I made this, words

Make Something Every Day – Writing 002

Today I rebelled. Slightly. Or perhaps I just tweaked the rules based on learning what works. I’ve been thinking for a couple of days that Sunday needs to be a review day rather than a full “production” day.

Writing

And then I pulled “Writing” again. The first repeat. And while I have done some writing and thinking about writing today (and I’m writing this) I gave myself permission to do some of the things I’ve been wanting to do, remembering that the important thing here is that I make something everyday and don’t get pulled into chores and duty all day long.

I think what I learned from the other day’s Writing assignment is that I need a longer term project. It might only be a short essay, but I need a goal for a series of writing sessions, rather than starting from scratch each time. What do I want to write? Well, the things that came out onto the page last time were the tweet storm about what I’m doing and the beginnings of a “What were the eighties like?” piece. Also the tweet storm about my dream the other day (though that was the day after – I am drawn to this form for writing short stories with a twist).

Perhaps another way of coming at the 80s would be to write some short stories and then try to tie them together, rather than starting top down to express the feeling of being there for me without explaining what I was doing.

Fire

I’ve been meaning to make a fire in the back garden for a while. It’s good for me to build it properly and see it burn well. I have plenty of earth and water and air in my life, I miss fire. So I put it together from the dried grass and weeds pile and some of the weedier rosemary twigs for kindling and then built it up with bits of a pallet that was broken and I’d chopped up into reasonable chunks.

I had a go at making drawing charcoal from some of the larger rosemary twigs in a little tin. I punched a tiny hole in the lid of an old vaseline tin (like a shoe polish tin only more like an inch and a half in diameter). The lid goes on very tightly, which isn’t ideal for this, it turns out, because heat and metal. I’ll look out for other more suitable vessels.

Then just as the fire was nice and hot and settling down to embers and I’d popped the tin on the top to cook, it started to rain. Of course, it’s the Bank Holiday weekend, obviously it’s going to rain as soon as you start burning anything.

Anyway, I left it, the rain went off quite quickly and the embers were still hot enough. When I couldn’t see any gas or smoke coming out of the hole in the tin, I lifted it out to cool.

When I opened it, I was pleased to see that it had cooked – I’d been worried that the rain would have spoiled it. It wasn’t perfect – I’m not sure that rosemary is the best material for drawing with, but it’s what I had immediately to hand and it was dry. I might go down to the river tomorrow and see what I can find in terms of hazel and willow. Anyway I made some carbonised wood, I tried a new process and it worked – and it’s pretty in it’s own way.

I should have taken photographs throughout the process, but all I got was the final result.

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rosemary charcoal

35mm film

The other distraction is that I now have all the bits I need to process black and white film, so I can’t see me resisting the impulse to use that tomorrow as well as reviewing the progress to date.

I made this, words

make something every day – family history 001

“Family History” day kicked off with a memory shared from Facebook. Last year, I saw this photo shared on a South Birmingham Past/Present type group and was pretty sure I’d spotted my aunt, Saffron, so shared it with her and I was right. We think it was 1956. She and Sue gave me some more background.

West Heath May Queen and entourage c1956

“I remember the day so well, feeling nervous and embarrassed and scared, and my friend Christine Smith as the other ‘maid of honour’. Jeez 🙄”

“it was an annual event. It was the May Queen who then ‘reined’ over the West Heath carnival. I remember Saffron’s dress was green flock with velvet ribbon trim!”

“I’m sure Mom made Saffron’s [dress]”

“I wonder if mom made Christine’s dress as well. Yes, remember the green velvet ribbon especially 😉”

I moved on to looking for some reminiscence materials for my Uncle Lloyd. When I saw him a couple of weeks ago, we talked about when he lived on Main Street, just off the Stratford Road in the early 1960s.

I found him in the electoral roll for 1962 in Flat 2, 48 Main Street, the house isn’t there any more, but I did find a 1938 25-inch OS map that includes that area on the National Library of Scotland site (lots of old maps there, with Creative Commons licences).

He struggles with following online stuff, so I’m printing it all out and sending him a letter, but I’ll also share it by email with his remaining two sisters and one brother.

I also had a scout around for things to do with Eaton’s, the Canadian department store. He lived in Toronto and worked as a delivery driver for them in the mid-1950s (he went out there in 1955 and returned in 1958, I have shown him the passenger lists he was on).

