Poor Woman's Patio

The semester's winding down, but during rare breaks I've been dumpster diving for concrete pieces and gradually digging out the mess of nasty weeds in the backyard. Today I finished a partial patio in the backyard, which I made completely from free concrete and stone, and which will hopefully keep the enormous weeds from coming back.

Here's the corner of yard with the dead weeds last fall. They were green and lush in the summer when they filled the whole corner. The dogs even had a tunnel system through them.


The root system is a crazy web across the whole area, and I dug up hundreds of nasty clumps like this:


Here's the strip once I tore out the dead dry stalks, before digging


My rag-tag collection of concrete and cinder blocks that I've been collecting:


and the final "patio":


I left 2-foot aisles around the washer pit (I made washer pits for Zach's birthday last month! He got the first cupper!), which I'll plant with some sort of vine-y ground cover. Next weekend, when all my finals are done, I'll plant my square foot garden in the big wooden box. I bought a bunch of heirloom seedlings at a neighborhood sale yesterday, and even planted a bunch of seedlings inside last week. I'm still shocked that they're sprouting, which is silly because that was the whole point. But I didn't screw it up yet! Exciting!

It's still looking pretty shoddy back there, but I think it'll come together!

Dumpster Diving!

My main non-school project is making something out of the backyard. I'm sick of cleaning off the dogs every time it rains and the backyard turns into a mud pit. Plus we'll have myriad family and friends over this summer (Zach's graduation, projecting movies onto the garage, Pearson's going-away party, and, um, our WEDDING :) , and I want to have a reasonably nice space to entertain.

We're in a rental though, so I hope to spend next-to-nothing to clean the place up. Note my stealth pose as I scout wood scraps with which to build planters for my vegetable garden. Pro!

Also, I spotted some big concrete slabs in a dumpster a few blocks from home, and the super nice neighbor loaded them into my trunk with a tractor.





Four things:
1. I need a truck.
2. I need a tractor.
3. OK, I only want these things.
4. But they would be super helpful to have in my dumpster diving kit.

Patio Swing, AKA, I-Told-You-So Swing

Last July I dragged this gem out of the alley and into the garage:



and, naturally, Z was not pleased. I mean, look at this thing:



Not exactly something you'd want to sit on. Lawn swing needed some love, so I stripped it, admired its good bones, and then it sat in the garage for 8 months.



And then! Spring Break! I found 300' of seatbelt webbing on ebay for $40:



and wove the shit out of the seat:



It broke my heart to cut the webbing, so I decided to weave the whole thing in one piece (minus the weird places at the front where the frame didn't extend far enough). Which turned out to be a nightmare, but once I got started it was more of a personal issue than a practical one. And for some reason, it worked in the end.







TA-DA!





And then it snowed 7" the next day. Not to worry, the webbing recovered nicely and is back to its handsome, super-comfy self.



One of my favorite dumpster diving projects! And I've got about 80' of webbing left... any ideas for cool projects?

P.S. Zach... I told you so :)
P.P.S. Sorry you have to put up with me storing shit in the garage for months (years) on end.

All the pics from this before & after project are on flickr.

hey there, long time no see

I've been busy on all sorts of projects, but most of them are school projects, and it just hasn't felt right to update this space with grad school assignments. So here are some things I've done in my "spare" time (aka procrastination time) in the last few months...



In January, Shannon, Saffron, and I made concrete planters. Shannon was inspired by my last blog post about making concrete planters for materials testing, so we mixed up a few batches at my place. Notice it's pitch black through the blinds in the background; we started at like 2, thinking it would take just a few hours. I think they left around 10 pm. We mixed the concrete in a big plastic bin on the side patio, which was covered with a frozen sheet of ice, smarties that we are. Saffron was such a trooper:

First batch was two tall planters, the shorty with a large planting space and the tall one with a smaller hole. Plastic tubes added for drainage (wondering if this will work adequately?).

My favorite is this rectangle planter we made by lining a gridded plastic basket from the $1 store with a plastic bag, and filling with concrete. Next version should have drainage holes, and I'd like to make an actual mold that would put the pillow-y grid on the top instead of the bottom:




(gridded basket in the background)

Concrete Samples

The semester's not over, but I'm officially on Thanksgiving break so I'll take some time over the next week to update this space with some of my projects from the last three months.

