It's November!

One week from today (tonight actually) is the opening of the gallery show of all of our furniture and textiles that we made in Copenhagen this summer!! It's hard to believe we got there just over 4 months ago, it's still so fresh in everyone's minds, but on the other hand it does feel like forever since I saw the friends I made there.

Anyway, the point of this post is to invite everyone to the opening reception on November 9th, from 8 to 10 PM on the Second Floor Gallery in the Design building at Pratt!

(Click the title of this post to see the Facebook event page for more details!)

DIS Chair!

Hi readers, I know it's been a while since I've updated, but school and work have been running full force, and the semester is well underway. Several projects are going on, but first let me start with the professionally-taken photographs of my chair that I made in Copenhagen!











I still haven't seen it back in NYC yet, they're here somewhere, but apparently going through customs takes longer than shipping from CPH to NYC by boat. Eventually there will be a DIS show here at Pratt for furniture & textiles from this summer, so keep a look out for that too.

I finished my first jewelry project since high school! Surprise surprise, it's tree-shaped, just like everything else I seem to be making these days. Sustainability is kind of taking over my brain. Anyway here it is, in all its hours-of-sewn-on-paper-leaves glory!





In other news, CSDS is taking on a project through a green organization in NYC to work with starbucks about a paper cup uptake container, which will connect with an effort here at pratt to use paper cups and make styrofoam a thing of the past. After all, paper is only truly better when it's being used and disposed of correctly.

I'm also in the middle of working out a connection between CSDS and Sift, the new Pratt Sustainability newsletter. I'm not sure at this point if I'll be writing full-fledged articles, CSDS blurb updates, or what, but I'm now the go-between gal for these two wonderful efforts.

Etsy.com people came to Pratt yesterday and did a presentation about what Etsy is for, how it works, etc. and it got me (and I'm sure others) pumped to put up work and sell some things on Etsy. It really plays into the whole local-as-sustainability thing, as well as supporting green efforts. I'll probably set up an Etsy account next semester when I have more time to make things, such as my recycled plastic bag laptop sleeves.

Finally, I'm working on a sustainable, tree-based (in many ways) coffee table in furniture this semester. I don't have any pictures of that to upload just yet, though, so let me leave it at that for now.

DIS summer design exhibition 2009

I've already posted with my thoughts on leaving Copenhagen, so I won't go through all that again. Suffice to say that despite the heat and my jetlag, i am glad to be home, although I already do miss Scandinavia very very much, and I know I will continue to want to return there for a very long time.



Instead I'm going to dedicate this post to the final work of the DIS summer 2009 arch. & design kids, a very talented group, many of whom I will miss very much when we won't get to spend every waking minute of every day together in the studio or out on the town or on a coach bus in the Danish countryside. At the right you can see my chair, in the show space.


Here's a glimpse of the overall space the show was in, with the textiles hanging, architecture models on tables, and chairs grouped on the floor. (The furniture kids blew the rest of 'em out of the water, if I do say so myself. The textiles were fantastic as well, although there were less than 10 of them, and the arch kids needed descriptions of their projects to be more engaging. But after all, scandinavia is all about the furniture!)




Here are a couple of other snapshots from the opening. This is Kim's chair, to the right, and below are Dobie and Natalie, who is sitting in my chair, with her print hanging in the background.






With a lot of the chairs it's pretty evident how the study time in Scandinavia has impacted it's design (if you know what to look for), but with a lot of them it's not so evident, and I think mine could be included in the latter category. If you look at the details, though, you'll see how the (custom-fabricated) steel stretcher bars were made not to hide the chair's weakness, which is that it wants to splay out when you sit in it, hence the steel bars, but to showcase how it all works.




The fact that the washers on the ends have holes in them, visible to show how it was screwed together, and the way they are straight, and not curved, in order to leave the spotlight on the veneer shapes are indicative of scandinavian design. I know I'm not a scandinavian designer, but I have learned so much about chairs, of course, and scandinavian lifestyles in general that I like to think I have a solid idea of not only how people think here, but also why it has been (and will be) a foundation and a leader of design in many different areas.

an update... finally!

Okay so before I talk about the rest of the study tour, let me tell you about my morning, and the weeks since i got back.

