Blog of a veggie lady who can't stay in one place for too long, loves to dumpster dive, loves to craft and can rant about feminism for hours! Just little notes and photos from my travels and the qwirky, fun, arty and ridiculous things I've seen! (and things I've found in bins.)
And back to uni! So by this point I’d missed a lot of the process of developing work because of my travelling, so my work was understandably not included. Finnish group work is kind of different to English group work, whereas in England we work on a combined piece of work in Finland they do their own pieces each. So Paula was making boat themed work, towels and a piece of wall art and Laura was making after sauna clothing. So they were working on their own pieces, and were really lovely and gave me little bits to do, and I worked on doing the final powerpoint presentation as a contribution. I also learnt how to mix dyes! It was pretty exciting, seeing as I haven’t been taught that in Huddersfield yet and we just generally use pre mixed dyes. I think being in Finland has taught me a lot of the practical background knowledge I’ll need to use when I work outside of uni. Such as how to coat a silk screen, which the technicians would do back home, presumably because of the obscene English health and safety laws! I really love the girls work, and the level of effort they put into it to make it perfect!
The next morning we actually got on the ferry! It was windy! It was a beautiful 2 hour journey past lots of vastly different island landscapes. We got into Aland at about 11 pm, on the wrong side of the island, or so we thought. So I very cheekily went and asked a couple if they were going to Mariehamn, which they were, so they gave us a lift. We then got to the ferry port, and our ferry wasn’t listed. We had no idea what to do, but the night before we were meant to stay with some couchsurfers, I had their address, so we turned up at their flat begging for help! they told us our ferry was actually from where the last ferry dropped us, but we had a few hours to go so we chilled out with them for a little bit! They then showed us where the bus to the ferry we wanted went from, and after even more stress, got on the ferry and had a very disrupted nights sleep on the way to Stockholm!
![And then A WIZARD CAME ALONG!!!! This was the lead singer from one of the bands, I wasn’t really feeling this band, they were a bit over the top out there. A lot of people seemed to be loving it, but they were very slow starting songs that went on for about 20 mins, and I was tired, but liked the outfit =]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lmuo24H3ko1qda4jjo1_500.png)
And then A WIZARD CAME ALONG!!!! This was the lead singer from one of the bands, I wasn’t really feeling this band, they were a bit over the top out there. A lot of people seemed to be loving it, but they were very slow starting songs that went on for about 20 mins, and I was tired, but liked the outfit =]
Samu then took us for a picnic in a gorgeous park with a great view over Turku! It was a beautiful sunny evening and all around were people drinking beer and chilling out. We then went to a squat party!
So then I took a few weeks out to go travelling! It was all planned before I was put into group work and thought I’d be doing individual work, so it put a bit of a spanner in the works for my uni work! But I had my lovely friend David coming over from England to visit. We started off in Helsinki and stayed with Juha, my favorite Helsinki resident! We went to some parties and did a lot of drinking as we usually do with him. After convincing David that Helsinki really is the most uninspiring capital city ever, we moved on to Turku. I’ve been to Turku before twice and wasn’t a big fan. But we couch surfed with this fantastic guy called Samu. He met us from the train station and took us to his house, it was just gorgeous! An old Summerhouse with no right angles and lots of little quaint bits!
I was obsessed with the rather epic bookshelf our client had, which dominated one side of her living room. Because of this I started to draw lots and lots of pages of books with different patterns, with the aim to use it on some sauna textiles.
The clients house was full of wooden furniture, walls, floors, everything was very Finnish warm tones of wood. My initial idea was to make a sauna seat cover with strips of different colour and this design on one stripe.
For the 2nd term I we did group work. It was pretty confusing, we thought we were going to be in a felt making class, then went into it to be put into group work. We didn’t realise until a few weeks later that there was no felt making involved in it at all! Still, instead we were doing client work which was interesting and showed me how working for a client works in the real world. We went to our clients house to talk to her about what she’d like us to make. We had pre-made some mood boards to show her to get an idea of her personal style. She gave us some initial ideas that she might want towels for the small bathroom, maybe some curtains for her laundry room, some wall textiles and maybe some sauna textiles. Her apartment which she shares with her husband was really inspirational. It was full of furniture, artefacts and art from all different places and in all different styles. Her eclectic taste made her quite easy to design things for.
After the zombie walk we went to pull a sauna, dressed as zombies. The sauna pull was for a world record, they had people pulling the sauna non stop for 80 hours and there ALWAYS has to be someone in the sauna. We did the “graveyard” shift in our zombie attire from 12-4am. We got to watch the sunrise over Lake Kallevesi (Light water, I think it’s a really pretty name for a lake.) and I jumped from the fast moving sauna a few times to go for a quick dip in the lake!
