flight paths for paper birds

giant recycled fabric doily rugs

so, I saw these awesome rugs on dudecraft - like huge doilies. I immediately wanted to make one, but with my aim to use only recycled or reclaimed materials this year, it took a bit of experimenting to find good materials. 

My attempts

 

The best option I've found so far was to use stretchy fabric, and luckily I had some slightly damaged ribbed shirt fabric from reverse garbage (sorry this is mostly relevant for brisbaneites, but maybe there is something like this in your city? I LOVE rg - could rave all day about them). Non-stretchy fabric was ok too, but the rug had less... bounce to it. 

these ones were for a show Rozi and I were in recently - Future Specs, run by the 4c arts collective. More pics and things from that show to come! 

They got a good response! I think I'll have to give some lessons sometime. Basically though, if you can crochet, you can make them. Just use your hand as a big crochet hook! And if you are going to make one, please think of using reclaimed material - divert some fabric from landfill! 

big ball of fabric yarn

  

what's 350 about?

Well, it's about the maximum safe level of carbon parts per million in the atmosphere, above which the risk of runaway climate change is very very high. 

here's some photos of my first craft activism expedition (with thanks to Rozi, Josh and Josh for help!) to get the number visible in the city (briefly). This was actually back in last October, just before the global day of action on climate change- which was Oct 24. 350.org is a fantastic group making links between climate action orgs all over the world- with the aim of getting action based on scientific evidence about what the world needs (ie. 350 ppm) instead of what is politically expedient or the fact that big polluters don't want to have to change their ways. 

in blog news I'm just starting to make an effort with updating again now (after being reinspired at Woodford, about both art and activism!) 

 

and here they are in the homes they found around the place, for a very brief life in the limelight, before they were all taken down by maintenance. 

 
 Victoria Bridge

I made about 60. my hands were mighty sore from all that crochet! 

Oh yeah, and my friend Josh wrote a blog post about this project too (and writes the funniest blog I know in general) where he says nice things about me. He also wrote a book which is faaaantastic and you can read about it on his blog too. yay!