Modern embroidery

This week I have been trying my hand at a new skill..

...embroidery  !

Embroidery is one f those almost ancient art forms that spans across the globe, and for me it carries especially nostalgic connotations...

In Norway the different patterns and techniques in embroidery is a symbol of where you are from...instantly recognisable to the people across the communities.....

Nowadays embroidery is considered by most to be old fashioned, not so in Norway where embroidery and cross stitching has been brought right in to the 21st century in the form of "guerrilla embroidery"....people, mainly women, all over the country are working out their stresses and frustrations by embroidering rather aggressive messages...

I will be doing a post on "Guerrilla embroidery" later, but for todays post, I want to show you how I've been getting on with my first tentative try at embroidery...

Being a self-confessed haberdashery phobic, I decided to face my shortcomings head on, and went out a couple of weeks ago and bought some Aida (that's the cloth you stich on to..), some embroidery thread and a hoop....

I knew I didn't want to do a ready made, traditional pattern, and when I found this Tattoo colouring in book I knew it would be fairly easy to transfer one of the designs on to my Aida...

I chose a traditional (in tattoo terms....think sailors) swallow motif with a wrap around banner, with space for my very own message...guerrilla style, and coloured it in.... 

 Then I simply traced the pattern onto my Aida, making sure it fit nicely into the embroidery hoop...

Ready to start embroidering....

I braced myself...I had no idea how to start...I did a little research online, but decided , in true June-style to jump straight in...I'm not one to mess about!! he he!

 

I chose a simple backstitch, and just followed the lines of my design ....making it up as I went along...

So this is how its turned out....so far!

considering I've never done any embroidery before, I am pretty pleased with the result....

 

 now the only question is...do I add some colour, or do I leave it as it is?

What do you think?

xxx

June

THE NOSTALGIECAT SUMMER KIDS CLUB....

 

....Session 4: SCIENCE EXPERIMENTS

 

Welcome to session 4 of the Nostalgiecat Summer Kids Club, today's theme is Science Experiments...

...nothing fancy, but we had some fun mixing things together to see what happens...

In today's post I  will show you what me and Little Miss Moo and her friends, Caleb, Tristan and Scarlett got up to on Monday...

 The first thing we tried out was...

 

MAGIC MILK

 

The science behind this experiment is probably too complicated to explain to a 4 year old, but you can read all about it here ....

To do this, you will need:

Full fat milk

bowl

food colouring

washing up liquid

q-tips

Poor a little milk into the bowl...just enough to cover the bottom. Add a few drops of food colouring in the centre of the milk...DON'T MIX.... Dip a Q-tip into the washing up liquid, then gently tap the surface of the coloured milk with the soapy q-tip....

We tried doing this experiment....unfortunately it didn't quite work for us: The colours are supposed to start "swirling" on their own as soon as the washing up liquid comes in contact with the food colouring in the milk....but for us it only made a ring  in the coloured milk...

Great start hey??

 If you want to see how it is supposed to turn out, click on the link above..

 

Caleb was never the less fascinated to see the colour shrink back in the milk....Why don't you try it and see what happens....maybe you can get it right?

 

Next we tried out making some...

OOBLECK

...Sounds exotic doesn't it? and it is....very strange stuff, but soo easy to make!!

Have you ever heard about being able to walk on custard?? It is true: you can!! And this stuff has the same properties : it is a liquid, but when you apply some impact pressure, it behaves like a solid...

Try this out, all you need is:

2cups corn flour

1 cup water

food colouring (just for fun)

Mix it all together....it will be tough to mix, so put some elbow grease into it..

....then let the kids gently dip their fingers in, like Tristan in the picture above, just to check it is actually liquid, before slapping or punching it to experience the liquid as a solid...

Scarlett tries "punching" the OOBLECK... 

....this experiment is sure to amaze!!

For our next experiment, you can re-use the OOBLECK mix by adding some more corn flour and a bit of Shampoo (and some more food colouring)....

 

SLIME

...But if you want to make it from scratch (or the kids have "played away" the OOBLECK mix), here's what you will need:

2 1/2 Cups Corn flour

6 table spoons water

1/2 cup shampoo

food colouring

Mix the shampoo and food colouring together, add the corn flour, then add the water...little by little..

It will be hard work, as Caleb found out, but keep mixing it until you get a sort of "dough" that can be rolled up into a ball...

The funny thing is, that once you have rolled your ball, watch it "melt" through your fingers...

Like the OOBLECK it is half solid/ half liquid and behaves equally confusing....The shampoo will add some elasticity , so it can be stretched like slime...

 

Lots of fun!!

Tristan and Scarlett tried to roller the slime, only to find that it turned to solid....but when they tried to pick it up from the table, it turned back into slime...

After cleaning up the mess (while the kids had some juice and biscuits)...YES- it did get quite messy,

 but it was easy to clean up.... 

...we had a go at making some....

LAVA LAMPS

You probably remember these from the 90's....hypnotic lamps with blobs of colour floating around inside...Our DIY version is not quite as psycadellic, but never the less, fascinating....

