Workshop Preparations...

My group's workshop was held on the grass at the UA Mall on October 20th, and was focused on spreading the word about BICAS and their upcoming anual auction through teaching how to make coinpouches, sunglass cases, and keychains from recycled bicycle tubes and small nuts and bolts type of pieces. The main ingredients- the tire tubes and the small parts being used as buttons- were provided by BICAS. We bought a few things to supplement our material list: keyrings, threading wire, and embroidery thread.

We gathered together at BICAS on a Saturday afternoon to gather and clean and prepare the parts we needed. It was a collaborative effort, with all of us picking through boxes to find interesting looking pieces to be used as buttons on the coinpouches and to string together for keychains, and then wiping them clean with Simplegreen cleaner and a rag. We picked through a few crates of tire tubes to find the larger style that we needed for our project, and we cut them open and cut them to two lengths- one for the coinpouch and one for the sunglass case. We made sure to have enough materials so each person in our class could make one of each, and about 10 more for the public to use. We wiped a few clean with rags so we could make some sample pieces, and took the others home to clean with running water and soap.

There were lots of people mulling around at BICAS that day and there and lots of things going on. As we sat and stitched sample pieces to display on the tables, we overheard a workshop being held about the different types of brakes there are on a bicycle and how to fix them. It was interesting to listen to the way it was being taught, and to the instructor's casual yet very informative manner of speaking and explaining. He told a lot of personal bike riding stories and talked about how much he had learned through BICAS and how many times this knowledge had saved him money and time. It was a really great way to endear and motivate his audience.

I was really glad to be able to listen to his class while we worked on our sample pieces. Although our workshop was not going to be as technical of a lesson as his, I made sure to pay attention to his approach and the way he described things and broke them down to basic terms. He definitely did an excellent job at this because I know nothing about the mechanics of a bicycle, and I understood everything he was talking about. Since I was going to be the one out of our group to be designing the instructional sheet, this was a great help and made me think about what it takes to break things down to basics.