make

Now don’t you worry about that

Posted by hil

Now don't you worry about that

An action shot of Joh Bjelke-Peterson welcoming guests to the launch of the Campaign – Federal Elections exhibition at Old Parliament House yesterday! Here is a slightly clearer one of him with Malcolm Fraser. Old Parliament House had a collection of the photographic masks of politicians, but I was asked to make the cartoon Joh last week.

The exhibition itself consists of photos by Andrew Chapman; you can see some of them here. They are wonderful ‘fly on the wall’ glimpses of electioneering politicians and political events from the Fraser years onwards. I was most amused by the ones of Beazley, because he so often looked like a jovial dag, but others were arresting.

Walking with Dinosaurs: The Live Experience: new slideshow

Posted by hil

Dino

(Photo credit: Craig Sillitoe)

Today’s online Sydney Morning Herald has a slideshow of new photos by Craig Sillitoe about the making of Walking with Dinosaurs: The Live Experience with a narration by their Head of Creature Design, Sonny Tilders.

Previously: Workshop footage, Walking with Dinosaurs: The Live Experience

The Moth Tree opens tomorrow night

Posted by hil

Mothtree

Over the last while I have been involved in designing and making the set, costumes and puppets for Canberra Youth Theatre‘s production, The Moth Tree: An Awesome Adventure.

The Moth Tree is a quest story set in a distant place, in a quiet part
of the world, where the ancient and beautiful Algoma City lies. Since
the very beginning of time the city has been protected by moths that
grow on an enchanted tree. Until now the city has been a haven of
harmony and a place of gentle joy. However, a band of villains have
hatched a wicked plot to bring the city to its knees. All that stands
against the coming darkness are a ragged pair of unlikely young
heroes…

The play has been developed in a collaborative process involving the group of 8 to 12 year olds, the director, Tim Hanson, and the writer, Shiereen Magsalin, workshopping and developing characters and plot lines. The intention has been to offer the kids the experience of creating and presenting theatre, with a crew of professionals. We open tomorrow night! If you are in Canberra and have kids, why not take them along to some live theatre?

Walking with Dinosaurs: The Live Experience: Workshop footage

Posted by hil

Walking with Dinosaurs: The Live Experience (see previous post) has released two videos of their awesome dinosaur puppetry:

Footage from the workshop
Torosaur v. Utahraptor

And here are a couple of stills from their newsletter.

Wwd_03

Steg
in the workshop. if you want an idea of HOW BIG this shows going to be, check out the size of the person working on the BABY brachi in the background (seen through Steg’s legs) … remember, he’s the BABY!

Wwd_14

Ankylosaurus in the workshop. To the right you can see one of the utahraptors in the making. There are two now in their final makeover stage and will be ready to wreak havoc with our first utahraptor who was one of the stars or the walking with dinosaurs launch, facing off with Torosaurus. (You can see someone behind the dino’s head, as an indication of scale)

I can see how you would come to call them affectionate things like baby Brachi and Steg if you were working on the build. I dare say they would have come in for a lot of swearing too! With only about five weeks till the first show in Sydney the makers must be under a lot of pressure.

Gimme a head with hair…

Posted by hil

It’s nice to have Claire posting again at Loobylu. (Claire had a beautiful second baby girl recently – congratulations!). Her post today mentions the difficulties of making hair on dolls – I agree it is tricky, and depite the post title, I really don’t like dealing with hair at all! It jogged me to scan some drawings that I have found useful for hair making. They are from an old book we have called TOYS you can make yourself, published by Odhams Press Ltd, London, advisory editor Hilary Page. Other than that it has no copyright information, but I’d guess it’s from the late 40’s or 50’s.

In this first figure, the middle row of stitching is the parting of hair down the centre of the head. You make it as long as is needed to cover the head, and then draw back the hair into bunches or plaits or however you fancy and stitch them on.

Hair

I used this idea for the doll I made a while ago, but instead used an interesting kind of fabric. I always forget its name, but its something like ‘feathered velour’. I stitched it slightly gathered down the centre of the head, and then arranged it to look like strands of hair in bunches, and cut the ends to give it that effect, too. On a doll that size it was a lot easier and quicker than doing the wool
thing.

The next one shows making loops of hair. I guess you could cut the ends once the loops are sewn on.

Hair2

This one for gollywog hair is the one I have used most, not so much the circling attachment to the head which gives you the shock-headed hair, but the making of the hair by stitching it on doubled-over paper. It’s a bit like a flat pom-pom! Instead of circling, you can use it for rows around the side and back of the doll’s head, and for fringes.

Hair3

Giant cross-section flower

Posted by hil

Cross-section flower

My third project for Floriade was making a giant model flower in cross-section, to be the central display in CSIRO’s Division of Plant Industry’s information tent. I really enjoyed making this, too. Some projects go really easily and this was one of those!

