Glass Blowing

Yesterday afternoon, Sally and I took a wee trip through to Edinburgh to see if we could have a whack at glass blowing in the Art College. We didn't just appear and expect it obviously, my friend from back home is doing a glass work course through there and then we just kind of invited ourselves! How nice of us! Unfortunatly we ourselves weren't able to do glass blowing but we did get a chance to creep on some of the people who were already working their wee socks off. I have to say I'm pretty impressed with what I saw which I think were just the basics! The workshop had a very different feel to our jewellers one back in Dundee, with the constant sound of glass exploding due to it cooling off too quicky and the heat!

CAD/Rhino

For part of our course we had to endure a FULL week of Rhino design, I sucked to say the least! Computers confuse me far too much for this, but have to say I am pretty happy with my final outcome! Incase you cyber fools cant make out what it is, its a bowl/ring! I know I'm a genius! The design came from my "Domestic Paradise" project which allowed me to think of homely things, im not sure why knitting came to mind because only one of my Grans (bigging it up for Granny Pearl (: ) knits and also tea drinking mainly because i drink a ton of it! So in this design I tried to incorporate both together. The bowl part is the mug part of the ring and the wall that has been built up from it is a knitted section which is held up with knitting needles. Lovely

Ring Bowl

My current project is titled "Domestic Paradise" so I have gone down the obvious route of looking into knitting and tea drinking, well mainly tea party sets. I love making rings or things that you can hold. This is just one part of the design obviously but you can see how this piece would be worn in the hand. I like how the inner bowl is going to be quite awkward for the wearer to drink from, Im not sure whether I will keep this feature or not though!?

YOUR FIRED!

Here is a wee glimpse at my below thrown objects straight out of the kiln! Bit weird how the navy colour from the aluminum has disappeared, pretty happy at how lovely and white these samples have come out!

Porcelain FAIL

I thought I was being really clever here and doing another mock up bowl all on my own, but BOOM I had a major fail! I rolled out all the part I needed (2 sticks in thickness) then put the porcelain over my moulds and left then out over night to dry. And that was my mistake I was supposed to leave then to dry slightly over night by putting a plastic bag over it. But I had not put the plastic bag over my pieces and then they were useless in the morning! Oh well learn from our mistakes. . . . right?

Porcelain update

A quick snap shot of my thrown porcelain cups/vessels! not bad for a first attempt i thought! Although i cannot take credit for the one on the left which is obviously not looking as poor as the rest of them!

Throwing Porcelin

For my current project (Domestic Paradise) I decided that I wanted to give throwing porcelain a go to create a mug. I'm going to admit it now I thought that the process of throwing was pretty straight forward and quite simple when I was watching Shaun ( who very kindly gave me a demonstration) throw a mock up of a mug, he made it look very simple and I have to say I was pretty shocked that he didn't think I would be able to create what I aimed to on the first go!

Design Meeting 9/2/11

In our most recent Design Studies meeting we have further discussed our potential business ideas further. I feel that we have come to the conclusion that we are going to go down the up-cycling into the fashion world route in community places. We discussed that members of local communities and cities could donate their old clothes that are maybe completely useless to charity shops or even just to themselves and then the members of staff employed would cut up, rip apart, alter the garments to becoming one off pieces giving the customers very unique and individual garments. The process of each garment could/would be kept in the bar code so that when scanned the customer would be able to see what 'useless' garments their new clothing had come from which would in turn encourage then to up-cycle more items to see what our team could do with them. Regular customers would be given more of an incentive to go back and buy items with the 'club-card' point value aswell, maybe at the end of each month a garment is given away to the most eco friendly/ highest donator customer?
Using the fill-out sheets that Hamid gave us in our lecture before hand we quickly went through the pros and cons (etc) of our business proposal. The customer group that we decided we were mostly going to look at was females aged from 16-40. Although this is quite a large age group to take on with the growing eco-friendly trends that are present today we felt that with this business proposal it was very much achievable to target a larger market successfully. As technology is a MASSIVE in todays world to go into, we felt that having some sort of technical quirk would be a perfect way in keeping the younger "ipod generation" on top of the local trends. So we are to further look into creating an app for phones and also a blog that would be linked to said application. This would give the need of constant update and put the business on the global internet highway, giving publicity aswell as relying on word of mouth and other advertising events. Items should be roughly priced or even cheaper than the high street market so that the business is able to grow further. Income will be slow to start off with until a faster route of materials has been achieved.
PRODUCT-one off designs, completely unique using same designs possibly and different fabrics and texture for different looks and feels of garment, up-cycling
PLACE- source own materials to keep material cost low-market, charity etc, off street boutique, near city centre but not in?!
PRICE-varies, near high street value, payment for threads/sewing equipment etc
PROMOTION- applications and blogging, night classes, promo nights, hobby
PEOPLE- repairs on own designs, tweaking high street products to fit certain styles, altercations
PROCESS- staff contribute to everything throughout blog etc, train regular customers at night classes and offer jobs?
PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENT- staff wear clothing as constant promotion, sewing machines in floor so that visual is available to customers, make one off furnishings, completely customize.

Raising

For this I basically had a round 0.7mm sheet of brass metal, annealed it and then went to town hammering it onto a stake! This particular bowl shape took me the better part of 5 hours to achieve! Not too bad for my first time I think, but in a slightly negative not my hand was very sore and stiff the next day, so defiantly wasn't holding the metal correctly for the larger majority of the time whilst doing this!

Assignment 2: Semester 2: Year 3

In our most recent group meeting, we discussed and planned out various routes that we can look further into. We mainly looked into communities, communication, upcycling-recycling-downcycling. I found it very useful to brain storm using a large piece of paper with ready printed images. I still need to research into the chosen topics more, but just thought it would be handy to blog about it!