Lloyd Davenport c.1955-58 delivering furniture for Eaton's in Toronto, Ontario

I really ought to have a dig for his military record (National Service) and Police Service record next.

With this stuff, it’s really hard to stay focused, because there are so many rabbit holes to go down. The best solution I’ve found is to give myself a fairly narrow goal, keep bringing myself back to take notes of what I have found and pointers to interesting things that need to be followed up, and forgiving myself for spending more time on it than I intended!

I made this, words

make something every day – wastecraft 001

THERE ARE DAYS WHEN I SEE THE TASK AND GO “YUK, I DON’T KNOW WHAT I’M GOING TO DO” AND THEN SPEND HOURS THINKING ABOUT IT AND OTHERS, LIKE TODAY, WHERE I KNOW IMMEDIATELY WHAT I WAS GOING TO DO.

Today was “WasteCraft” – which is inspired by Ian Willey‘s workshops of the same name. Ian’s great at seeing the potential for applying old and new making skills to working out how to deal with stuff that we at best recycle and at worst, throw away.

In particular today, I knew that I wanted to do more on my “Origami Paper from Take-Away Bags” project.

Previously I’d taken a Caffe Nero paper bag (my wife got lots delivered during lockdown) and chopped it up because the weight and finish of it reminded me of origami paper. And then I turned it quickly into a simple little box. It’s the kind of box that you might put paper clips or other small things in. I usually have at least one on my desk to catch pencil sharpenings.

nero origami

But I needed to do a bit of research before going into full production and turning the whole pile into folding fodder.

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So I carefully unpicked one of the bags. OK I got impatient and wasn’t as careful as I could have been. The main enemy is the glue. The schoolboy stamp-collector in me wanted to try to melt it with steam, but then I’d probably have had to do a risk assessment or been in contravention of the Health & Safety at Work etc. Act 1974. I’ll have another go at home where my employer is less worried about such things. I also need to try perhaps seeing if the glue melts under a warm (or hot!) iron because sooner or later this paper’s probably going to get iron pressed flat anyway.

But for now I just let it tear and leave some bits stuck together. It’s a case of undoing some of the seams and removing the bag’s handles (which are also paper, more in a moment) to get to a single, rectangular piece of paper.

I don’t seem to have taken a picture of a finished rectangle, so here’s one just unfolded with the handles still attached.

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I measured the unfolded bag and found it to be 670mm x 340mm which means 8 square sheets of not quite 170mm each. I can accept the “not quite” in the name of minimising waste.

So my squares will have 17cm sides.

The handles are just folded paper and rather than pull them apart I’m quite attracted to them as square straws (300mm long) even if I don’t have an immediate idea of what to do with them.

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So then I took the guillotine to it and produced 8 x 17cm squares – some of them torn, they all have at least one perforated edge that’s presumably from the machine they’re made on – I might trim it off, I might keep it, there’s not many origami folds where you end up seeing the actual edge of the paper.

And then I realised that I’d been assuming (silly me!) that the Pret A Manger bags that I had (there are fewer, but still enough to work with and introduce some variety) would be of exactly the same dimensions.

No, no! turns out the long side of them is about 11cm longer than the Nero bags, so there’s going to be some left over, one way or another.

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Sadly although I learned a lot, and have written more about today than ever before, I didn’t quite get round to actually making something out of the paper squares yet, but there’ll be another day for that soon.

I made this

make something every day – make photos 001

I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw that today was “Make Photos”. I can do that. I feel good about my photography. I’ve been doing it for a very long time. I mean, I suppose, technically, I’ve been writing longer, but it doesn’t feel like that and I’m just much more comfortable with an open brief to “Make Photos” than to “Write”.

So it felt like a bit of a day off. I just grabbed images when they came to me and when they didn’t, I went out with my eyes open for them. It reminds me that it’s a feeling that I enjoy, the disconnection from the normal folk and the madness of the world to just look at what is in front of me and decide whether it’s something I want to record or whether there’s a different way of looking at it than usual.

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I don’t like talking about what they might mean – same with all the work really – I don’t know what they (should) mean to you, they were just there today and called to me.

On the other hand there are some things in there because they’re interesting to me and I want to know more. There’s the plaque on the Telephone Exchange that shows that that bit of it was built in 1937, which is the year my dad was born. The box that the candles came in, from Andrew’s dad’s garage, I think held 2 dozen 15 3/4oz cans and has some interesting instructions for turning the box into a display stand and some sort of standards certificate on the base, which might have research and blogging potential.

