I saw the Christmas decorations in Carnaby Street yesterday, I think they’re nice but I must admit I wasn’t as impressed as previous years. I thought they might have been a bit Jeff Koons inspired but I think that’s probably coz I’d just seen Pop Life at the Tate Modern and I’m writing an essay on Koons for uni. The pink reindeer did have a bumhole though…
My Mum found these little beauts I made when I was a kid…you can tell I was always destined for great things in the art world!
Some of my badges in a dish…I like this photo.
<3
Also, I massively want a badge maker now but good ones are so pricey!
I’ve been home for a few days over reading week and while I was back home Mummy taught me how to make paper/ recycle paper…we took photos of each stage as she needs to make a handout for her Foundation Art & Design class, so I thought I’d do a little tutorial on here. Never made paper before so I won’t be using any technical terms, hopefully will be nice and easy for everyone to understand.
Have fun
x
You will need:
Paper (duh!) this will be the base colour
Sieve (can be easily handmade from a wooden frame with a net curtain stretched over it)- The size of the frame will be the maximum size your paper will be.
Trough for water (it will need to be able to easily fit the sieve in)
Food processor
J cloths
Iron
Magazines & Newspapers (if desired)
***If you’d like to view the pictures to go with the steps they’re on my flickr page, they’re in the ‘Making Paper’ set***
Step 1.
Tear up the paper into pieces roughly the size of a postage stamp. (They don’t have to be neat!)
Step 2.
Put the paper into your average household food processor and fill it about 1/3 with water.
Step 3.
Blend it until it’s all mushy- you can play around with different consistencies to get slightly different textures with the same paper.
Step 4.
Pour into a ‘trough’ of water…basically it needs to be fairly shallow and a bit bigger than your average washing up bowl, I suppose you could use a bath or kitchen sink as long as you don’t wash the unused paper down the plughole (and I’m not paying the plumbers bill if you block your drain!)
Step 5.
Mix it all up a bit and use the sieve to fish the paper out, the more paper you catch the thicker your made paper will be.
Step 6.
Put the sieve paper side down onto a j cloth and use a dry j cloth to rub over the sieve and soak up water, then peel the sieve off. If pieces have stayed on the sieve it might be because your cloth was a bit too damp, so wring it out and rub over that area again.
Step 7.
Here’s where you can play around with different colours and pictures, you can get some nice two tone effects by repeating the steps 1-5 with another colour and then putting over the base sheet of paper in a pattern, stripes are always nice. You can also tear pages from magazines etc and press them gently onto the wet sheet of paper (you’ll need to put a light coating of paper mush around the edges of these pictures using the sieve to make them stay one once it’s all dry).
Step 8.
Leave to dry for a couple of hours. A good way to dispose of the trough of water is to pour in through the sieve so the water goes down the plughole and go can throw the paper that’s left into the bin.
Step 9.
Make sure the paper had j cloth either side of it and use a fairly hot iron to flatten and make the paper thoroughly dry.
Step 10.
CAREFULLY peel the paper off the j cloth et voila! If you’d like it to be really flat you can always press it in a heavy book, maybe ‘The Art of Looking Sideways’ seeing as every creative seems to own that!
This is one of my finished pieces…
Was just browsing the net to pass some time and I found this awesome looking website: FontCapture where you can make a font of your handwriting, or anything handwritten I suppose. I’ve not been able to try it out as I don’t have a printer or scannner right now but I will give it a go soon and post the results.
Love Love
x
…but it’s expensive and I am poor 
hopefully it will go into the January sales so I can buy it before I go to New York in February. It’s from TOPSHOP incase you were wondering.
x
Today we worked with Enno Krieger, a graphic designer from Hamburg, and did a little type workshop. We were given blank postcards and some magazines and we had to use type from the magazine to create a piece of type on the postcard. It was a really fun day and I ended up making four postcards…keen! At the end of the day we all stuck our postcards up on the wall and it looked really impressive, hopefully I’ll get a photo of this tomorrow if I remember my camera. For now, here’s mine…
Don’t ya just love my woodchip wallpaper?! These were a tad hard to photograph because of the glossy paper, but you get the gist. Any constructive criticism on these would be muchly appreciated as I would definitely like to make some more of these, cutting and pasting is so much fun!
Lots of Love x
Just started a new project and I though I’d go ahead and make myself a little sketchbook 
Over the summer we were set a project to come up with a shop and design it, so I invented HIDE…a shop which sells things in just one colour. The shop changes location every 3 months and so does the colour scheme of the shop, the logo, carrier bags etc etc, simples!
(Below is my logo)
x
(The red one is a bit of a brighter, nicer red but just doesn’t show up that great online)
Loads more photos on Flickr as usual!
I made this book for a project titled ‘About Me’…it’s a handmade book of all my favourite things. To present it to the class I used photos of it in a slide show and played ‘Merry Happy’ by Kate Nash in the background…one of my favourite songs! I know these photos are small, so if you’d like to see bigger ones visit my Flickr page.
Lots of Love
x
Another classmate, Sara, handmade rubber stamps with words on to spell out sentences about herself…I got her to ‘tattoo’ some of these bad boys on my hands and I think they make great photos.
