the icky and the crappy

Click here for a link to the talk that Damian Skinner gave about the work of Lisa Walker and myself at Craft Victoria last month. The brooch that he refers to is this one:

It was a very great honour to have Damian write about my work and also to meet him - he has been one of my craft heroes for a long time. If you are interested in fantastic, thought provoking writing about jewellery - bookmark his website: www.pauadreams.co.nz it is always a great read.

Hot off the press!

Here is the invitation for Take a ball of thread... at Zu Design.
Hot off the press! I love the sexy, thready font.

Talking, naturally

Next week I am off to Adelaide for the last leg (for now) of the Take a ball of thread... exhibition tour at Zu Design. I am so excited. I love Adelaide and have many good friends there, including the sensational Lauren Simeoni. Inbetween installing the exhibition next week Lauren and I will be spending some time together plotting and planning for our two lady exhibition to be held at metalab in October. It is going to be called Unnnatural, naturally. We have been working on the idea for the exhibition for over a year now - Stay tuned for more as the exhibition develops!

While I am in Adelaide I will be giving a talk at the Jamfactory, come along if you are in town!

I also recently gave a talk at salon a talks evening run by metalab and ECC Lighting and Furniture. The talks are held at the ECC Lighting and Furniture showroom in Darlinghurst. It was a real honour to be invited to speak and such a fun thing to do - I got to install my work on some stunning tables, lit by beautiful chandeliers and other designer lights for one night only! I took lots of pictures and will post them soon. If I was more organised I would have posted this information before the talk! But it was a big rush putting it together after coming back from Melbourne and I actually LOST the whole first draft (the long one with all the words and images...) so had to do it again! The process of writing about my practice is one that I always find interesting (and challenging).

Here are some images of my work in situ at ECC:

Workshopping

While I was in Melbourne last month I gave two workshops at Craft Victoria in conjunction with Take a ball of thread... Participants were asked to bring along their own ball of sewing thread and I taught a few simple techniques that I have been using in my work including how to make a tassel, some string and a pom pom. The workshops were so much fun and participants made some super pieces. Like this neckpiece in progress by Craft Victoria's lovely Carmel:

It was also exciting to have a sneak peek into the contents of peoples sewing boxes!

To see more pictures of the workshops click here

Vitalstatistix

As part of the Clog interview I was asked to provide some statistics about the project. I put on my thinking cap and this is an updated version of what I came up with:

800g of casting wax used
115 finger pricks
130+ objects produced (there were 78 pieces shown in the Craft Victoria version of the exhibition)
70 blog posts and counting
51 wax burns (approximately)
23 AA batteries
19 months and counting...
4 metres of 0.8mm diameter 925 silver wire
1 litre methylated spirits
1 drilled hand
and of course,
1 ball of thread (length unknown)

Clog-a-riffic!

Well, I am pretty behind on all my posting here, blame a hectic making schedule and recovering from jet-set interstate travel with the exhibition!

I have missed so many exciting things to post about. The first one is a link to the Clog interview mentioned in the previous post - you can read it here