Sunday saw the first ever Creativi Tea - I had wanted to run them last year but never got around to it what with all that moving mand festivals and what not.
So I invited people, and got tea stuff ready and baked cakes.
Lemon and lime - lime sponge with lemon butter icing and lots of butterflies 🙂 Which Al's cousins gave me 🙂
I made sandwiches - ham, cheese and humous to cater for vegi and vegan and meat treats people. And I had crisps in butterfly bowls because I am me and the house is infested with the creatures 😉
And then it was time for people to appear - I wasn't sure what people would want to be doing as I'd said bring your own project or tell me what you want to learn. Most people turned up with writing so were clustered in the lounge.
There was a variety of writing going on from poetry to prose, to essays to novels to short stories to computer programming. Even Jeany got in on the act writing and illustrating a lovely story about a mutant girl and her dad.
People were being very British about not actually taking the cakes until Jeany broke the icing (literally).
In the kitchen sewing and knitting occured - mainly Alaric finishing off the bag he began making me at Centre Arts during a sewing course I sent him on as his valentines day present.
I was sad I had some people drop out due to weather and moto bikes breaking and fuel costs and writing events but it worked really well. Extra nibbles even arrived with people 🙂 Having noisy/messy stuff in the kitchen and the quieter stuff in the living room worked really well.
I am planning on running one of these a season 🙂 If you want to be invited to the next one let me know!
Here are more pictures of cakes as I know you all love them 😉
We love Sugru which is a putty like stuff that you can form into shapes, sticks to just about everything and is flexible - it is basically a funky silicon rubber from my understanding. When we first heard about it we couldn't get hold of any and so had to wait as they had sold out but the wait was worth it!
Since then we have used it for tonnes of things from embedding electronics in hair pieces, making creatures for the visually impaired, fixing fridges, shoes, adding little feet and buffers to all things electronic, fixing broken mugs and making jewellery. I plan to fix my electric guitar with it though need to see how it reacts to having glitter added to it!
But it is more important to me than it's usefulness. To me Sugru represented something more, when it appeared I was struggling with both scientists and artists telling me that there was no cross over between the two areas. My tag line o twitter is that I am The Artist Scientist or Artistic Scientist and to see this product - the result of something an artist (ok design student) had produced, being so wonderful for science/tech and artistic endevours.
This was the sort of fusion of art and science that I was sure should exist but was being told didn't and my examples of how the modle builders of film dinosaurs had ended up solving the mystery of joints and movement that paleaontologists has been struggling with was falling on deaf ears.
So I turned up at The Cheltenham Science Festival debate on science verses art that year with my sugru bracelet and my ESA t-shirt I'd won for Celestial Montage and found that people didn't seem to really cae on either side of the divide, they have their opinions of the others and that is that. Stuck in the middle as all ways I gritted my teeth and looked for more science-art related things and found it under the title science communication.
Recently Sugru posted their life story so far and asked what inspired others, so I told them - they inspired me! They provided the evidence I needed that science and art can create wonderful productive and helpful things by learning from each other, they are an example of a dream that was followed and they provided the very material I had been trying to work out how to make myself - I was mucking around with resins casting, silicon mould making and fimo in order to get something like sugru and I was failing and could not make the projects I wanted. I hadn't even thought of applications beyond my own ends and there WOP! appeared sugru ready to go and so I went and so did Al and he has even written up one of his repairs/hacks for their website!
It a year of fiddly work but there is a sound panel complete with sounds of space, slime moulds and cracking ice to name some of the eight.
It is obviously not a full sound cave but it a proof of concept and a piece of science-craft in its own right. It could not have come about without the aid of ESA, UWE, Ella Matthews and Alaric. Not to mention those who sponsored the project so that we could actually buy the components without them there is no why I could have afforded to make this.
Me and Alaric finally made it out to see some live music - something which has not happened yet this year! We went to the Unsigned Sessions at The Playhouse in Cheltenham. These are run by The Record Shop down by the Norwood pub.
It was the first time we had been in The Playhouse which has a nice light fitting I took photos off to try and sort our how my camera works! I only found the black and white setting after the gig!
The first band was unfortunately ill but a young guy came on and played some cracking tunes - I can't remember what his name was unfortunately.
We then got a band called Red Shift who were a three piece band, a guitarists with two guitars, a saxophonist and flutist in one and the dude at the back with the squeeze box who I unfortunately was not in the right place to photo.
They played some lovely covers - some of which had a depth the original songs never had.
The guitarists voice put me in mind of David Bowe meets Pink Floyd with a little Bon Jovi thrown in.
My one issue was I felt the Gnarls Berkely cover needed more energy, but having it sung by a warm female voice was genius 🙂
Then we got on to our friends' band, Mention The Bear, they were doing a 68 Come Back Elvis Special with guitar cases for percussion and more guitars than you can shake a stick at!
There was some serious hand blurring on the fret board happening and Richard did not disappoint with raw performance - if Elvis and Jim Morrison had had a love child... just watch the video I took!
Neither the film nor photos are as good as I wanted as I was just mucking about with settings to see what I got and some of them I didn't realise weren't quiet there until I got them up on a computer screen!
See guitar case drum!
Guitars galore!
Dan rocking out!
Richard absorbed by the music.
Jumping around time!
I was really happy to have an chance to wear my fifty style skirt I made last year (with modernish heavy metal themed material!) and my ancient blue suede boots 🙂 Though I am still disappointed there was no black leather!
Alaric, Art and Craft, Events and Outings, Jean, Recipies, Sarah, Writing | sarah | 
Tue 26th Mar 2013 12:16 am | 
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