For some reason, I took some random snaps of food in Waitrose – “something, something, climate crisis, unsustainable food supply chain, something, we’re fucked”.

And then there’s the mix of peeling paint and derelict ground with plants growing on it and bits of pavement and walls that you might not notice unless you went out with your photographer’s eyes in.

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A note to self though that there’s another job to do on editing, cropping and choosing ones to share – making photos is more than just pointing and shooting. They’re taking a while to upload to Flickr, but soon they should all be here Make Something Every Day #1

A good day.

I made this

make something every day – writing 001

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Today, I pulled “Writing”. Yet again, I probably spent more time thinking about what sort of writing I mean and what I wanted to do with today than on actually typing (or scrawling) anything.

I can’t see me ever being the sort of professional writer who gets up every day, has a cup of tea, dashes off 5,000 words no matter what and then gets on with whatever else it is that they do. I mean, I might make it there before I die, but it would be by accident rather than design at this stage.

But I do enjoy writing. I enjoy putting together an argument or a story, working out what’s really important in what I want to say and getting rid of the bits that get in the way of that (usually).

And it does deserve to be on the list, because writing something more substantial than diary-like blog posts and a few tweets is something I want to be able to do, I think I’ve got some substantial things to say and actually, now I think about it, I remember that the whole idea for this “make something every day” thing came out of an idea of focusing on writing – I thought I might try to turn out a short essay every week – but the prospect of doing that and only that was too triggering for my ADHD brain (mainly because it would mean I wouldn’t have time for any of the other things on the list).

So today I did two things, I suppose. I tested out the Tweet Storm action in Drafts with a little 9 tweet thread.

Before posting it looked like this:

Screenshot 2021-08-24 at 21.29.14.png

And then, after lunch, I wrote about 500 words draft on “What were the 1980s really like?”

I got sidetracked again by thinking about writing tools and blogging software – it’s a curse! – but it’s OK, the project isn’t about doing the thing all day, no matter what and not thinking about anything outside of your subject area. So I cut myself some slack and had a nakd bar.

Oh and I suppose I wrote this post as well, but that doesn’t count, does it?

I made this

make something every day – craft #1

[late publishing from yesterday’s activity – another two-post day today then (I hope) ]

“Craft” today. What does that mean? I can see that in the set of cards I made, I’ve distinguished it from craft that is mostly about reusing waste (like the origami boxes made out of Caffè Nero bags.) but it wasn’t immediately obvious to me what I’d been thinking of, preferring as I do to leave definition to emerge from what it actually is, rather than making a detailed plan.

Is it knitting? I don’t think I was imagining a day of engaging with knitting. Perhaps something papier-mâché? Nah.

At this point I was already late for work, so I trotted off to church and got on with emails and writing promotional materials for lunch, as you do.

Then my colleague, Andrew the caretaker sent me a text asking whether I’d like this box of candles.

WhatsApp Image 2021-08-20 at 14.35.34.jpeg

Yes! Of course. Not just another example of ways to build community out of stuff you have lying around, but also a craft activity. So now some time today will go on washing and chipping away at some lumps of old wax. Yes, there’ll be some recycling into new candles, but I’m also going to try some whittling like I did with this carrot a while back.

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I made this, words

make something everyday – music 001

OK, so the answer to the question of whether I work on Sunday was “yes, kinda”.

There’s a reason for the sabbath. At a practical level it’s about unwinding and connecting with people we care about. Today was my son’s birthday and I’m glad I had a good long chat with him.

But I did pull a card and it was “Music” and so I was thinking about it most of the day even if I didn’t make anything that I can share here. Obviously this can’t be about me making a totally finished product every day and it won’t even be something small and unpolished. Today’s one of those days. I didn’t make anything new that I’m willing to share, but I am willing to share what I went through.

Firstly I wrote something to my friend Steve Lawson. He’d posted something about people who sing and accompany themselves needing to put effort into both the singing and the instrument they play rather than just letting one carry the other.

This is how I feel about my music. I’ve put hours into both singing and ukulele playing, but ultimately I see myself as a singer who accompanies himself rather than a ukulele player who sings (and the latter is how I think I’m mostly perceived).

