callmegustie on etsy

I have finally made my first listing on etsy.

Being at home with my two young children I have decided to begin crafting scandi inspired designs and set up a work from home. I love the process of making and draw inspiration from the everyday as well as my Swedish heritage.

Out of my love for scandinavian and nordic design styles, colours and form, Stoccie Blue was born. Christmas is my absolute favourite holiday of the year and so I made a Christmas stocking out of burlap and cotton fabric. It is neat and rustic and blends in nicely in homes that are decorated with earthy colours and tones.

Stoccie Blue is the first in a series of stockings to come so stay tuned.


You can purchase Stoccie Blue here

yule tid

 Greetings.

It is has been a couple of months since I popped in here. Wow, time flies. Busy busy times at the moment with christmas coming up. For the crafty and creative person comes a-whole-lot-of-stuff-to-do panic around about this time of the year. I took a chill pill the other day and made some decorations for our hallway. I have saved all these fruit netting bags to find a reuse for them and they finally came handy to create this hanging, pagan queen like woman...I love the simplicity of this piece and the best part of this is that I get to eat more ice cream now to get more sticks! This pagan theme is reminding me that I am finally coming to terms with the complexity of my scandinavian heritage and my newfound home in australia...I am working towards embracing both in finding a pathway for my creative streak.

Hanging decoration in hallway

Pagan queen

I also had some scraps lying around after finishing a bouquet arrangement for my friends wedding flowers. I used this awesome (but expensive) hat making mesh and it is quite stiff which makes for great folded flower like shapes with bits of fabric stuck in it. 

Fabric flower

It is the first advent on sunday (not that i am very religious but it is a nice custom regardless). Got some christmas decorations up, next on the itinerary are the stockings. Have all the materials, just need to finish the tie I am sowing for my partner for a wedding we are going to next weekend. Pweh, hard life being a maker. (NOT)

oh, ps. YES. We finally moved the TV away from our main living area, the conversations that has enabled over the last week is unreal. Loving it.

Bottom-up urbanism at its finest - Heath Nash at HIFA 2011

Recycle plastic bottle pattern - Image via designboom courtesy of Heath Nash

 This project includes all the things that I love about design and more specifically about the urban landscape and meaningful spatial site interventions. Heath Nash, project coordinator and designer produced and organised this work along with local artisans for Harare International Festival of the Art. HIFA performing arts festival 2011. The South-African designer, reused thousands of recycled plastic bottles and other materials such as plastic buckets and aluminium cans to create a set of canopies for the urban dweller to take to when in need of shade. According to designboom, Nash got the inspiration from simply walking the streets of the Zimbabwean capital whilst observing how people occupied and congregated under the city's tree canopies so to avoid the Southern African mercury. 

This observation was translated into a pragmatic and spatial take on the idea of recycling waste materials derived from consumption. 

Components of an extensive distribution system - Image via designboom courtesy of Heath Nash

The way in which the canopies are constructed is simply magic. Repetitive pattern is one of the most powerful ways of generating beauty and striking form in my eyes and the combining of cultural and social observation with a commentary of mass-consumption, leads way to a meaningful site intervention.

The project suggests a site intervention that is constructed at a 1:1 scale, utilising local craftsmanship with the organising mind of a designer. The other beauty in this project lie in the system that this 1:1 site intervention actually represents. Where all these bottles, cans and buckets come from remain unrepresented, perhaps it is not doable but I hope that you get the picture. A 1:1 intervention that assembles tens of thousands of small objects that was part of a mass-distribution system going out for consumption to then be returned to another system, that of recycling and end up in this meaningful installation. Simply beauty.

re-ordering, re-assembling, re-configuring - Image via designboom courtesy of Heath Nash

process - Image via designboom courtesy of Heath Nash

Bird Hotel not in trees

bird cafe by Teddy Luong and Dennis Cheng for Umbra

via designmilk
This is a nice little design but I can't help pondering the designing of the birds actual habitat in the form of trees. The spatial qualities would improve with the planting of trees and shrubs instead or in addition to.

Unless, of course, you designed this little bird house for an urban installation. It has a quicker impact on the site than waiting for a tree to grow. So here it is: install this little bird house design whilst you wait for their actual tree/shrub habitat to grow in the meantime. Greatness!

