Videre: DIY pinhole camera

We came across this awesome kickstarter project this week by designer Kelly Angood; the design is a DIY pinhole camera called 'The Videre'. The kit is screen printed and die-cut individually by hand onto thick recycled card. The self assembly kit comes with everything you need; a spare medium former spool, 0.4mm pinhole and a full set of instructions, and let's be fair it's a beautiful looking kit isn't it! We also love that it's made from mostly recycled materials and it's 100% made in England!

Anyway this is a kickstarter success story! Angood has been able to launch The Videre to the market after raising over £35,000 from 881 backers, more than double her original target! We reckon this might be something for our Christmas wish list - you can order one online now! There's also an awesome tumblr going and you can find out more on their website! We reckon the results could be pretty amazing, look at these portraits! You can also see the process of making them in the video below! 

The Pop-Up Pinhole Project Portraits from Kelly Angood on Vimeo.

41 days till Christmas!
- Claire ❤

lesson idea: paper dress

The last few weeks have been crammed full of inspiring activities in my A Level lessons to get my students hooked and engaged with their new project - the exam unit! On Monday I set my AS Textiles students the challenge of creating a paper dress. The exam theme is 'Covert and Obscured' and my students been researching the work of fashion designers and artists who use recycled materials to create garments and accessories, often creating pieces so beautiful that the recycled materials used are almost unrecognisable. To begin the lesson we looked at the work of designer Gary Harvey alongside the 'Junk Fashion Show' put together by fashion students from Krakow's school of Art and Fashion design.  

I then gave the students a pile of newspapers and they looked to origami, simple folding techniques and experimenting with heat transfer onto paper to create a series of small experiments individually. We stopped intermittently to discuss processes that were working well and began planning what could be created to construct the dress. The students then worked together to dress the mannequin using staples and tape to hold the experiments together. I think the finished result is beautiful and it showed them that an artistic fashion piece can be made quickly and with limited materials, whilst encouraging them to explore the maximum potential of those materials! 

I love that there is plenty of scope to use this approach to add deeper meaning in a range of different directions depending on your choice of contextual link. You could look back to the 1960s when the paper dress was a desirable disposable fashion pieces, discuss pieces that make a social comment like Gary Harvey's or look at contemporary fashion which uses orgami as inspiration, blogger Ajurette Maga has put together a wonderful two part blog post with a brilliant collection of designers (part 1 and part 2) for this! 

As always let us know if you have a go at this after reading or get in touch and share if you've done a similar project!

- Claire ❤