Here's what you'll need:

Empty water bottle

Cooking oil

Water

Alka-Seltzer's tablets

food colouring

Fill the bottle 1/4 full with water, the top up with the oil, leaving 1" at the top..... wait for the oil to settle on top of the water....

 Add some watercolour, and let it sink through the oil and mix with the water.

Break up an Alka-Seltzer's tablet into bits, and add 1 piece at the time and let this sink to the bottom of the bottle...

The Alka-Seltzer's releases small bubbles of carbon dioxide gas that rise to the top taking some of the coloured water along through the oil...the gas escapes when it reaches the top and the coloured water falls back down through the oil.

Enjoy the show!

You can add more Alka-Seltzer's to keep the reaction going...even at a later stage.

We also had a look at what happened when we screwed the top back on the bottle (tightly!!!) and tipped the bottle back and forth....like Scarlett in the picture above...and when the bottle got vigorously shaken.... 

The next experiment we did was

MARBLED PAINTING WITH OIL

We did this in plastic zip-lock bags , to minimise the mess, but to be honest, I think this would have been a lot more fun if we had just used some soup bowls....

Anyway, Here's what you'll need:

Zip lock plastic bags (or soup bowls)

Baby oil

2 different colour paints (poster paint is fine)

glitter

Pour some baby oil into the zip lock bag/bowl, then add two colours of paint and some glitter (to make it sparkly).

If you have decided to do this in a bowl, let the kids go ahead and use their fingers to "marble" the paint, by swirling the colours together...

If you want to keep your kids mess free, and are using a zip lock bag, make sure you squeeze out as much air as possible before zipping the bag shut....I secured the seal by using some gaffer tape, to prevent any leaks....then let the kids move the paint around with their fingers to create a marble effect...

I don't really know why I was trying to minimise the mess when we did the MARBLED PAINTING, as the next thing we made was really messy....and really fun:

FLUBBER

This is just as stretchy and weird as the SLIME we made earlier, but with a completely different consistency and feel to it...

Here's what you'll need:

1 Cup White school Glue

3/4 Cup cold water

food colouring

2 bowls

1/2 Cup hot water

1 Table spoon Borax

A little note on Borax:

Borax is a natural mineral and a common household chemical found in laundry detergent and hand soaps...it is marked as toxic, but this only really applies if ingested in very, very high doses...It is not absorbed by the skin, and as we were only using a small amount, I was happy that it would not cause the children any harm...

Read more about Borax here , if you are concerned...

Mix the glue and the cold water + food colouring in one bowl.

In the other bowl, dissolve the Borax in the hot water...

Slowly add the glue-mix to the Borax water and stir....

The glue mix will kind off set and slightly solidify when in contact with the Borax water...

Poor out any excess water, and you will be left with a slimy gelly like lump...

....the kids loved stretching it....

 

....and squeezing it...

...and it generally made for some sticky, messy fun...

The last "experiment" we did, was to make some beautiful...

SUNCATCHERS

 ....to take home to mum...

You will need:

Plastic beads

Oven proof muffin tray

Oven

Pour a handful of plastic beads into each dip in the muffin tray, then cook in the oven at

 200 degrees (C) for about 40-45 minutes, until the beads have melted.

Make sure you have your windows wide open for ventilation, as there will be some fumes coming off the beads as they are melting....ask the kids to vacate the room!!!

I asked the kids what they thought would happen to the beads when cooked in the oven....and Scarlett thought they might rise like a dough, but Caleb thought they might shrink..

I explained how most solid things will either melt or burn when exposed to high temperatures...

As soon as the beads had melted, I carried the muffin tray outside , so that our sun catchers could cool down quickly....

I didn't get time to do this for Little Miss Moo's friends before their mums came to pick them up, but here's what I did with ours:

I used a 2ml drill bit and drilled a hole in each disc, then used some colourful embroidery thread to suspend them from a bit of driftwood I found on my stroll along the Thames the other week...

Would look great hung up in a sunny window...what do you think??

For more fun science experiments for kids or other great activities, please visit my pinterest board

http://pinterest.com/juneolsenwalker/kids-crafts-and-fun/

We had lots of fun with our science session...

I cant believe that next weeks session will be the last one this summer...

where has the time gone??

I'd love to hear about what you have got up to with the kids over the holidays to keep them entertained....

Please leave a comment below...

There is also still time to enter the PRICEDRAW in my lace print plates GIVEAWAY...

...just leave a comment at the bottom of the blogpost  a celebration to be in with a chance...

  xxx

Junes

MEET THE ARTIST....

....SCHOONY

 

 

 

 

Friday night me and Mr attended the preview art show of our old colleague and friend Schoony at the Ivy, London...

 We have known Tristen "Schoony" Schoonerad for years from working with him in the British film industry, and it was a privilege to be there to support him at the opening of his first solo show, IF I STAND ON MY TOES, I CAN TOUCH THE CEILING, as an artist...