I subscribed to Steve’s music on bandcamp last year and that got me his whole back catalogue and regular new music that he makes that he doesn’t release more widely. Steve’s stuff is very experimental – he plays solo bass and pushes in all sorts of directions what playing solo bass might mean.

Anyway, I said:

“I feel at the moment like I’m on the edge of something new. I’m getting a lot from listening to your subscription releases and thinking about how to make new music. And it’s something about using my voice as an instrument for experimentation in the same way you use your bass, rather than only trying to refine the voice and uke. I still work on making my strumming and fills more interesting, but I also need to do something that stretches the dominant instrument without being held back by my lack of technique in the accompaniment… I think.”

I’m not sure what this means. I’m not going to be suddenly making free jazz dooby-dooby biddly-bop experimental electronica stuff, but I am experimenting with what is possible, both in terms of recording and performance. And I made a start on that today – my time included playing uke and banjo, singing solo and singing with uke and recording bits of all of them, exploring some ideas – it’s sketchbook stuff, which is an important building block, I now have a bit more of an idea of what I’m aiming for and a process for getting there.

I made this

Make SOMETHING EVERY DAY – MY ARCHIVE 001

You get two posts today as I catch up. Can’t find a catchy enough title for this project, but this is only Day 2, we’ll see. Do I work on Sundays (tomorrow)? Dunno, we’ll see. If you missed it, the beginning of the previous post has an explanation.

Today I pulled “My Archive”.

Already, I can’t remember what I was thinking when I wrote these out. But there’s a lot to be done with “My Archive”, that’s for sure, whatever it is. I’m not certain quite where the line is between my archive and family history at the moment, I suppose it’s things that I made or things that are about me – but who cares? So there’s a bit of the process emerging which is that I have to have a bit of a think and a bit of a write first before I settle on what it is that I’m going to make. The writing, thinking and doing might not all get represented in the blog post.

I got a bit distracted by the perennial blogging software/where to publish/how to publish bullshit and that’s the last time I’m going to mention it. But when I’d calmed down and thought about it, I realised that actually scanning some negatives that I shot in about 1980 or ’81 and putting them on Flickr with some tags and a bit of a description was a worthwhile enough thing to do, it does get me engaged with organising the massive cloud of stuff that’s on digital platforms and in cardboard boxes, the only real index of which is my brain. Just writing stuff down instead of thinking about it is really useful, if only because it helps me to stop thinking about it.

R01-S23 Gig 1980/81
1 of 23 in the first roll

I’m not entirely happy with how the album got embedded from Flickr in WordPress, so I’ve replaced it with just one image. You can jump to Flickr if you want to see the whole thing and maybe like and comment and stuff. Maybe you recognise some of the people I don’t. Or the venue. Or know when it was. None of which I have much of a clue about – some archivist.

It was shot on HP5, and these are straight from the scanner, no cropping or colour correction yet.

I was using a flash, so wasn’t at the stage where I was experimenting with pushing the film speed to extremes. I know that I got my first SLR for my 15th birthday, so this is most likely to be 1980. Tony joined the Zenith Hot Stompers in October 1981 and so this will be before then. If I didn’t fear contradiction, I would say it was a configuration of the New Delta Jazzmen – Tony Davis, trumpet; Mick Jones, trombone; Clive Millward, drums; Pete Barnard, banjo; I don’t know the clarinet or bass players. And I’d also say it was upstairs at the Booth Hall at Hereford, but I have no evidence for that other than forty-year-old memories that are very unreliable.

This was just the first 24-exposure roll, there’s another 36-exp one to do, which might yield more clues.

It’s very odd looking at pictures I made forty years ago and trying to think about what I thought I was doing. I can see that I was experimenting and getting my eye in. But it was hard then, not having near infinite storage or the ability to check what you just shot. Experimentation with shooting live events was risky when you wouldn’t get anything back till you’d had some time in the dark room. There are plenty of rookie composition mistakes and bits where the person I was shooting turned their head at the last minute, but again, you just don’t know that until you develop the film.

So how does that add to my archive? Well it’s a bit more action research, I suppose. I’ve done something, thought about it, recorded some data and written about it. It’s not nearly as organised as I want it to be, but it’s an improvement. Progress.

I made this

learning how to work out loud again – ANIMation 001

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I lost the knack. And I started a job where I found it hard to do it consistently, so didn’t do it at all. And I got diagnosed with ADHD at the age of 56, which explained an awful lot.

