Salaric

This is not one of my greatest cards ever but I thought I’d share it with you anyway – I made it for my parents 30th Wedding Anniversary. The theme was Ruby so I picked out reds or as close as I could. The card blank came from a kit I picked up in the Pound Shop.

I used:

One white, square card blank
Metallic paint pens
A small square of red card
3D white fabric heart
Purple crystal/gem stickers (I didn’t have any red)

I started off by sticking the red square in the upper right hand corner of the card, leaving a nice boarder of white.

I then stuck on the heart, in the corner of the red square.

I then added the writing in with the paint pen which unfortunatly was a bit glooper than I was expecting. I then constructed letters out of the gems for the last part.

After Christmas and birthdays and the like my husbands family expect Thankyou Cards – this was a new one on me as in my family you just say thanks to each other. None the less I struck on a good way of making thankyou notes and occupying a small child at the same time.

First off I got some sugar paper/mounting card and some poster paints and just got Jean to paint on one side of the card – I went for red and green card as these where Christmas thankyous. This worked best as a hand squishing and swerling paint excersise so was extrememly messy.

Once dry I cut out the thankyous we’d written on plain white paper – they could have been printed but I like hand writing notes. I then cut them out and using little loops of cellotape stuck them to the card on the none decorated side. I then used a paper gliotine to cut out the card as a boarder to the letters. This was suprisingly effective – especially as I made sure they would all fit into the various sizes of envalopes we have!

I think this would have worked better with double sided tape and perhapse the more uniform sizing of printing the letters.

Cheltenham is famed for its festivals and has a Science Festival ironically as I am a trained scientist (geology) I found out about the Science Festival last year from a poet!

This year there was an ecological art space organised with the Environment Agency where the Biologist and Artist Dr Lizzie Burns and her friend Matt where helping people explore the natural world through art. Getting children especially or so it seemed to me! to think about the world and our impact of the environment.

My little girl had a great time painting our garden onto the big white column just outside the Environment Agency Cafe. I had to label things as being 3yrs old some of the things were not that obvious. There were pots of clay and a watering can of water to make a ‘paint’ out of the clay and then lots of paint brushes!

Lizzie said it was great to work big like this and I felt it contrasted very well with Matt’s seeds – he had a table with different types of seeds on it – wild banana, seeds that float on the sea, a tub of 20 different tree seeds and so on. He then gave the children the option of making seeds out of clay themselves or drawing some. There were two colours of clay red/brown and white clay.

There where lots colouring pens and things avaliable for the children to colour there seeds and decorate them if they wished – my three year olds seeds were basically clay blobs with no colour on them but hey she tried 🙂

I am myself known (on twitter at least! plus in various poetry and science groups) as the Artistic Scientist or the Scientific Artist – you choose because I can’t/wont! So I was very excited to find someone who not only is trying to cross the percieved boundaries between these two areas but is being active and successful with it. She runs workshops on lots of fun things using art to interest people in science and to explore science giving it back the sense of adventure that is often lost in modernity.

She also makes fantastic molecular jewellery which is an idea me and Ella (Chemist come writer/poet/photographer) during our undergraduates but we never got around to doing anything about it – the closes I got is making tertiary and quarternary structures out of my wire working and thinking about protiens :). Lizzies work is bueatful and she embroiders ties and things.

If I had more money than I currently do I would get some of the jewellery for Ella as a congratulations presant on completing her PhD! (Ella if I ever get out of debt name your molecule!).

My Geo-Vases are probably the closest I come in the visual arts to this kind of thing (not sure that loo roll hubbles and pompom comets count!).

This week I went to Stroud and discovered there were two arty exhibitions on – one of them was in the church by the car park and the other was in JRool Cafe 12 Union Street, Stroud, GL5 2HE.

The one in the church had lots of Christart in it which appears to be contempary religous paintings and the like – some of them were very good.

One of the artists paintings seemed to be more – rural type subject matter which I’m sure I’ve seem at other things around here (probably in Painswick). The artists name was Christine Gaunt and she was running the exhibit when I went in.

