swap o rama rama

A piece a week – Making at the Maker Faire

| poppypeach
With all the preparation last week to get ready for the Maker Faire Saturday and all the school events plus Qi Gong, Hula and Pottery classes time was slim to actually make. So after my volunteer shift at the Maker Faire at Swap O Rama Rama – I did a little making investigation of my own! The cool thing I did find at The Crucible is painting your own Raku pieces of bisque fired clay pieces. The process is a low fire and using the glazes that are mainly copper based theres a reduction in temperature that creates these amazing metallic finishes! The kids and I made 3 little vessels and according to my pottery teacher they are just for decoration only which is fine as they are sitting on the mantle now in all their metallic glory. I love the randomness of the color and cleaning up the piece after being in the fire the colors show up even more!
8am start at the Maker Faire for set up of Swap O Rama Rama – all so very quiet that early!
Raku pieces out in full glory

 So good to be with the Swap O Rama again this year – being there last year I knew what to expect and help people out with their modifications – the pic below is someone making an infinity scarf out of pant legs. It was so great to share my experience of making infinity scarves with someone else!

Pant legs become a scarf 
Hanging out in the dark room is something I love to see too as the pictures you can capture are super cool! Being with the kids is tricky as you have to hang onto them! This is a cool wall sculpture that you could change the colors of the piece – it was just beautiful. The bottom pic is of my son with a LED selfie that he took! We saw lots of robots, 3d printed items, legos, steampunk outfits, fire and many many art installations – these are my kind of people! 
Changing colors 
LED Selfie

A piece a Week – A Fascinator and a Corset ready for Maker Faire

| poppypeach
We do not get much of an opportunity to get dressed up these days – living the life of a mama in utilitarian though interesting clothing. So to me an event like the Maker Faire is time to get dressed up! I am volunteering at Swap O Rama Rama this Saturday for half the day and I thought it would be good for the would be sewers to be inspired by an upcycled outfit. Alabama Stitch Book takes all the credit for the corset as it is a pattern in the book for a reverse applique project. This matches the skirt I made a couple of weeks ago using the same repurposed tee shirt fabric from FabMo. Checking out the weather it will be a bit cool on the weekend so I am adding a shirt underneath with the scarf and brooch in the pic. Should be a fun, yet practical outfit to wear for the day! 
The fascinator was from a tutorial I found on Pinterest using a mascarpone container. The tutorial I found uses a cup so that sat higher on the head. I like how this came out it is a cross between a small bowler and an air hostess all jazzed up! 
Ready to get dressed up for the weekend

Stitching detail on the front of the corset

The accessories for the neck the scarf and brooch from repurposed silk samples

The front

The back – machine sewn as I ran out of time on my sewing day which was mothers day!

A piece a Week – A Bag Design for Rickshaw Bags Design Contest in collaboration with SF Etsy

| poppypeach
Yet another week that flew by with many things to do and the completion of the year book for my son’s class I had been working on. That was a huge task but I was thankful that we had a lot of pictures to choose from! It was just like the old days working as a graphic designer to a deadline and sending my work to print – thank goodness for the experience to complete projects and make the deadline.

The cover of the 40 page yearbook – green is a popular colour with the Stingray mascot

I had my ceramics class on Wednesday to have some time to play and with a bit of luck I do hope my planters come out as I planned – ceramics is a very tricky medium and I know that a lot of experience is needed to get things right. A lot of keeping track of what works will add to the success of a piece – experimentation is fun though random! This week it was a lot of hand building and seeing what I could do without slab building and using moulds – I will post some pieces once they are fired and glazed.

The big event this week was the Maker Faire all day on Saturday, starting at 6am! I decided I would volunteer this year for something different and an opportunity through the SF Etsy team to volunteer with Swap O-Rama-Rama came my way. I worked over 5 hours on my shift and it was a very long day but so much fun. There was never too much idle time as there are people coming through the tent all the time – it was very inspiring to see what people were making with discarded clothes. I had read about Swap O-Rama-Rama ages ago in a sewing book and thought ooh it would be fun to be involved and little did I know I could get a gig to be part of it!

I love the Bubble Guy!!
In action at the Swap O-Rama-Rama tent

Sunday was a day of a couple of kids parties with some resting in between. My plans for my next projects are in the works and I found some fabric from FabMo to upcycle into a design for the Rickshaw Bags Design Competition for SF Etsy members. The brief is to design a bag flap for their range of the zero messenger bags – I have seen them on a couple of etsy buddies of mine and they are the perfect size messenger bag. My idea was to do the rail quilt design that I saw recently at a volunteer gig with my hula teacher – she is super crafty and makes loads of toys and quilts for people in need. So I sliced up some fabric at 2.5″ each slice and then pieced it together to see what I could come up with and voila a diamond shape pattern known as on point in the quilting world – who knew that this idea of quilting would translate so well with these fabrics! I am very happy with the design and the look on the bag is certainly very stylish, if I do say so myself 😉

The rail quilt design on point using some stunning FabMo fabric
The Rickshaw Zero Messenger Bag mockup