Friday Finds

Given that Christmas is sneaking up on us so quickly (simultaneous 'eek' and 'YAY') I thought I'd do a few posts on all the lovely handmade goodies out there. In this first post I'd like to show you some of the wonderfully geeky things I've found on MadeIt, the online Australian handmade market.

Geeky alien cards by MoonMum, with the alien bodies made from pages from an old junior science encylopedia.

Charles Darwin cup and saucer by Zinnia Pea with hand inked quotes from Darwin on the cup and saucer. 

Cufflinks from Red Zebra Designs with Russian Swiss ruby jewel  watch movements

LEGO cufflinks by Rainbow Lollies

Finding Fibonacci

It's been a long time since blog posts, but I certainly haven't forgotten about IdeaLiza. I've got lots of things I'd like to blog about, but today I'm going to talk about my latest series 'Finding Fibonacci'. In this series I'm branching out from the laser cutting into screen printing. I've been printing onto gorgeous organic cotton bags from The Organic Mamas. These bags have so many great qualities: they're made from 100% organic cotton, are free from dyes and chemicals, and are super strong and durable. They're made in India and are SKAL certified.
My first series of screen prints is called 'Finding Fibonacci' and is based on natural objects (so far fruit and vegetables, but hopefully there will be flowers soon too) which feature spirals described by Fibonacci numbers.  I've also printed bags with the spiral pattern which is key to all of these objects, which is also the central feature of my logo. So, here they are...!

They're currently available from my Made It, Bluecaravan, and Etsy stores.

Madeit picks

This week I get to be one of the picks editors for madeit. Here are some of the pieces that I chose:

Madeit is a site for buying and selling handmade goods by Australian designers, and has all sorts of cool things on there including stationary, jewellery, clothing, and homewares. For those of you starting to think about Christmas (eek!) there is lots of great stuff on this site!

Molecular Weave in Liminal Apparel T-off

Liminal Apparel is a NZ store which sells fair-trade, organic t-shirts and bags. At the moment they're running a great competition on facebook giving away 20 fair trade organic screen printed t-shirts. All the entries are now in and voting is open until 16th October. There are 18 entries, and some great ones in there. I entered the Molecular Weave piece, showing the structure of cellulose in the shape of a t-shirt. 

Cotton fibre is almost pure cellulose (about 91%). Cellulose is an organic compound with the chemical formula (C6H10O5)n and is an incredibly common compound, being found in the cell walls of green plants, and in algae. It is a straight chain polymer, and has a crystalline formation aided by intra- and inter-chain hydrogen bonding. This bonding holds the chains together and allows formation of microfibrils (fiber-like strands) with high tensile strength. These strands are very important in cell walls.

There are a few different crystalline structures of cellulose, with the different structures relating to different configurations of hydrogen bonding. Most natural cellulose is Cellulose I, and it occurs in two forms: Iα and Iβ. Cotton cellulose contains both these structures, but is primarily Iβ.

In this t-shirt design, the black dots are carbon, red is oxygen, and white is hydrogen. The dotted white lines show the hydrogen bonding in the Iβ configuration of cellulose. I like how the t-shirts in the competition are organic (in the sense of grown without the use of certain pesticides or fertilizers) and the cellulose molecule is an organic molecule (a molecule containing carbon). I also like that the crystalline structure of cellulose resembles the weave of a t-shirt, with the chains going in one direction, and hydrogen bonds linking the chains.

Periodic Videos

A few days ago I went to a fun lecture 'From test tube to YouTube', given by Professor Martyn Poliakoff from the University of Nottingham. He has a YouTube channel, and a website with a short video for every element in the periodic table. If you were interested in my post on Carbon, I definitely recommend his video for carbon. He and his team have also made videos relating to topical events like the olympic games, Nobel Prizes, and the nuclear accident in Japan. One of his most recent videos, and apparently one of his favourites, is this one where he cuddles a koala and talks about the chemistry of eucalyptus oil. He is also very well known for his chemistry themed ties, and his hair! He is now in the Guinness Book of World Records for the world's smallest periodic table, etched on one of his hairs.

The physicists at the University of Nottingham have also got in on the act and also have a series of videos about some of the symbols used in physics. 

All very geeky and fun and I've just wasted a lot of time watching!

Green Desire

I recently came across a brilliant store called Mio, which has a range of beautiful, functional, sustainable products ranging from furniture, through lighting and accessories, and including some fascinating paper forms for surface coverings. And I want most of what they sell!

When I clicked my way through their website, I found their philosophy page, where they explain their principle of Green Desire. They define this as 'when consumers actually crave products that are sustainable and responsible'. And their way of contributing to that cultural shift is by creating 'responsible products that are both beautiful and affordable'.

This notion of Green Desire is one to which I can strongly relate. At times I think that we have stuffed up our planet to such a degree that we're on a one way path to complete self destruction. But I also think that if we have any hope of limiting this self destruction, we need major cultural shifts. These shifts include in our energy use, and in our resource consumption. Consumerism seems such a huge part of the culture of today, and eliminating that desire for more and more goods seems unlikely at best. But maybe changing the type of goods craved is a more reasonable step.

New store!

Young Republic is an online marketplace for Australian designers, and includes categories for women, men, kids, jewellery, and home + life. There is some fabulous stuff on there, and I'm really excited to be part of it too. And today I'm particularly excited to be featured on the front page, featuring hot new arrivals. To go directly to my store, click on the badge on the right.

Carbon

Carbon is a bit of a hot topic at the moment, so I thought it might be a good day to talk about this piece:

The picture is of a necklace featuring a wood pendant with the element carbon as it is on a periodic table. Trees incorporate carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into biomass, and by making objects from this wood the carbon remains stored (in a particularly geeky memento).