 

 

 

His background is deeply rooted in the film industry, and he and his brother, Robin, grew up on film sets, where their father John (a legend in the British film industry) worked on films, such as "Raiders of the Lost ark" and "Return of the Jedi"...

Both Robin and Tristen have followed in their fathers footsteps, and have worked for more than 20 years making special effects and prosthetics in movies all over the world...and they are both part of their fathers lifecasting business in Elstree Studios, UK...a proper family business.

But for Tristen, making film effects was just a means to an end...

in his own words, he always knew he wanted to do something more extraordinary...

he wanted to use the skills 2 decades of working on films had taught him to make what HE wanted to make, how HE wanted to make it....not just be an artisan for designers on big Hollywood productions...making "silly monsters" and dead bodies....

(no offence papa Schoony...)

 

Schoony took his first tentative steps into the art world in 1998, when he on short notice created "rope trick" for an underground exhibition of work by people in the British film industry...it was a piece he had imagined for a long time, inspired by the Indian fables of a boy climbing a magical rope 

He took a lifecast of his nephew Kai (Robin's son) climbing a rope and put together his very first art piece...

Kai has since been his model of choice for a lot of his pieces, including the iconic "Boy Soldiers" with which Schoony took the London Art scene by storm in 2008 at mutate Britain's one foot in the grove exhibition on Portobello Road..

 

As opposed to "rope trick" that symbolises "weightlessness", where Kai is looking down on the public, the pose of "boy soldiers" is facing up...."looking up at us with a look of what he may become" It is a statement of a persons potential...Kai's haunting expression put together with the grenade clutched in his little hand is part of what makes these pieces so relevant today...

... and in fact Schoony caught the British medias attention with this piece when he had a 3D installation displayed on the peace plinth outside the houses of Parliament in protest to the UK's involvement in the war in Afghanistan in 2011.

Kai was 7 years old when his lifecast was taken for "boy soldiers" - the same age of some of our soldiers serving in Afghanistan as they would have been less than 10 years ago...

"I don't want this future for my nephew"...

 

 

Schoony is one of a few artists to use lifecasting as part of his creative process...usually used in the film industry to produce incredibly lifelike dummies and effects, it involves taking a negative cast of the actual person, that then will be cast out as a positive in a sculptable material, such as plastecine, so that the figure or features then can be altered as needed...but Schoony revealed at his show, that the future now lays in 3D scanning...so times are changing, also for the family's lifecasting business...

 

Schoony now joins an impressive list of top artists whose work is also featured throughout the swanky Ivy club, including Damien Hirst, Marc Quinn and Matt Collishaw, and his artistic career is set to continue going from strength to strength. But it hasn't just been plain sailing: It has taken a lot of hard work and commitment to break into the UK art scene, and although he has made few good friends along the way, that has been very supportive and given him some great advice, Schoony's transition from film industry artisan to fine artist has been met with a few "who do you think you are..." attitudes, both from his old colleagues in the movies and from the art world...

 

 "it is very difficult getting your name recognized at first in the art scene, and I am met with a lot of prejudices all the time"

 

 But his father John has always been supportive, and with his and an artist, family friend, Nick Reynolds' help Schoony looks to have finally broken into the UK art scene..

 

 

 

Schoony is giving a direct nod to his background in the film industry with his latest figure " Master Warhol" where another lifecast of his nephew Kai shows a young boy looking up through a handheld cine-camera...perhaps a retro perspective nod to his own childhood...  No doubt inspired by the iconic Warhol prints this figure is repeated throughout the exhibition in various bright colour combinations..

 

 

And with his current work " scullduggery", set to be featured in the next "Kick ass 2" film premiering a stone throw away from the his exhibition at the Ivy, in Leicester square next week, he is again blurring the lines between film and art....

 

  

 From top left: Me with papa Schoonerad, me and Mr., Me and Schoony, the brothers Schoonerad, Tristan and Robin,  Robin and Sally Schoonerad ( the proud parents of model and muse Kai).

  

 It is not just young Kai that has been immortalised for Shoony's latest body of work ....

 

 

 

The figure "comeuppance" is a mixed lifecast of actor Nick Moran, of "Lock stock and two smoking barrel" fame.. and his brother Robyn.....the pose is very theatrical and almost cinematic, as if yet again hinting to Schoony's past in the filmindustry .

In the picture above Mr Moran is explaining to me how he has lent his wristwatch to the figure for the evening, because he didn't like to see "his own hands" without it...

 

 

 The ethereal title piece "If I stand on my toes, I can touch the ceiling", where a young woman is levitating towards the ceiling,  perfectly sums up the title of the exhibition, and the message conveyed that If you strive to achieve , you can, like Schoony himself has proved, make something extraordinary out of your life....

 

IF I STAND ON MY TOES ,I CAN REACH THE CEILING  will be showing at the Ivy club until the 17th of August .

Supported by Art Below, Schoony's work will also be publicly showcased on a billboard space at Piccadilly tube station until the 26th August.

 

If you are in London, make sure you check it out, and if you are not, watch out for his artworks feature role in the anticipated "kick ass 2"...

 

xxx

June