Oro Valley Bolo Ties and Necklaces

For my project, I wanted to see how Oro Valley students would respond to art making workshops about BICAS. I organized four weeks worth of workshops, open to any sixth grade student, faculty and staff members, and 8th-10th grade art students, along with their parents to teach them about BICAS, and allow them to create jewelry out of lids, bottle caps, and bike parts. This is pictures from the first workshop, four weeks ago.

I was surprised at how many sixth grade students showed up for the event, and were excited to get their hands greasy. The sixth graders came before the older students, and immediately grabbed up all the good supplies. Everyone was eager, and everyone participated. They made pennants for bolo ties and for necklaces, and were interested in much more, from seeing the images on BICAS' website. It left me wondering who would show up the next week.

No parents came to the first workshop, but one teacher stopped in out of curiosity. She did not make anything. Maybe next time.

The Influence of Sound in Community Environments by Lara Somers

Friday October 30th 2011

As part of my research I went to the Japanese Friendship Garden in Phoenix, Arizona. Here I observed the environment's sounds and created an illustrated poem based on my experience and insights.

Preparing for crafting!

Bag templates


Our group made a quick and decisive decision to work together and facilitate a workshop. We wanted to make bike panniers out of donated oilcloth, but decided that was a little too intense for a mall workshop. Instead, we decided to make three different small bike bags. In class, I created paper templates for the bags. Together we traced the patterns and cut out the oilcloth for the pre-made bag patterns. We gathered additional materials for our workshop from the Wildcat Art supplies. We also made cards that included silly images and Bicas information to put in bike spokes around campus. Our biggest challenge was logistics with regard to the day of the workshop, but that went pretty smoothly as well. Throughout our planning stages, we divided up tasks evenly and arranged for each group member to bring certain items we needed for the workshop.
Shawna cuts patterns

Kim and Jake hard at work

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.

Pop-Up Gallery for BICAS

Stuart Robinson and I are so thrilled that BICAS approved our plan for a pop-up gallery on the UA Mall! Pop-up galleries are a fun, low-cost way to spread the word about BICAS to the UA community.

Advertising can seem like an expensive, unattainable luxury to non-profits; however, with a touch of creativity, a non-profit like BICAS can spread the word about its programming, while also building a relationship with the campus community. During this current economic downturn, creativity is highly valued as a necessary skill. Specifically, Susan Monagan, Susan Christopherson, and Suzanne Loker write about the links that can be made between university campuses and non-profits in their study, Creative Economy Practitioner’s Toolkit: Taking Advantage of Campus and Community Resources (Part 1). This study spoke to the core of what Stuart and I wish to accomplish. “Planning a festival or special event is a terrific entry point for a community trying to get started with creative-economy initiatives. Festivals and special events can be designed to be very flexible, provide opportunities for inclusion and satisfy multiple agendas. These events provide communities (and visitors) with evidence of successful collaboration and cooperation, accomplishment, capacity, diversity and liveliness” (par. 25).

For those who are unfamiliar with the pop-up concept, let me explain. The economy has caused many businesses to go under, leaving many vacant shops and buildings everywhere, especially in large cities. Particularly in cities like San Francisco and New York, artists and collectives have contacted building owners and negotiated the space for short periods of time for very low rent. For nights or even weeks at a time, galleries “pop-up” in these spaces, making a fun, lively, communal space for the community to engage with.

Stuart and I wish to take this concept and apply it to BICAS and the U of A. By hosting a pop-up gallery on the UA Mall showcasing the art of BICAS artist’s, we hope to spread the word about this wonderful non-profit to the students, teachers, and administrators on campus.

I have been working on the promotional materials for the pop-up show. As of now, Stuart and I are planning on hosting the event on November 16^th. If this changes, I will notify you all. In addition, I have posted the current version of the event postcard.

Panniers in Progress

When discussing how we could incorporate community art with the BICAS mission statement, our group realized that there's a ton of potential for BICAS to expand their presence among the U of A community. The best possible ways we could conceive of to accomplish this was a combination of the following ideas:

• Promotion of BICAS via "guerrilla" style advertisement
• Creating a physical presence on the Arizona campus in the form of a free bicycle art workshop on the UA mall
• Distribution of information about BICAS in both physical and word-of-mouth form

For the guerrilla style advertisement, we wanted to spread the word about BICAS in a non-destructive, fun manner that would hopefully be a pleasant find for the students affected. Keeping this in mind, we thought that various types of spoke cards, with fun imagery like cats and the BICAS website on the opposite side, would be a great way to spark interest in finding out what BICAS is and why they found this sweet card on their bike!

The workshop on the mall, a key part of our plan, had to be something equally fun to match up with the spirit of our spoke cards. So, we chose bike panniers and other small bike bags as a craft that related to the bicycle theme, is easy to make, and could be created from recycled and re-purposed materials such as bike parts and inner tubes. Fellow group member extraordinaire, Emily, had some experience making bike bags with oil cloth, so we already had a head start in decided how we could facilitate this workshop and make it really fun and super successful.

At this workshop, we planned to not only encourage students to come drop by and make some bike bags that could be donated to the BICAS art auction, but to inform anyone who was unaware of what BICAS is and how they could get involved. So, we promoted our workshop via a series of fliers distributed around campus and downtown, in hopes that we would get the largest possible turnout of people. Our hope was that people would see our fun fliers and be curious about the workshop, or even just about BICAS and/or bicycle art, and would make the effort to find out more.

In my next post, I'll talk about how we began preparing for the workshop, including all the decision making, difficulties, and new ideas that emerged in the process.

Setting up an online worshop

For my workshop, I’m exploring ways to facilitate a workshop using a blog through the site Tumblr.

The reason I chose Tumblr as the place to host the workshops was because of two features the blogs allow: submissions and reblogs. I set up the blog so that users could submit their own photos of crafts they made, which could be posted to the blog. The reblog feature is a way to spread the word about the blog. When a user reblogs a post, that post will show on their blog and others can reblog from them and so on.

The first step I took was to set up the blog space and acquire a domain name. I customized the blog’s appearance to compliment that of the BICAS website. I also created a page explaining BICAS’ mission and a link back to their site.

After the blog had been set up, I collected three different crafts to create tutorials to be posted on the site. I chose the crafts by how easy they are to do with materials around the house, and using recycled materials as well to go along with BICAS’ mission of sustainability. These tutorials have yet to be done.

After the tutorials are finished and posted, I will be contacting Casey and working with her to make any adjustments before the website will go live.