And after the raging and choruses of “no wonder!” I’m now settling into being able to do a day job and do other stuff too, trying to work with my brain’s constant search for novelty and variety rather than against it.

But I’ve not been writing here or very much anywhere online. Posting to Facebook feels like it just creates an obligation to respond and engage. There’s fewer folk here and hopefully not as needy.

So I came up with a scheme. I made 15 little cards with “genres” on them “forms of expression” if you like, definitely not “content types”. They’re things I like making, don’t worry about it – oh and I’m not going to say what they all are until I’ve got at least one set of 15.

I’m pulling one out of the pile every day and making that the focus for today. And then writing a little bit about it. So it’s the old schtick of “do cool stuff and write about it on the internet” but maybe not as cool and definitely not with anything else in mind but a desire to ship something everyday. WordPress isn’t the perfect blogging tool (and the block editor hurts to use), but it’s what I’ve got. There’ll be a day for playing with blogging software, but it isn’t today.

Yesterday’s was “Animation”. So I made a couple of things. One was while I was having lunch, I made a little time-lapse loop of people going in and out of TK Maxx. I put it on instagram because that seems the easiest place to host things like that. Not ideal, but again not today’s battle.

Then after having a bit of a think, I spotted a picture I took in the woods a while ago of a tree trunk that someone had drawn a bear’s face on.

IMG_20181004_131829_292

So when I came back I imported it to GIMP and made some blank layers on top. I faffed with pencil width for a bit to try to match the marker that the original was done with. And then I traced the bits I wanted to keep in this piece onto the first transparent layer. I do this in some contrasting colour so that it’s easy to tell which is the drawing and which is the original – for this I used a bright red.

When I was fairly happy with it and knew that the lines kind of joined up well enough, I got rid of the transparency and started filling in blocks of colour based very loosely on the original (I also made the “inner” of the ears bigger and the eyes bigger and solid black). That’s the point I’d got to when I sat back and thought I should write it up a bit.

It looked like this:

bear

Next I copied this, freehand and quite sloppily another three times so that I had four frames that look the same but are very slightly different. When turned into an animated GIF, the looping makes it look a bit more lively (it’s what I remember as the Roobarb & Custard effect, because I’m old). I’ve done some of this here before, but can’t be bothered to search back.

Anyway, now, shrunk down a little, it looks like this:

and that pleased me enough to let it be for another day.

(yes, I did write about it yesterday, but didn’t post here – progress not perfection) – stop moaning you’ll get another one in a minute and then you’ll be sorry.

words

Signs of life

Three things popped up on my radar in Guildford this week. Promising signs of things starting to happen. They might not all be to everyone’s taste, but it’s all better than the void in new activity that’s had to pervade for the last year.

1.

First one, I can’t find anything official on yet – so I guess it’s still just a rumour – but I hear that Zero Carbon Guildford are going to be taking on the empty retail unit at the bottom of North Street formerly known as New Look (so, interestingly right between TK Maxx and McDonalds).

I got this from the local Labour Party newsletter (yes I’m still a member, no I don’t know for how much longer) which says

 after some essential work they plan to open: a zero waste shop , a café, Library of Things, Cinema and Meeting space. They will be needing lots of volunteers as things open up, so keep in touch through https://www.zerocarbonguildford.org/ 

2.

Then there’s The Boathouse or Soulspace which is down by the river next to the Weyside Pub (for very aged readers, The Jolly Farmer). Again, details are sparse, and building has only just begun, but I’m on the mailing list – it’s café and coworking and dedicated space for local charity halow (who currently we see a lot of at Guildford URC) as far as I can see. They’re doing some right things, reaching out to community to see what’s needed and I’ve sent them an email, so we’ll see.

3.

Finally, there’s news of redevelopment of the old Burymead House site at the bottom of Portsmouth Road (between The Cannon and the Wycliffe Buildings. It’s been undeveloped for twenty years – twenty years where it could have been used for *something* but has just been left to wilderness (and not even very good wilderness – too much rubbish and rubble still left lying around)

So now it will be 303 “co-living” spaces and branded as Guildford Plaza – it looks like student accomodation for people who’ve just finished being students. So I expect much criticism (enough students already!) but I’m on the fence currently between “it’ll never happen” and “ooh 300 new neighbours!”

I'm the founder of the Tuttle Club and fascinated by organisation. I enjoy making social art and building communities.