Making Time

I just wanted to give some linky love to Andrew who is starting out his portfolio website.

Andrew Livingstone is an artist who works in ceramics in Belfast, Ireland. He is completing his PhD in ceramics.

In the image above, he has projected an image onto ceramic blocks he made. The image is from the shipping cranes that loom over the skyline in Belfast. The image is made to look like the ubiquitous blue glazed plates you’d see in many homes in Northern Ireland.

Welcome to the web, Andrew!

i saw these chairs this weekend in a cafe in hita, kyushu, japan. you can see the staple marks which show where the old upholstery was removed and restyled. and then some kind of funy base put on the chair.

great to see this! i’m glad i got a closer look at it.

also saw this cute reclyed plastic giraffe. looks like it was little circles of plastic bags skewered with wire? or… i dunno how it was made actually!

congrats to the winners!

and also, kathreen (of red current) who organizes whipup.net, deserves buckets of prizes too. she puts so much work into whipup, it’s truly phenomenal. i write there and try to help out as much as i can… but i know she puts in oodles of time. i was worried when there were some people getting frustrated with a few technical glitches on the first contest… i was thinking, ‘hey guys, there is a person on the other end of the line, and she’s trying her best to make it run as smoothly as possible’, and it did go very well!

please note there is a tiny little ‘make a donation’ link on the sidebar of the whipup site. and i think it’s about time i put my money where my mouth is. please donate to whipup, and give kathreen loads of prizes for all her hard work!

details are up for the next contest: week 2: your surly side!

orangeface

Originally uploaded by keri.

i am sending someone something with a face on it. i can’t show a pic, or say to whom, or what it is, but in my note i remarked that i was finally getting used to seeing faces on pretty much everything in japan.

But i have to say this is a lovely series of pics of faces created by placing black and white stickers on different objects. Keri Smith’s list of 100 things to do (inc 95 things so far!) is so cool. I’d like to see her book too.

I love the simplicity of the stickers in funny places. See Keri’s Fun with Stickers. Isn’t this such a shy little doorknob now? It’s amazing what two eys can do.

Decole would be proud.

Need more faces in odd places?

See the FLickr Decole group
Some more smiley faces at Wee Wonderfuls.
And My Paper Crane makes everything you could ever want with a face on it.

well, actually alot of faux bois here in japan. the cement bollards and railings are cast to look like wood. but this is just one of the many ways that the surroundings are beautified in little details. and beauty means irregularity and natural forms. even the plastic in your bento box to separate items looks like leaves.

anywho, i saw this staircase (up to the Oita Art Museum) and thought of It’s (K)not Wood, the design blog I linked to the other day. and he linked to me, so that is very nice

my little mochi posted: “An experiment of sorts”:

Draw 7 of something, anything, it doesn’t matter what, they can all be the same or all different. Take as much or as little time as you like and then leave a comment of what you drew. I’ll explain later.

(click to see bigger)
I drew 7 flip flops, because I saw a friend of mine wearing flip flops for the first time this year. Summer weather is coming quickly!

I was reminded of the fun of pompoms after seeing this tutorial at Bella Dia. so were others!And it gave me a great idea for an arts and crafts activity for the ‘easter party’ at the school I started english teaching at. I’m in the midst of a whole week of pompom-chick-making! The best yarn was a slim acrylic mohair. the best glue was actually a glue stick, as there is less mess.

Crafting with kids is a bit of a challenge. I’ve been working in a children’s art organisation for five years, and we do more open-ended projects to give children arts experiences… but this requires good verbal communication and much of our projects we spend talking and thinking, and surprisingly, less ‘doing’. But now, with my new job, teaching english, i was at a loss of how to approach doing a creative activity with kids in a wide age range with minimal verbal communication.

Looking back I regret not having done something more open-ended, to get the kids to respond to the idea of spring… I fell into the teachery-trap of ‘prepare it ahead, know the exact results’… Alas, i pre-cut the paper beaks and the eyes (with hole punch). But there’s still loads of variety, and they really enjoyed making something so cute, and it took only about 10 minutes.
I also like this kid-friendly craft activity that Kathreen shows on her site: peg dolls. It’s got a clear end-result, which is guaranteed satisfaction, but there’s more room to allow for variety. I plan to do more crafts activities with the kids, and I’m going to keep open-ended in mind!

This is a cool thing! Every thursday Kathreen (red currant) who created Whip Up! will present a crafting challenge to be completed over the weekend.
The entries must be posted on the website links section (you need to join whip up and login) and then they will be judged, and the winning entries get some great prizes, books and kits.

This thursday marks the first Whiplash~! Everyday Creativity

I’ve been writing at Whipup, and I’ve enjoyed it very much. I was so so surprised when Kathreen asked me, as I felt I was not a ‘professional’, nor had I been craft-blogging for very long. It made me a bit nervous to write my own first post. I hestitated a bit! I’m glad she chose to have a newbie (like me) too.
Here, I try and write about my own work/thoughts, but on Whip Up, I write about things that would be more generally interesting. It’s amazing what response people give over on Whip Up. It’s a great community and resource, it’s wonderful to watch as it grows. Especially because post after post, it’s guaranteed high quality. And high volume. There’s so many authors now. I check it daily.

I wonder sometimes if we’ll just run out of things to write about, but I keep on finding new and more amazing things to share, and seeing more interesting things come out of the site.

This competition will be very cool to watch too! Yay Whiplash!

I finished this guy as we were watching Wallace and Gromit and the Curse of the Were-Rabbit. perfect timing, and it had nothing to do with Easter, as I started this in February. April is my ‘finish what I started’ month. The month of May might be my ‘finish what i started month’ too!

He moves so nice. His head flops like a baby (or a drunk, depending on how you look at it) and his arms are heavy and floppy too. As soon as I had put on the final leg, I spontaneously scooped him up, hugged him and kissed him. I paused and shook my head thinking: “that was weird”… i had a surrealistic moment of “why do humans make images of animals and figures to hold? why do we make images of the universe?” Later on, I kept on putting him in the boyfriend’s arms. I liked to see him holding the bunny (started having domestic fantasies).

oh this rabbit is so lovely. he’s so ANIMATED. you pick him up and he’s moving all over the place. he’s of a nice heavy thick wool, and has a super soft mohair bunny tail. i’m trying to find the right color rose wool felt to line his ears with! I want his inner ears to match his nose.

He has a great shape, which I am proud of since it was so hard. There was alot of frogging on this one (rip it, rip it, rip it!). I took some photos along the way.

after moving in with my boyfriend, i began changing ‘his’ apartment into ‘our’ apartment. negotiating space (like finding a better pocket-dumping space) and moving things around and reorganizing shelves and drawers. i panic whenever i lose something… or actually i panic when it is not exactly where i thought it should be. so to manage this, i need to know where to put things so i can find them again. i’m not great at it, but i try.

slowly, i’ve been changing how the place looks. more things are purchased, curtains made, pictures hung… he speculated whether i going to cover it with knicknacks. i said ‘no’ but… um… secretly i would love to live in a place that had a wall like this:

i wish i could live a muji existence of plain linen, sober black, grey, white and cream… but it’s not for me. there is an ideal place between stark blandness, and colorful cluttery confusion. just trying to figure out where that is.

photos above from petits appartements à Paris by Jeu de Paume 

these are three blogs that i highly highly enjoy.

design*sponge

It’s (K)not Wood dedicated to all things faux bois (fake wood)

Apartment Therapy