Saturday 4th May - Exhibition Opening

Exhibition Opening & workshops

Megan, Jenny, Sammi and myself arrived at the Botanical Gardens at 11am ready to set up the workshops. Cath, Joe, Liz, Tony, Siony and Danielle arrived at half 11. Siony set up the refreshments while Cath, Joe and Liz helped me to set out the bookbinding workshop.
At 12 pm, we served our refreshments. More people gradually began to wonder in but it wasn't as busy as thought it would have been, this was probably due to the weather.
When my mum arrived I gave her the tour around our exhibition showing her what we had all achieved and she was thought it all worked very well within the space, as well as it being amazing, she was very proud of us all. 
I then went back to bookbinding and helped a little girl make a book. We made it together, one to one so she could use the tools, I put them in position and she pressed them down and through. She then decorated it and brought it back to show me what she had done and to say thank you. I helped another couple of kids to make a book and made some for their little siblings that they could take home to them. 
I didn't have anything to do with the collaborative drawing in the end, but I did see the final outcome and it looked to have gone very well. 
When it came to cleaning up we decided that we were going to leave it up as it worked as a  piece of work. 
Sammi, Cath, Joe and Liz left the gardens at around 3pm. Megan, Jenny and I decided to stay for another hour to help clean up. With the 5 of us helping it didn't take long at all. We put all the tables and chairs back in their sheds and wiped everything down. Making sure that everything was left how we found it.
We managed to leave the gardens just after 4pm. I had such a lovely day and actually enjoyed teaching people to make books. It was such a wonderful experience and I would definitely do something like that again.

Friday 3rd May

Finalising our exhibition

Today Liz and I mounted name tags and titles of everyones work to lay by the side of their work in the cabinets. When we had placed these into the cabinets Jenny and I took some posters and walked around the gardens asking if we could put them up to advertise our exhibition. When we got back to the apothecaries hall everything had been hung. John and Cath were in the process of trying to put up some spot lights to create the shadows we wanted around the room. As the plug sockets and extension leads were only on one wall and able to be put up safely, we could only cast shadows on one wall around a corner. We tried to adjust the spot lights and add in more to cast shadows across the second wall but it didn't work as well, so we limited out lights down to two. We also had to arrange the spots so that they didn't blind anyone as they walked in. 

1st year Prints

After that has been completed, it was down to us to clean up while John and Lyndon took down the scaffolding. We helped to carry the scaffolding out and load it on to the trailer. Hoovering up the carpet in the installation room was the biggest task as it took ages. I had to pick up the cut offs of fishing line as the Hoover wouldn't pick them up.

Instead of everyone making cakes for a cake sale in college we decided that we would all put £6 into a pot as then we would have to put all the time into buying ingredients, baking the cakes and selling them. I had managed to collect the money off everyone so in our pot we had £42. 

I gave £2 to Megan so she could go and buy me 2 packets of cups from the pound shop as that was the cheapest we could get them; £2 for 160 plastic white cups. 

I went to the co-op as they had packets of crisps on offer for £1 each so I bought 4 of them. Our budget was now down to £36. Cath also kindly gave us £20.

I went online to Tescos to see what sort of prices boxes of wine were. I also asked my step dad to recommend a good wine that they sold. 

I bought 2 boxes of wine that were £16 each, 8 cartons of orange juice for £7 and a bottle of orange squash for £1.50. We also needed some table cloths for our refreshment and bookmaking tables, so I got 2 of those for £2 each and 3 packets of baby wipes for 50p each.

Altogether that totalled £52 so we still have £10 in our budget which we will probably put towards something in our 3rd year.

Thursday 2nd May 2013

Setting up at the Botanics

Cath, Joe, Liz, Carla and John had been at the Botanical Gardens yesterday (Wednesday) cleaning, putting up the scaffolding and emptying the cabinets ready for us to arrive today to hang the installation. They had also managed to get a supermarket cage which they took apart for us to use. We use it to hang our installation from, as it is a grid of small squares. 

Carla had set up her prints and a book she had made yesterday as she was unable to make today or tomorrow. Cath and Liz had set up 2 cabinets. One with some victorian enamelware that had transferred decals, the other, a cabinet containing some old weighing scales and some copper dishes that had been enamelled also with some decals.

When we arrived, a couple of labels had already been hung. Liz had worked out that they were going to hang in a dish-like way. There would be 5 layers of circles. We did half the circle first. The 1st layer around the outside would have 40 labels which hung at 120" of fishing line. This is the shortest layer. The second layer would have 34 labels hung at 130", getting a tiny bit longer. The third layer would hang 20 labels which hung at 138". The fourth layer hung 5 labels at 145" and the inside layer would hold 3 labels at 150", the longest length. We then worked backwards hanging the other half of our circle hanging layer four; 5 labels at 145.
Threading all the labels took a long time. The reason being was having to measure all the fishing line at different lengths then tying it onto the labels, making sure they were kept in groups of their length.

Megan, Danielle and Sammi arranged the cabinets for Megan's, Danielle's and Siony's work. They did a really good job and managed to get Megan and Siony's to blend in with the other cabinets really well.

Trying out different ways of displaying Megan's work

Cath and Liz's enamelled copper dishes and some weighing scales and weights

Some text decals

Danielle's work beginning to be displayed

A book that Liz had made with some garden tags

Megan's work displayed in the cabinet

Danielle's work displayed in the cabinet with Liz's book

Cath and Liz's decal enamelware

Carla's print plates and book

Siony's sewed canvases

Tony's books

Danielle's second cabinet

Danielle's work

The label installation when we arrived this morning

Measuring the fishing line

Tying the fishing line to the labels

A pile of the different lengths for different sections

The installation when we left this afternoon (first year prints hanging on wall behind)

Half of the installation taking place

Tuesday 30th April

Collaborative statement

So we thought we had completed our collaborative statement but we didn't take the first year prints into account, so Joe and Liz had kindly added a small section about the prints onto the bottom.

So this is now our final collaborative statement:

Thursday 25th April 2013

Decals on labels

This was a very simple and easy process which didn't take much time. Cath had bought some original Victorian pharmacy labels from Ebay. She had them put onto some screens and which were screen printed onto specialist transfer/decal papers. 

We cut out our chosen decals and put them onto our labels. Furthermore, the decals were soaked in a tub of water so the glue created a slippery surface, letting the decal slide off. We then slid the decals over our hands or along a finger. We then turned the sticky sheet down on our label, smearing the left over glue and water across the area of the label. This ensured that when the label was placed, positioning it would be easy.

Tuesday 30th April 2013

Final Poster

After amending our poster all morning which included correcting many one letter spelling mistakes, various punctuation errors, we then printed them out to proof read and identify further mistakes. This process was repeated several times to achieve perfection.