The second exhibit was IMPRESS ’09 and is work by Caroline Tate and Annie Hobson. This is part of the Print Making Festival 2009. This was really interesting as they have write ups on the different printing techniques and they run courses. I wish I had enough money to go one some of these as they look fun 🙂

There were lots of prints hanging on the walls including a giant circle of butterflies!

The exhibit is open until the 28th of March 2009.

I went to Tech Adventure at the Trinity Arts Centre last weekend. This event brings together computer programmers, inventors, roboticists and people who generally like to make things.

Obviously I didn’t understand a lot of the technical detail of the projects that people bought along to display but I could see potential there for the arts and craft community. For a start there was a thing called a Reprap which is a 3D printer. This has huge potential and is designed so that you can basically build your own and then then get it to build ones for your friends. It built the shapes up out of plastic thread that was being fed into it. The shapes it can do are currently limited but even they are quite impressive and would have use in craft projects. Then I found out that it’s the same plastic that milk bottles are made out of so it could have huge implications for home recycling.

The man who had brought it was discussing various things such as how to build up shapes with overhangs on them and mentioned the words ‘sugar paste’. Apparently they have a nozzle that does sugar paste to build up support structures to get more intracate shapes and then they wash the sugar paste off. I then got very excited and asked if you could build things like the glass they had there out of the sugar paste – completely – he said yes!

Here are some of the things it made:

This would be fantastic for cake decorating I feel. He said the only issue with that would be that after an hour the sugar paste turns to syrup and the nozzles stop working which is something I think could definitly be worked around, though the shape you are making is perfectly fine!

A little more probing on our part found that though they had not done high melting point things like glass they thought it would be useful for ceramics which is cool 🙂 Also one of the things that really bugs me about the lost wax process in metal casting is that you spend ages making the wax object and you can only get one casting out of it. This machine alters that as you could have the object saved as a computer file and it would build as many as you wanted out of the wax!

There were so many other things there too and the crossover of people who do techy stuff and those who make/draw is phonomenally high. This I believe is because to make craft objects you need to be a sort of engineer even if you don’t realise it and to draw good pictures you need something similar. To come up with your own projects you need to be creative and in order for the technical people to do what they do they have to be creative – creativity is a layer above science and art or technology and craft, or poetry and programming.

The dichotomy between the sciences and arts does not really exist, it is an artifact of our society – good artists tend to be grounded in some sort of science, tech, or maths whether they realise it or not!

I went to a fantastic talk on this at last year’s Cheltenham Literature Festival.

I even read out some of my poetry at this and one more Wiggly Pet also got a good home. It went to the first person to tell me how many programming languages I had in the poem! I actually gave two away though as there was a little boy in a tigger suit who wanted one so desperately.

Another thing that came out of this is that there is a Maker Faire this month – 14-15 March at the Newcastle Science Fair. I can’t go but it looks interesting.

Also it is because of this that I am now considering making special funky cases for computers though as I am obsessed with paper mâché at the moment, I am having to resist the urge to do every project in that medium!

This week I went to the Cheltenham Art Gallery and Museum, Clarence Street, Cheltenham. In gallery 13 they always have special exhibits which at the moment is the Alphabet of Trees.

This was quite an interesting exhibition with what I thought of as quite dark monochrome pictures with suggestive shapes lurking within them. Each print corresponds to a short poem, each of which represents a word to do with plants and trees starting with a different letter of the alphabet. The poems, to my mind, were also dark.

The poems belong to Philip Sharpe and the pictures were a visualisation of these, created by Andrew Judd. I think it was thought-provoking in itself but I also liked the explanation of how the pictures were created.

From the information available about the prints at the museum they were created by relief printing using two blocks – a main or key block, which I assume provided the main body of each picture, and a second tonal block. The main block was cut into lino (linoleum) whilst the secondary blocks used a variety of media such as:

• Wood cuts

• An etching technique involving marking the surface of a lino block with caustic soda – at the museum it said the surface was ‘bitten’ with the soda

• Sand or salt stuck to a block which creates a texture when used with some sort of acrylics

The prints were based on charcoal landscapes that were turned into mono-images from which the printing blocks were cut.

