Friday, October 10, 2014

Nighttime Wanderings: Part II

Don't call me Lucy Rose anymore, please. Don't call me Lucy or Miss Till. I am now under
cover as an Illegal Street Artist. 




On Wednesday I posted about waking up super early to watch the lunar eclipse and I promised a second instalment about nighttime wanderings. 

Here it is:

At the school I go to we receive a bunch of junk mail from all sorts of places. Usually they are campus wide notices about upcoming organisation fairs, lectures or sales. Sometimes they are local venues attempting to attract college students. They send a slip of coloured paper into every single CPO box on campus (that's probably well over 1500 boxes) and 90% of them are thrown out. Actually, everyone haphazardly tosses them onto a shelf above the mail room and they sit around for several days before someone supposedly recycles them. 

I walk by the stacks of  abandoned coloured papers and wonder how they could be made into something cooler than trash. So I decided to make them into a mobile of origami cranes. I collected all of the discarded pieces of green paper from the college bookstore's advertisement and over the course of two days (with the help of a few friends. Thanks, guys!) made them into cranes. 

A few minutes ago I borrowed my roommate's black rain-jacket and illegally hung the mobile from the CPO-room ceiling (we are only allowed to display authorised displays). 

MWAHAHAAAAAA!!! It was so rebellious.

Plus I almost got locked into the student centre.










I love redemptive artwork which takes something others would overlook or deem useless and makes iy into a beautiful thing. That is why I stayed up so late and spent a lot of time making this mobile.

There is a lot of trash around me that can be transformed into something worth-while, but more often than not I have the inspiration but I never actually end up doing it.

I felt determined that with this one idea I needed to follow through. 

Here is a brief list of some trash I have collected in the past:
(I may or may not still have some of this stuff)

- Mouldy coffee grinders found in a dumpster on Stodolni street

- Piece of ventilation piping from my landlord's trash can. I thought it would make a nice gift for my boyfriend.

- Lots of pieces of nature: pinecones, acorns, leaves, branches, nut shells and sycamore pods

- Tin cans (pencil holders!)

- Jars (in which to keep my nature pieces

- An old desk entirely plastered with "Good Job!" stickers and Barbie stickers

- An entire collection of rusty hex nuts (some are shiny!)

To quote my dear friend Calvin of the Bill Watterson cartoon Calvin and Hobbes: "There is treasure everywhere!"

Wednesday, October 8, 2014

Nighttime Wanderings: Part I

Dear Friends,

There was a lunar eclipse this morning. According to the internet that is when the Sun, Moon and Earth are aligned with the Earth in the middle. I probably didn't need to explain that to you smarties. But me and the two friends who watched it with me were having a hard time figuring it out this morning at 5:30 AM, as we stood groggily clutching our coffee. We uttered such intelligent musings such as; "Does a lunar eclipse mean that the moon covers the sun? How is that possible?", "Wow that's pretty." and "Who is blasting mariachi music right now?"

It was my RA Emily who came up with the final intelligent explanation for a lunar eclipse.

Last night at 12 PM I asked my roommate Laura if she thought sleeping on the lawn of the college campus and waking up to see the eclipse was a good idea. She thought it was not. She said that the campus security would probably find me and mistake me for a homeless person. She had the more sane idea of waking up at 5:15, taking some coffee and blankets, watching the eclipse and then returning to bed. She is also very smart.

So that is what we did! Here are a couple photos. We wanted to take a photo of the eclipse, but it didn't show up on our cameras. So we did the next best thing: Selfies!


This is our first selfie attempt. Laura and Emily are
looking adorable at 5 AM.  I look crazed. 

They let me try again. The result is way cuter. Plus I added a vintage tint. 

The eclipse was beautiful. The moon was full and a reddish glow was creeping across it. One edge hadn't yet been covered and it was bright yellow. Here is my attempt at an illustration.


This was my first nighttime wandering of the week. Tune in tomorrow to hear about the next one!