We made concrete samples a few weeks ago for a class in Building Materials and Technology - one standard concrete test, and one with a bonus ingredient. They were strength tested at a lab today, but I was late and couldn't figure out how to get in :( so I'll update when I hear how the zip-ties and pink paint held up. We had to write a paper summarizing the project, and I thought it would be fitting to also compose a tribute video. It was going to be a music video with an 80's hair band song, but I didn't want to block out the intimate conversation and subtle moments. Also, I couldn't decide on which Loverboy song to use.

Virgin Studio

This week is/was orientation and a skills workshop for architecture studio. Here's how the studio looks on day 1. I'm looking forward to when it looks more like this.

PKND 6 recap

PechaKucha Night volume 6 was 3 weeks ago so I figure now is as good a time as any to post these pictures. It was a fantastic event; eight Denver designers plus one out-of-towner presented to the 300+ people who camped out in Buntport Theater's parking lot. The keg ran out before sunset but at least there wasn't a lightning storm or tornado. Basically, it was awesome.

Before:

After:

Before:

After:

Before:

After:

I took these pictures with my iPhone, so once it got dark I let the legit photographer take over. Randall Bellows III took phenomenal photos of each presenter and did our audience shot at the end... will update with those soon.

PechaKucha Night Denver volume 7 will be on October 20 at Buntport Theater. Details on that event to come!

Flipbooks of my Favorite Places Part II

Genius Locii flipbooks in action!

A digital film of an analog flipbook of a digital film. How meta is that?

I catalogued my process of making the flipbooks on flickr and there is a recap of the "Looking for Locii" exhibit on the Museum's website. Plus, my last post gives every mind-numbing detail of the making of the flipbooks. It's just like How It's Made, only not really.

This sixth and final exhibition for the DCM is a cross-city challenge between citizens of Denver and San Francisco. It's a pop-up museum that has (so far) appeared in Mod Livin', the Denver Art Museum, and the CTA architecture office (my summer volunteering gig) on the Santa Fe art walk. Next month the exhibit it heads to SF to pop-up around that city for a few weeks, and then it will be gone. I am pretty sure it is just going to evaporate.

I think I failed to mention that I was the only person to complete all the community challenges at the DCM. To honor my star participation I was awarded the prestigious golden pickle!

I'm fairly certain that it's the only trophy I have ever received in my life. That's what happens when you take art classes in school instead of playing sports...

DCM creative challenge recap:

Missing Map

Mummify Me

29

My Little Mania

Bottled Up

Wonder Room

Looking for Locii

Flipbooks of my Favorite Places

The DCM's final community challenge was to identify a space in the city that has a distinct atmosphere or spirit, or Genius Locii, and then make a tribute to it in a small box provided by the museum. Every day I fall more in love with the new neighborhood we recently moved to, so I decided to make a little flipbook shrine to the Berkeley Park hood. The best part about living here is that I am within walking distance of three of my favorite places: a dog park, coffee shop, and hardware store. So I filmed a walk around the neighborhood with my sidekick, Meyer.

We started at home, the point at the top right, then we walked counterclockwise to the Berkeley dog park, over to Tenn St. coffee, down to Tennyson Hardware, and then back home. It ended up being an hour-long walk split into four separate legs, so each flipbook is a 10-20 minute video reduced to 60-80 pages.

Each participant was given a small cardboard box to contain the representation of their Genius Locii, and I wanted to keep the flipbooks tethered to the box yet still accessible to viewers. In my BFA show in 2006 I used magnets to attach flipbooks to the side of a pedestal:

but since this is for a traveling exhibit that will pop-up around Denver and San Francisco I wanted to attach them more permanently. After lots of brainstorming (pulleys? rubber bands? mini slinkies!) I finally thought of using retractable name-badge lanyards. So I bound the flipbooks with zip-ties and looped the lanyard into the binding.

Here they are hooked into the box. More about the exhibit and a video of my flipbooks coming soon...

.

PKND extreme makeover

I just finished updating the PechaKucha Night Denver website, oh, about an hour ago. It might not look like much, but it took some major time messing around with CSS and style sheets and FTP, etc. I basically know about 5% about each of those things, which made for some interesting all-nighters. I do love Indexhibit, the interface used to build the site, but I wish I knew more about customizing it all special-like. So here's what happened...

I added presenter backgrounds:

and a fancy About page with pictures of audiences from around the world:

and some video: Charles Carpenter's awesome video from PKND2:

and my stop-motion video of Jennifer Thies' aerial fabric dancing:

and the most exciting feature: a fancy contact form!

There's also a new facebook group to join our twitter feed.

It was a fun project; I learned a lot; I'm really glad it's over with.