If you happen to be around Cheltenham then it’s worth a look – the museum’s free. Unfortunately this display finishes on the 8th of March. There is apparently a book for sale containing the pictures so once I have sorted out my Amazon account I will add it to this post! Along with more info on printing.

At the moment the Museum and Art Gallery in Cheltenham has an exhibite called Medieval Machines which I took my two year old to. Whilst there I became intreged by this loom.

The long threads attatched to the frame are called the wrap – these are the ones running along the leanth of the loom that you weave the wool in and out of. The way this loom is set up there is a treddle which appears to be the treadle bar at the bottom though I wouldn’t swear to that and a heddle which I think was the flate panel of wood in the middle that had the string running though it, alternatively in slots or wholes. When the peadle was pressed down it raised this panel so that the strings going through the wholes where raised whilst those in the slots stayed in the same place. This ment that instead of weaving in and out, over and under each alternate thread you could just pushed the thread though the middle and then either put your foot on or off of the pedle and repeat the process.

The presance of the heddle is too allow both hands to be free for moving the thread backwards and forwards.

The resulting weave though some ones obviously not followed the instructions here!

There was also a piece of wood with rounded ‘teeth’ cut out of it along one side – this was the comb. This was used to push the threads down into place so that they sat flush against the previous row. The would make the fabric far neater I think.

The wool its self was wrapped around a wooden plank with two longer slightly curved pieces of wood either side that looked like runners on a sled. This is called the shuttle and makes moving the thread through alot easier. The wall that was rapped around the shuttle I think is called the weft.

There was also some information about the general history of weaving and looms. He is what I learned:

Apparently weaving begain with farming in the Neolithic which was about 10, 000 years ago. Origonally looms where upright with the long threads known as the wrap hanging down weighted by stones to keep them tuaght.

The clever teddle/heddle thing appeared to be a middle ages thing and allowed better efficiency with both hands being used to move the shuttle (wooden block with the thread, wool etc… rapped around it). Later on several heddle rods – the middle panel thing with the slots and wholes in (I think) where used to make complecated patterns.

This next bit is sort of about textile history in general but I thought it was quiet interesting in a handicraft sort of way!

Textiles it turns out were the most important industry apart from agriculture in medieval times. This was especially the case in places like Northern History and Flanders (which I think might have been part of Spain).

England origonally was just a wool merchant but then we got interested and started making our own stuff. I personally wonder about the rest of the UK did they develope their own textile industries around this time too?

To my suprise the spinning wheel did not reach Europe until about 1300 years ago. It migrated from the Middle East and helped the textile industries emmensly by increasing thread production.

Obviously I have parraphrased alot of this from stuff I read at the museum and from other things I have read since going to the exhibition.

Unfortunatly it is only there until the 8th of MArch 2008 but if you can catch the exhibite then it is lots of fun 🙂 I have also made some scetches that I hope to add to this post at some future date.

Wiki links that are interesting reguarding this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_technology

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_clothing_and_textiles

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textile_manufacturing_terminology

On Space Camp with the Cubs we made aliens out of New Clay, lolly sticks, goggly eyes and pipe cleaner (renamed as modelling straws or something) and anything else we had lying about.

The kids were pretty much let loose with the stuff, which they squidged into a myriad of shapes. Numbers of goggly eyes varied drastically and the pipe cleaners made great tenticles or hair!

Their creations, some of which were very imaginative, were left to air dry on a table for the rest of the weekend.

Of course the extraterrestrials needed some sort of transport, so we got the children to make spaceships out of bits of rubbish. There were old tins – with no sharp edges of course – bits of netting bags, cardboard and plastic cones from the middle of the wool cones for knitting machines, odd cut offs of wire and battery casings.

With some aluminium foil and a lot of PVA glue and brown parcel tape, they fashioned their vehicles. The variety of designs was amazing, some functional and others more ‘alien’ to our earthling eyes. 🙂

These were both fun projects suitable for the range of abilities we had present.