The petals were the main challenge, but I decided pretty quickly to use a molded felt technique that I had previously tried with some masks. Essentially you saturate felt in white PVA glue, mold it to the shape you want, and then let it dry. It adopts the shape and becomes fairly hard and plasticised in a way. You can paint it, too, and the way the paint bleeds through the felt can be used in different ways, some quite sensuous. In this case, I made a petal shape in clay and each petal had a double layer with some aluminium flat bar running up the middle to give it extra rigidity. The interesting thing about the technique apart from the obvious texture, is that the felt can be stretched and pulled but remain in one piece. In this respect natural wool felt is much better to work with because it pulls and moves much more than synthetic felt. But synthetic is okay if you don’t have a choice.

I think the flower may end up being displayed in the CSIRO Discovery Centre, where some of my insect models are too; I hope so.

Some thoughts on make and craft

Posted by hil

Back in September I made a late comment in a discussion thread on Shelley Powers‘ post, Craft/Make. I just want to pull it out and publish it here, and perhaps also on my OPML blog, because I don’t want to lose the thoughts in it.

‘The swap-o-rama-rama and the computer-related stuff were equally exciting at the Maker Faire. It was precisely that they were treated equally as cool exemplars of the DIY ethic that made this juxtaposition
so interesting. It wasn’t about gender, it was about the maker impulse, and all its forms.’

— Tim O’Reilly

‘It wasn’t about gender, it was about the maker impulse, and all its forms.’

I’m a maker for the performing and theatre arts, and I appreciate this reasoning. But using the swap-o-rama-rama as an example of making Maker Faire more gender-inclusive, and describing Craft magazine as having a more ‘female spin’ seems to me to turn that statement around, because there is an underlying assumption there about what females are interested in. In a banner at the Renegade Craft Fair, Craft Magazine has the by-line ‘Hang it, Stitch it, Wear it, Light it’: the assumption is still that women are primarily interested in decoration, sewing and fashion. While that may be stereotypically true, working on that
assumption is preserving and encouraging the status quo, (and making money from it), rather than challenging it and acknowledging that there are women out there whose skills and interests within the making and
craft world go well beyond those traditional interests expressed in a modern way. I also think there is a danger of diminishing craft by defining it in this way, just when it seemed to have broken lose from being a lesser creature by being included in the broader term, make.

As an aside, I’m also watchful about the new craft movement being somewhat bound up with retro and the 50’s, and I wonder if it means some of the social attitudes about gender from that time are also being revisited. I get worried when I see apron-making contests. Many craft bloggers are women with small children, and it must be great to have the community and connection of blogging if you are a stay-at-home mother. But I wonder if it also means that craft is still largely in the realm of something a woman makes for, or as a reflection of, her
domestic world, for love or pin-money, while the kids are small. There is nothing wrong with that seen for what it is, essentially a hobby and social activity, but it might mean the new craft movement is not so new
after all.

— Hil

Yesterday Shelley wrote that O’Reilly’s company could do much to ensure that Craft attracts a good audience of men and women, and to encompass and encourage a broader less-gender-specific view of craft. My feeling is that the creation of Craft, in addition to Make, is essentially a marketing decision to diversify and increase their business domain by capitalizing on that ‘female spin’, and its therefore more likely to rely on preserving the status quo, as I said above. If it makes good business sense to divide Make and Craft in this way, I doubt Craft will go down the road that Shelley optimistically suggests.

Espresso coffee hats

Posted by hil

Espresso coffee hats

Making these fun hats was another of my Floriade projects. I enjoyed making them and was really happy with how they turned out. They were made for the performance group The Bunch of Posers, who in this guise are called Acappellacino.

To make them I started out by making the cup shape upside down, with a mixture of a garden pot and a garden hanging basket and clay. I started paper mache-ing it, but realised that the edges were going to curl when they dried, so instead I made a pattern from the shape (you put alfoil over it, masking tape it so it stays in the shape, then cut it into sections so
it becomes a 2D flat pattern). I could have made a small model and done the same and scaled it up if I hadn’t started down the paper mache track to begin with. Once I had the pattern, I cut it out of a particular thin dense type of foam sheeting and glued it up into the cup shape.

The top cup rim and the foam is made from a circle of polystyrene, so it gives the foam rigidity at the top. The saucer is slightly thicker foam, and the rim of the saucer is a ring of a kind of tubular insulation foam that the building trade uses (its called PEF backing rod, and its like those lengths of foam kids play with in swimming pools – pool noodles they are called here. But you can buy it in different diameters if you know where to go for building supplies.) The ring gave the saucer a nice rigidity. You can see the cups in the raw making phase in this picture.

Then it has muslin spray-glued on to the foam to give it a protective surface and kind of bring it all together. Then paint, with a bit of latex added to make it stick well.

The coffee pot was made in much the same way, just from foam. I made a pattern straight from my neighbour’s espresso pot and scaled it up (what I should have done with the cup, too!). However it does have a ring of light aluminium flat bar in the top rim and a couple of aluminium bars from the ring up into the lid to make the open lid possible and strong. The steam is dacron, the wadding stuff they put in quilts, with a wire through it.

The coffee cups just sit on your head like sombreros, but the coffee pot needed a chin stap which I filched from a bike helmet.

Here’s a video of the group in action, singing “You’re the Cream in my Coffee’. On my computer the sound only streams smoothly once its played through once.


(Click on the photo)