited about Halloween, I informed her we were not buying a replacement trick or treat bag but that she would be making one – she was really enthusiastic which I hadn’t quiet expected her being 7 now and getting to the point of rolling eyes and saying ‘oh mummy!’

We found rummaged through our black sack of cloths that are stained and wholey and she found my old furry purple jumper so we cut a rectangular chunk out of it (well almost rectangular – she did the cutting!). We folded it in half and she stitched it together up the two sides. I let her do it free form and she found the problem of the fabric shifting around so we lernt about tacking and then she did grate big stitches and learnt that this wasn’t a good idea and then we did some back stitch too which she prefered the results of but took too long for her concentration span. Once the sewing was finished we turned it inside out so the stitching was on the inside and not to be seen!

We then cut strips of jumper and plated them together to make a handle which we sewed on. Jean Later added some felt eyes to the bag.

All the sewing was done with a large bodkin needle and yarn/acrylic wool making it easier for her to handle and for me to see what she’d done wrong and there for to untangle her!

The theme of my little girls party this year was Dr Who and to my horror I could not find anything in the the shops for theming the party 🙁 Now we had been hunting themed presents which would go out as sort of decorations – little darleks and things and I found cake toppers on line but too late. So I ended up having to make cakes and decorations myself.

For the card Tardises (Tardii?) I cut out blue rectangles of card, little squares of white paper and little trapisiums of yellow card.

Using a dark blue felt tip pen I draw a line across the top and then a line going down from that cutting the rectangle in half. I then used pritt stick to glue on some of the white squares as windows and then drew the door handle, keyhole and door panels in. Using a silver metallic paint pen I then wrote Police Box on the top and stuck on the yellow card as a light.

These came in handy all over the place! Including attatched at a piece of finger knitting I had strung across the room as a sort of bunting!

This was a great project for the kids to copy as well 🙂 Just before they all sat down to watch the new Dr Who box sets Jean had been given for her birthday (along with sonic screw drivers, Dr Who Books and an annoying talking card that says you have to cellebrate or be exterminated (she wants to know if I want her to get the card as I’ve written the words down not exactly right! I have said no but she has gone to get it anyway NOOOOOOO!))