New simoneandginko workshop dates!

Do you have jewelry you no longer wear? Do you have broken necklaces, or a collection of beads you love but don't know what to do with? Did your grandmother leave you some gorgeous beads that you'd love to make into something for you to wear?

Good news! simoneandginko is running two upcycled jewelry workshops in November and December. They'll be held at the Artists Shed in Queanbeyan, only 15 minutes from Canberra civic centre and 5 minutes past the airport. We'll provide the materials and guidance to help you create beautiful pieces of contemporary jewelry.

Dates: Thursday 3 November or Thursday 1 December
Times: 6-9pm 
Location: the Artists Shed, 14 Foster Street Queanbeyan
Cost: $40 (includes all materials)
Bring: jewelry and beads that you would like to up-cycle

If you'd like to enrol in the class, contact us.

We look forward to seeing you there!

New York? Schmoo York...

Sorry everyone, but I really was a bit disappointed in New York. I know, it is amazing and enormous and blah blah blah, but I think everyone, me included, talked it up just a teensy little bit. So when I finally arrived in this city of great promise, it fell a little short for me. It didn't help that I was sick for three of the six days I was there...

Lest you think this is just a blog of complaints, I did do some fun things in New York. One of them was to attend a short course in extraordinary embroidery at 3rd Ward, a very cool warehouse space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, that offers space for artists to rent, a range of short courses, a gallery and numerous events and other activities.

The course was run by Iviva Olenick, a wonderfully inspiring visual artist who creates clever and insightful commentaries on human relationships through her embroidery pieces.

And, in fact, I found that my art blossomed in the face of adversity. I created two pieces (one above, one below) that reflected my musings on the contrasts of New York, between the aspirational signs, billboards and big screen tvs I saw around me, and the realities of a tough and sometimes exhausting life in a big city.

Resin in Canberra!

Last Saturday heralded our very first resin jewellery workshop in Canberra, courtesy of Bqueen with enthusiastic support from simoneandginko. On a beautiful sunny afternoon, at the Belconnen Arts Centre, overlooking the lovely Lake Gininderra, Canberrans created gorgeous bangles and rings in all the colours of the rainbow.

We learnt a lot from our tutor Bron, including the important safety issues when working with resin, but also how to create beautiful contemporary jewellery.

It's great to have such an exciting new workshop happening in Canberra. And simoneandginko will be running the next three workshops! They will be on Saturday 5 and 26 November, and 10 December, at the Belconnen Arts Centre. Details of how to book are at Bqueen or Belconnen Arts Centre. We hope to see you there!

Denver: Mountain high

Colorado is gorgeous.

If you catch my slightly incredulous tone, it's because no one ever told me that. In fact, most guide books seem to dedicate about four pages total to the parts of Colorado (Denver, Boulder, and the Rocky Mountains National Park) that I visited. Maybe it is just a really well-kept secret. In any case, I'm really glad I decided to visit my friends in Denver as part of my US trip and discover this really lovely place.

I spent my first day in Colorado wandering the rather quaint streets of Boulder, a red-brick university town, and admiring the flatirons - a series of steep granite outcrops that the sporty people of Boulder like to rock-climb (when they're not mountain-biking up sharp inclines).

(scenery near Boulder)

We'd made plans to hike in the Rocky Mountains National Park the next day, but the weather forecast didn't look great - cold weather and possible rain. We kept our fingers crossed, put on a couple of extra layers and headed out the next morning. The sky was grey and as we got closer to the mountains, a low-lying fog prevented me from seeing all but the lower peaks.

The air was cold and crisp as we exited the car and started walking on the trail to Bear Lake.

As we climbed higher and higher, the scenery became more enveloped in fog. We would pause at scenic spots, where my friends would assure me, regretfully, that 'if it wasn't for the fog, this would be an amazing view of granite peaks'.

I assured my friends that I didn't mind. The pines and fir trees, coupled with the lakes and fog, had me enchanted. In fact, some of the scenery reminded me of the haunting images captured by Swedish photographer, Denise Grunstein. You don't get this kind of scenery in Australia, and so on some level I didn't really think it existed until I saw it with my own eyes.

I don't feel that my photos have done the scenery justification, but I can assure you that it was beautiful. And while I haven't now decided to become a landscape artist, I loved the ideas that this scenery inspired. I hope they inspire you as well. At the very least, visit Colorado! It's gorgeous.

San Francisco: Everything old is new again

The funny thing I found about San Francisco was that it seemed to be stuck in the sixties. Lots of friendly people, lefty politics, psychadelic artwork, and drug-addled homeless. It makes sense I guess - the sixties was a big deal for San Francisco, when little towns like Canberra were barely smudges on the landscape.

One fun and inspirational thing that I did in San Francisco was to enrol in a workshop at SCRAP. SCRAP is a big warehouse that sources end of line products and scraps from factories and other sources, then sells or gives them away, mostly to schools for art and craft projects.

The workshop I did was called 'from the free section', referring to part of the store where everything is free. The idea of the workshop was to use these miscellaneous products to make beautiful and useful things. To make treasure from trash, to make old things new and shiny.

One of my favourites was making little notepads using paint sample strips. They were just the right length to wrap around a small pile of paper, and stapled at the end to hold it all together. For an added innovation, a notch in the top of the fold created a pencil holder. Pretty clever! Looks stylish too (see below).

Other items we made included paper photoframes (top right in the photo), bound photo albums with paddle-pop sticks (I guess they call these popsicle sticks?) and a rubber band, and for the most beautiful and complicated item, we reused pages of old calendars to make beautiful Japanese origami wreaths (below).

All this with the aid of our helpful and inspirational teacher, Monica Lee. Monica is really clever at seeing the potential in items that we can too easily throw away. Things like pretty postcards or nice wrapping paper that we just don't know what to do with anymore.

So I guess the biggest thing I took away from the course was not the items itself (although the three that I managed to bring back to Australia are fabulous), but more the skills and ideas to see inspiration in scrap. Thanks Monica!

PS: If you want to know more about places like SCRAP, Australia has a few reverse garbage warehouses in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne. Or you could start your own!

Los Angeles: Lofty heights

So some of you may be aware that I was just in the USA for three weeks on holiday... I intend the next few weeks to be filled with posts about the inspiring ideas I had on my trip.

In Los Angeles I was overawed by the ambitions of architects with grand visions and seemingly unlimited budgets. In the midst of this sprawling city, awash with dry heat, stood various buildings so extraordinary, enormous yet elegant, that I felt compelled to blog about them.

One of my favourite buildings was the Getty Center, perched high on a hill overlooking LA. Not one building but a series of buildings all intertwined, this center is a homage to geometry. To the glory of the grid, more specifically. Each panel on the buildings, each railing, even the distance between each tree, is measured according to a specific grid. The architect was Richard Meier, who listed Frank Lloyd Wright as one of his key influences.

I'm not exactly a grid person, myself. But in attending the architecture tour at the Getty Center, I was inspired by the vision of the architect and his ideas about order and disorder. For example, by laying the gardens out in an accurate grid, he was able to interchange plants and trees to create a sense of order in disorder. That for me is a wonderful creative insight that can be applied to craft and design in many other areas.

Other buildings I adored included the silvery curves of the Walt Disney Concert Hall (not a Mickey Mouse in sight, thank goodness), the LA County Museum of Art and for design of an earlier era, the Richard J Riordan Central Library and the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels.