Art & Craft

Trolls and spiders and things that go bump in the night

I haven’t been writing a lot lately because I’ve been doing craftsy stuff.

Earlier in the month, Kindle Arts held their annual masquerade ball, and it was the biggest joy being part of the team who made it happen. This year’s theme was Transmogrification: Into the Gloaming, and as well as helping set up and tear down, my contribution to this was the creation of the Troll Hole.

I spun this idea out of something I saw at Dustcovery in Vancouver – a giant, human-sized hummingbird feeder, where you can drink sweet tea using a straw out of a huge feeder. I wanted to create a little space where people could play at being something else, and thus the Troll Hole was born.

The shell of this is a pop up tent that’s designed for taking showers in when you’re out camping, which I made a slip cover for using thrift store sheets. I then bought a second hand RV foam mattress, and viciously attacked it with a bread knife to hack off pieces that I could use to round out the tent form and make it more stumpy. I got a pile of thrift store blankets, and using a combination of upholstery-style sewing, E6000 for fabric, and a bit of hot glue, fashioned together this lovely soft stumpy hole for trolls of all kinds to reside in.

There is a clear sign on the hole. Do not feed the trolls! But perhaps that’s more a suggestion than a rule. I supplied gummy worms anyway, and a friend with great culinary talent provided a citric acid magic mix to make them super sour. I also obtained a number of fabulous vintage troll masks (all from this one guy on FB marketplace who was very intrigued about the “troll party” I was planning) and a variety of troll-based literature for bibliophile trolls to peruse while in the hole.

Right at the last moment, the day before the ball, I realised that the hole was a little flimsy. The pop-up tent I had built the structure around was not designed to have a lot of heavy stuff hung off it, and I worried that people might collapse the hole while climbing in and out. Thankfully my amazing partner came to the rescue and constructed a skeleton out of an old broken canopy he had lying around in his “scrap metal pile” in our back yard. I’ve often cursed that pile for looking so messy, but I was glad as hell we’d hung onto that canopy, as it created a very sturdy frame. I am forever in awe of his ability to fashion practical things out of junky nothings.

At the ball, early in the evening, people were curiously amused by the hole, but nobody seemed to be getting in it. I worried that nobody would understand the full troll experience I had envisaged. But as the evening went on, the hole became very well-populated! I had a few people tell me that it was a nice space to have a sit and a cuddle with a loved one, away from the hustle and bustle of the party. One group thanked me for giving them a “safe space” to “trauma-dump” about their past relationships with each other! Many people enjoyed the masks and the books, and my 2 tubs of gummy worms were completely empty by the end.

This whole process has bought me a lot of joy. The world doesn’t provide many places for adults to play, but I believe that play is so essential for helping us express ourselves, get to know each other better, and be a little different from the ordinary, for just a little while. I also have quite a love for small cosy spaces, I think because as a child I used to make hidey-holes in my parents’ airing cupboard among all the towels and clothes there, so this project has allowed me to share a little of that small-cosy-space-love with others.

I’m planning on bringing the Troll Hole to festivals in the summer, and I want to keep improving it. Next on the agenda will be plushing out the inside of the hole to make it super cosy – I want to create some foamy panels I can attach inside, possibly with some EL wire or fairy lights sewn in.

The pull of new projects is also enticing. I have this idea that I’d like to create a kind of womb space for contemplation which has poetry inside it. I’m also thinking a bit about interactive walls and textured fabric panels with pockets and surprises in.

But for now, I am taking a break from crafts, as I’m pretty crafted out. Over December/January, as well as making the Troll Hole, I made this fabulous spider/facehugger inspired mask from scratch out of wire, paper mache, paint, glass aquarium rocks, and literally thousands of rhinestones glued by hand…

And I also made a jacket for my partner, and six big signs for the masquerade that I hand drew or cut out of vinyl. It’s been an intense crafting period so now I’m resting and getting back to writing. It’s cold and I’m ill right now, so the opportunity to bash out some good words in a blanket in front of the TV is pretty welcome.

Thanks for reading!

Art & Craft

Fluffy Frog, Famous Frog

Check out this frog I knitted! He’s a cutie, right?!

He is quite tiny.

I have wonderfully talented friends who created an art collab which resulted in huge technicolour banners of dioramas of all of our underwater-themed crafts. Little frog took part, and he got very big and colourful!

These banners go to festivals and get seen by thousands of people, so lil froggy is now kinda famous!

These are the sorts of craft things I love most… humble, fiddly beginnings that morph into something mixed-media and multifaceted. I double extra love it when people re-craft my crafts into things I wouldn’t normally do, like this.

Art & Craft

Robot waiters, chatbots, and AI image generation

I love technology. I work in tech and I am a big consumer of tech in its various forms. But I’m not blind about the shortcomings of a lot of technology, and part of what I find fun about using new technology is comparing how it actually performs with the marketing bluster about it.

Yesterday I went to a hotpot restaurant which had a robot waiter. Not so much the sleek, cool and futuristic robot that you might have imagined if you were asked a decade ago what the robots of today would look like. This robot had a cat face, played muzak-style elevator tunes, and needed rescuing when it got stuck on the edge of a wall. It was cute and novel, but only capable of bringing out dishes and returning to the kitchen. I’m sure if the human cooks and wait staff there were asked if it made any significant impact on their workload, the answer would be a no.

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