Carbon is a pretty amazing element. To me one of the most intriguing things about it is how many different forms it can take - from graphite (soft enough to use for writing) to diamond (one of the hardest materials known, and a fair bit more valuable than graphite!). My favourite of its allotropes are the fullerenes, particularly buckminsterfullerene (not least because they make fantastic modular origami pieces using PHiZZ units). Buckminsterfullerene is made of 60 carbon atoms, and is shaped like a soccer ball. One of its claims to fame is that it is the largest matter to have been shown to exhibit wave-particle duality.

I'm hoping to take this carbon on/ in wood idea a bit further with coasters, and maybe even some form of table.

Business cards

Introducing the new IdeaLiza business cards...

Each card is also a seed packet, containing sunflower seeds. The paper I've used is acid free 100% recycled light brown paper, and I think goes really well with the seed packet design.

Hopefully people will grow their own sunflowers, and see the cool patterns in the flower head.

Puzzles

Every Christmas when I was a kid I would get a new jigsaw puzzle. On Boxing Day, we would be packed into the car (literally in my case – I was the youngest and hence could have the most stuff piled around me) and would get the barge to Straddie. We stayed in the same place each year: a wonderful rambling house with sea grass matting on the floors, mismatching crockery, and the smell of salt, and copious quantities of sunscreen. I loved it. There were many rituals involved in these holidays: multiple swims a day, beach walks, kites, Arnotts family assorted biscuits, cheese jaffles, Christmas cake (which the ants generally discovered), getting stung by a blue bottle, and doing the jigsaw puzzle. My Dad and I would take over the table in the living room and spend a large chunk of the hot days completing the puzzle.

I've been playing around with puzzles again, but in a bit of a different form. Here are some coasters which together form a trivet. Not as complex perhaps as the ones that occupied my summer holidays, but maybe they can be a fun part of everyday life. The pieces are made from 100% wool felt and the whole trivet measures about 210 mm x 210 mm and is available from my online stores (listed on the right).

Here is another example of what I’ve been doing with puzzles. Sorry for the lack of ironing before I took the photos! These puzzle pieces were hand screen printed onto 100% cotton napkins.

Honeycomb weathering and GeoLogs

Over the past five or so months my partner R. and I have slowly been exploring some of Sydney’s beaches. With neither of us being used to living in a big city, we were particularly drawn to the areas that, well, didn’t feel like a big city, and the beaches that weren’t overlooked by huge houses. Of course, some of these beaches have their own charm – just not the charm we were after.

Maroubra is probably our favourite of the beaches we’ve visited so far. The beach itself is fabulous, but it also has great rocks at either end to explore, and a path along the cliffs to the south of the beach with spectacular views through the coastal vegetation.

One of the first things we found to explore at Maroubra was the rocky headland at the north of the beach. These rocks have exquisite weathering patterns peppering their surface. Here are a few of the pictures I took.

My geology knowledge is basically non-existent, but I’m pretty sure these pictures show honeycomb weathering, otherwise known as miniature tafoni weathering, cavernous weathering, fretting, and alveoli weathering. The basic mechanism of honeycomb weathering starts with salt being deposited on the rock, in this case probably by saltwater spray or by the wind. When the salt solution begins to evaporate the salt starts to crystallise in the porous rock, separating the mineral grains and leaving the rock open to other forms of weathering. Over time, and many cycles of wetting and drying of the rock, these amazing honeycomb patterns emerge. Honeycomb weathering isn’t just limited to coastal cliff faces, but can occur on building stones, in hot deserts, and at the poles. There is even some evidence of honeycomb weathering on Mars [1].

I've featured these rock patterns at Maroubra on one refillable notebook so far, and am planning on further books all featuring different pictures of the rocks. R. suggested a great name for these books: GeoLogs.

[1] C. Rodriguez-Navarro, "Evidence of honeycomb weathering on Mars", Geophysical Research Letters, 25, 3249-3252, 1998.

New products

In my last post I talked about spirals and sunflowers. Well, here are some sneak peeks of new products which feature this design. Any ideas what the pieces are?

They will be available in the next few days at www.madeit.com.au/IdeaLiza and www.bluecaravan.net/idealiza

Spirals and sunflowers

The patterns in the centre of a sunflower are visually spectacular, but also very clever. The pattern consists of interlocking spirals, with the number of left and right spirals being successive Fibonacci numbers. This particular pattern creates an extremely efficient way of packing in florets. Evolution has hit on this pattern numerous times; it is also seen in pinecones, pineapples, waratahs, the position of leaves on a stem…

Mathematically, the position of each floret is given by:

where the golden angle is 137.508 degrees, and i is the head number. I wrote a little matlab program to plot  these positions, and the result for 200 heads is shown below.

This pattern became one of my first designs, and has also made it into my logo. There are several reasons why I think it is fitting to have this pattern in my logo. Firstly, it is a great example of the connections between science and nature, which intrigue me. Secondly, I love the analogy of an idea germinating and growing, and having a representation of something that physically germinates and grows is apt. And thirdly, I’ve spent most of my adult life working in solar energy, and having something that not only looks sunny and is called sunflower, but that the leaves and buds of the plant track the sun across the sky, seems fitting. And as a final note, those who know me will probably be very familiar with how grumpy I get during days without sunshine – following the sun seems like a wise choice for me!

Beginnings

I’m not really sure when IdeaLiza began. I guess the thought of being able to focus more on designing, making, creating – whatever you want to call it – has been rolling around in my head for several years now. But several changes over the past year have encouraged me to try to turn that thought into reality. I’m not really sure what that reality is going to look like, but I’m enjoying the process of bringing it into being! I plan on using this blog to document how, why, and what I create.