State of Design 2011 Festival Guide - Now available

This years State of Design festival guide has been launched and is available from their website, here.

The theme for this year's festival is Design that moves. Personally, I am interested in the interventions that take place outside in the urban fabric, such as the Landscape Urbanism 72 Hour Urban Action in the Docklands that sees teams of architects, builders, landscape architects, urban designers etc...live, eat, sleep and work on their chosen sites and construct new urban forms through site specific interventions. (Correction, the name of this event has now changed to Urban Realities, Landscape Urbanism 3 Day Design Challenge.

Chasing Kitsune, from here

Hassell's Chasing Kitsune which is a Japanese food truck that will make its way around the city and adapt to its imnmediate surroundings, Mapping the Burbs, which is an Architectural discovery tour conducted on your bike.

 Camp Street CampOut + LookOut, which invites you to design and recreate the tent city for a day. Participants are invited to pitch their designs for a tent and display it in Alfred Deakin Place, Ballarat. Using recycled fabric, everyone is invited to tailor their tent claim a little bit of this public space.

Other than what's happening outside on our streets and beyond and true to my personal interests, there is also a worshop called MakeUp which takes you through the art of reusing and upcycling material. From transforming unwanted vintage wallpaper to reusing old yacht sailcloths and turning them into teepees.

This and much much more stuff to do in Victoria from the 20-31 July 2011.

Urban Interventions

My urban intervention Crate[or] is now online for your perusal here. Feel free to email or comment on the project. It forms a part of ongoing design research that I am conducting into approaching the city at a human scale when discussing urban development and the understanding of the forces that play out in the city.

Crate[or], photo by author

IKEA's 'Homemade is Best' - The architecture of Baking

Ikea's 'Homemade is Best' cook book contains 30 traditional Swedish baked goods recipes with a twist. Each recipe is complimented by an image of the ingredients before they are mixed together and baked. It is a wonderful documentation of the process of baking. NO, actually, it is the process of arranging the ingredients of baking.

Napoleonbakelser, before

Napoleonbakelser,after

The ingredients are placed in a decorative composition adjacent to each other and this image is then paired with the end result. But if I was to imagine the scenery of when I bake and cook in my kitchen, the image is a far cry from the stylized and glorified images of this book. It would be interesting to contrast this work by documenting the 'real' process of making and juxtaposition the images next to each other to further the notion of documenting a design process. Because, it is only the ingredients and the end result that is on display here, and the actual MAKING part seem to have been left out.

Kanelbullar (Cinnamon Buns) before

Kanelbullar (Cinnamon Buns) after

Still, a cool idea from the ad-agency Forsman & Bodenfors.

The homemade is best book serve the purpose of drawing more people towards the kitchen and obviously to IKEA's showroom. That is beside the point. These days, people seem to be more obsessed with the end result and product that they forget the beauty in the making of things. This is why I love this project. It starts to talk about the intimate and domestic in a beautiful way. It is a world away from fast-food outlets and mass-production of food. 

Mandelmusslor (Almond mussels), before

Mandelmusslor (Almond mussels), after

Yet the irony is that this work is meant to draw people towards the mass-production of the IKEA kitchen. As if IKEA is saying: OK, so here we have it, we'll let you go back to domesticity and the art of making unique food in your own home so that you don't have to worry about getting your consciousness dirty with the immorality of mass-produced food. Leave the mass-production to us and you'll be a happy peach. 

vaniljhorn (vanilla horn) before,
from here

vaniljhorn (vanilla horn) after, from here

Looking at the homemade is best work, makes me a happy peach but I just want to reconfigure the work to include the process of making it as well.

Now I know the point was not that at all, it is just the way I think. Originally, the ad company made the cookbook, created an iphone app that traced your exercise and told you when  you'd done enough exercise and earned the calories to eat one of the recepies. Clever, isn't it. Apparently, the ad reached 40 million people without IKEA spending a cent on media and promotional costs..somehow...I am contributing to the publicity too. Hmmm.

Here's a link to the movie.

I think I might just visually suggest how this process would look if applied to the components of an architectural project. Watch this space.