This Week I...

...I'm actually just going to talk about Saturday because on Saturday I went to the Elephant & Castle Mini Maker Faire at the London College of Communication.

They had loads of cool tech things, including many 3D printers. They're so awesome and now we all want one.

That's my sister learning how to make a felt robot badge complete with LED eyes. It's all about the conductive thread.

I tried out screen printing with heat-sensitive paint.

So cool!!

There was this space set up that when the fans were switched on the two walls inflated and you could walk between them. That was fun.

These guitars were connected to wires with handles that when you held them it completed the circuit and made some fabric spin which strummed the guitars. 

I picked up lots of information, this sticker, and a tiny pink spanner which had been made on a 3D printer.

Have any of you been to a Maker Faire event?

Fimo Pendant

When I was mixing the Fimo for these shell hairslides I noticed that all the bright colours mixed in with the black looked pretty cool.

So I took some of the Fimo and rolled it out, making an awesome looking pattern.

I shaped it and put in a hole, and made myself a pendant.

After I baked the Fimo the colours weren't as bright, but a coat of clear varnish fixed that.

I love the swirly, marbled colours.

I also made a long, thin pendant where the colours twist around it.

Oh Fimo, what did I do without you?

New Painting: Big ol' sky

This is the latest painting I've been working on.

It's oil paint on a 50x40cm canvas.

I decided to make it after re-discovering the paintings below.

I made these paintings in my first year of uni.

I painted the first one working from a photo, and then the second one was painted from the memory of painting the second one.

It's nice to see that my painting skills have improved over the years, or it could just be that trees are easier to paint on a large scale, as the first paintings are roughly A4 size.

This Week I...

...went to the most amazing place!

My Mum found out about Scrap Stores and we took a trip to our local one.

It's two floors of all kinds of scrap materials; fabric, card, foam, tubes, confetti, containers, keyrings, tiles...

You pay a yearly membership fee and then you can take whatever you want.

I picked up some vinyl-type fabric in cool patterns, some squares of mountboard, some weird foam stuff and some little plastic tubes. They looked useful!

Last weekend our garage was full of scarecrows and this weekend we had a garage sale.

The village had organised a garage sale trail and over 70 houses were participating, including our next door neighbours. Luckily we had really nice weather so we didn't mind hanging out on the drive all afternoon.

And speaking of scarecrows, our entry into the scarecrow competition made it into the local paper!

And at the village fete we found out we were only 2 votes away from 1st place.

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Ok, enough exclamation points. How was your week? 

Scarecrow Festival

As I mentioned on Sunday, my village had it's scarecrow festival this past weekend and this was our entry!

This was our first time entering because the last few years I've been away at university.

To make the scarecrows I made papier mache heads using ballons and added card for the noses and ears and a big yogurt pot for the necks.

We stuffed the bodies with scrunched up newspaper.

That was a fun Sunday afternoon.

My first idea for the scarecrow set up was an operating theatre, since I have the scrubs, so we went with that.

I was going to make something gross and organ-y for the operation part, but then I had the bright idea to have straw coming out of the body, since it is a scarecrow. 

My Dad and I definitely went overboard with the details.

We got an old computer monitor and I painted heart monitor graphics on to acetate to go on the front.

The equipment tray has syringes still in wrappers, pliers, tweezers, a jar opener and, my favourite; scissors + cotton ball = swab!

Someone (me) had the genius idea to put the scene in the garage.

This was primarily because I thought it would frame it nicely and we could put sheets up behind, but it came in handy as we had a few rain showers over weekend and it got a bit windy, and our scarecrows were fine throughout.

The scarecrow festival was also a competition and people could vote for their favourites.

We came in second!

The winner was a Mad Hatter's Tea Party set up which spread over two gardens, so this photo is only part of it.

We've already started thinking about next year's entry. It may have something to do with another favourite tv show of mine...