Logo Design: Norwich Ukulele Society

Things have been slightly hectic the past few weeks as uni has started up again, but here is a quick update to let you know that I am alive and well, and to show you a project I've been working on. This is my first real comission which is pretty exciting: a logo design for the Norwich Ukulele Society (of which I am also a proud member). It still needs to be scanned and cleaned up a bit, but this is a photo of the original from my sketchook:

I went through a number of designs before realising that quite usefully, ukes have four strings which in turn means just the right amount of gaps to fit a word in each. Pretty convenient, no?

More blogging soon!

Comics and General Nostalgia

The news recently that plans for an Avengers movie have been confirmed has a) made me just a tiny bit excited (Joss Whedon is directing! Mark Ruffalo as Hulk! etc) and b) reminded me of this comic-themed clock I made in Design & Technology at school, in Year 9 I think.

It features images from an actual Avengers comic which I brought from WHSmiths especially for the project and then proceeded to chop up, much to the horror of my tech teacher, (a Marvel fan apparently; oops).

Even in this photo you can see where I've had to paint over accidents with black paint as well as some minor glue smudges, but changing it in any way now would feel kind of wrong. I was about 13 when I made it and am quite proud, in a weird way.


This weekend I've been cutting up comics again, only this time for a greetings card:

The comic this time was from an old Bunty magazine (from the 90s!) Every Christmas I used to get a Bunty annual; they were full of girly comic classics such as The Four Marys and The Comp and yes I realise just how nerdy this sounds so I'm going to cut the nostalgia-trip short here. Oh dear. In one of the magazines I found a story about a girl who is fed up of being conventional so decides to make her own greetings card for Mothers' Day and couldn't not use part of it in a card of my own.

Tomorrow I'm off on holiday for a week; expect more crafting and blogging soon after that (assuming I don't get distracted by going through all of my old Bunty annuals -it is going to happen).

Lens Crafting

Confession time: I'm a hoarder. I cannot stand to throw things away. What if that toy typewriter from when I was in infant school comes in handy someday? That furry photo frame that I've never actually used has Sentimental Value (even if I can't remember why...). Luckily, where arts and crafts are concerned, hoarding is often a good thing.

About a year ago I found a really great guide to making discarded lenses into brooches or pendants; today I had a go at making a couple.



The images are cut-outs from old magazines (you can also use fabric) which were adhered to the back of the lens using Mod-Podge. The back of each image is coated with nail varnish to protect against damage.

The Florence Welch-image lens came from a pair of my mum's old glasses whilst the oval one was from a pair of my sister's yellow sunglasses from when she was little, which leads me to believe that this hoarding habit just might run in the family...

Before these two I did a test-run using a lens from an old pair of sunglasses. The text says, "It's odd -people like to laugh in the dark and not in the light." It's ended up becoming my favourite one, despite being extremely difficult to photograph.


The next step now is to decide how I'm going to use the lens images: at the moment I'm thinking the yellow one would be best as a pendant and the Florence one will probably become a brooch. Expect some 'After' pictures as soon as they are finished!

Art Saves turns one!

Can't believe it's been a year since I started this blog. Or, um, that I neglected it for a good six/seven months (eep). But while the blogging may have petered out somewhat, the crafting has not! This is a greetings card that I made a while ago:

I'm resolving to start regularly updating again. Honest! At the moment I'm working on some lens-craft using random images from magazines/interesting fabrics and the lenses from old pairs of glasses. But more on that story later! And by later I mean next week, by the way.

A Greetings Card: "Words Can't Express What it Means"

Not a lot of news/new crafting this week, so here is a card that I made a couple of months ago using paper from my box of random scraps and magazine cuttings, along with an old crossword.

The quote is from the CD artwork for the first Guillemots album, Through the Window Pane (such a good album! And lead singer Fyfe Dangerfield has a solo album out in the new year which sounds like it is going to be pretty awesome ideed).

It's getting nearer and nearer to Christmas, so there will very likely be some Christmas cards/other festive crafts on the blog soon!

Superstition, Rainy Days and Button Magnets

Sorry for the belated post -but hey, at least it's a less superstitiously-questionable day now, right? I can see many ways in which technology could (and most probably would) have wreaked all kinds of havoc if I'd blogged on Friday the 13th. Still, every cloud!

Today was an extremely rainy/windy day, so I took advantage of this by staying in, drinking many warm drinks, reading and making these:

Button fridge magnets! Got the idea from the fantastic Making Stuff book, which is full of really awesome, original ideas for crafts. They're really simple to make; all you need are some small magnets, some good very strong all-purposes glue (from your nearest craft shop/haberdashery) and random buttons of your choice.


As well as being easy to make, these are also really cost-effective -most of the buttons I've used were spare ones sewn onto the tags of cardigans or coats. So I'll probably make more of these whenever I find more buttons... maybe I could get people I know to pass on their spare ones...

Objecting to Objectification

The Women's campaign at my university is focusing on two main areas this semester: violence against women and objectification. For the latter, I've designed three posters to stick up around campus.

One of the ways we see women being objectified at uni is the fact that you can buy 'lads mags' like Nuts, FHM, Zoo etc in the student union paper shop. It's not the nudity that a lot of us have a problem with, but the way in which the women are presented; they're barely recognised as people in their own right so much as objects. So this is something I've tried to challenge in the posters.

I used cut-out images from an issue of Nuts magazine (yes, I did have to go out and buy an issue. Got some strange looks from the woman at the till...) along with the Nuts logo which helped for continuity through the three posters (as well as the fantastic pun opportunity). This also (hopefully) gives the posters a subversive feel as they are taking a brand and a product image that people will have seen whenever they've gone to a newsagents and giving it totally different meanings/connotations.

The cut-&-paste style of the posters kind of echoes third-wave feminism as it was a technique used a lot in the zines/flyers from the Riot Grrrl movement in the '90s. It was alot of fun to make the posters in this way, although slightly disturbing as I had to wade through the general sexist mess of Nuts magazine.

The images used take the slogans quite literally (brains instead of boobs, a piece of meat in place of a body etc) and hopefully this will help the message to stick in people's heads. The aim of the posters isn't so much as to persuade the paper shop to stop selling the specific magazines, but to get people to stop and think about exactly what it is that they're buying, and to promote the message that the female body is not for sale.