so a few days ago (last thursday) i went to the Carlsberg brewery with my friend Christian, which is literally down the street from my apartment. it was really cool, and they had some really good beer (i don't even like beer!) but when we went to the gift shop the guy told me my card had a bank error.... uh oh. i chalked it up to a danish pin-needing credit card or something (they've all sorts of weird pin credit cards here) but no. This i found out this morning, when i went riding in the sun and heat across the city to a hardware store to pick up nuts & washers for my chair (the guy gave them to me for free, which was nice-- about the only good thing that happened today) and then afterwords i found a Baresso (the coffee chain here-- like starbucks, but more expensive (hey, it's copenhagen!) and way better) because i decided i deserved an iced latte (Iced coffee is soooo hard to come by in this city!!) and a sandwich for later, when i'd be at the studio 2:30-10 pm. well, i finally make it to the front of the line (let me tell you, Nyhavn (street) on the canal + sunny day = tourists galore) and i order my stuff, and, no surprise, my card doesn't work. So the girl tells me to go to the ATM outside and skip the line when i come back, but when I go outside to find the ATM and I think I'm about to get cash, the machine goes, "sooooo ummm, yeah.... your card? it's bad. we're gonna keep it. KTHXBAI!" and im like WTF?? So i go back inside to tell the girl i don't have cash on me (where does my money goooo??) and that it ate my card, and she just gives me a pitiful look and wishes me luck. I was going to go home and get cash, but instead since i was closer I just went to the studio. Where i spent the entire day doing not one single thing on my chair except draw a line where my teacher needs to cut it for me. that's it. in 7.5 hours i did only that, and i got a bacon cheese burger in Christiania. that's it. Why? because ever since my chair came off the mold yesterday morning, i've been shoved to the back of the line since i'm way closer to being done than anyone else in veneer, which I guess is a good thing.

Anyway, so, i called the bank back again, after i couldn't get in touch last time, and they told my mom nothing when she went to the bank looking for info, and the guy connected me through to bank of america headquarters, where a nice woman named Georgia explained to me the BoA Emergency Card Dispersal Procedure, which is limited to once a year per customer if you qualify (and I was like, i freakin qualify, you shut my card off!!) and basically it boils down to them private courier-ing (courieing?) my card to me tomorrow by noon. I must have sounded so relieved by the end of my 20 minutes on the phone with Georgia she actually laughed at how many times I thanked her for helping me. So as long as i manage to wake up and hear the door buzzer ring tomorrow morning, I won't be in a foreign country without any money or any means of providing for myself. Phew.

Kay so that happened. That, and, i woke up with the skin of a sunburned 85 year old lady on my face. I'm not going to get into details, but i'll just say that something about the combination of wind, sun, exercise, and probably something I eat all combine to create an all-out war of epic proportions against eczema on most of my extremities.

I know what you're thinking, today was a blast, right? You're jealous you're not in Denmark, with eczema, no credit card, and no help on your chair. But I do love it here, every minute in this city! I'm not taking any of my time for granted, and I finally feel like I belong here, and it's sad to think i'll be leaving in 2 weeks!!

As for the rest of the study tour, well after Stockholm we went to the Ikea factory in sweden, which was pretty boring because everyone except for 2 people were on holiday (everyone here is on holiday!) and it was pretty much like any other furniture factory we've seen (you've seen one, you've seen em all, except for PP Møbler, which was pretty fantastic. Our teachers call them the best furnuture makers in denmark, and i believe it!) except for their super amazing gigantic RP machines. (That's rapid prototype for all you non-ID people out there... it prints computer models from Solidworks or other programs in 3D from liquid plastic. Hot stuff.) Only one that they had prints in 14 kinds of plastic, from really hard to really soft, and it can print joints and moving parts somehow, instead of just solid pieces, which is AMAZING. They had a plastic bike chain, which they had printed from a computer model, and it moved and worked and stuff. It's really cool, especially if you're an ID dork like we all are. That's the thing I learned the most from this study tour; how quickly 30 kids can bond with just a bus and a week and a few awesome teachers, and the common interest of being interested in how everything works. It's great, and we were just talking last night about how that fact that we're all design-based means we can all make really good friends in a short amount of time, since we all have the same base interests.

Since we got back from the study tour we've been in the studio every day (including both days last weekend) for at least 6 horus a day (last week we were there 7 am -2:30 pm and B team was there 2:30-10, and this week it's switched.... our poor teachers get no breaks) busting our butts to get our chairs done. Mine is closed to being finished, making one really difficult mold was definitely faster than several easy ones like most people are doing, and I'm really excited to see it finished! I'm going to post process pictures and final pictures on facebook eventually, but believe it or not I actually have a test tomorrow (on our process and on the study tour info- don't worry, it's "open sketchbook"!) so I should be going to re-read our study tour guidebook, I suppose. And I've got to get up early to make sure I don't miss the courier tomorrow!

Copenhagen! -- the first few days.

So it feels like i've been gone FOR.E.VER. And it's only been like 3.5 days. Yesterday (WAS THAT ONLY YESTERDAY?!?) when we got off the plane, we were all super duper exhausted, and we had to do all this check-in orientation stuff when we got off the bus (DIS loves bringing us places by bus, it's great). Cody met us there when we got off the bus, and after we got our schedules and stuff like that we had the extremely arduous task of bringing our luggage back to the apartment. We also happened to arrive the week Denmark was having unusually hot weather, like in the 80's rather than in the 70's like it's supposed to be. And our apartment is like a 1/2 hr. away, walking at not a slow pace. But we had been dragging these bags around for like 3 days nonstop, with no food or sleep in days, and let me just say these Danes LOVE their cobblestone streets and sidewalks. Yeah, fun. It took us about 45 minutes to get back to the hotel, and then we had to bring our stuff up 3 flights of stairs (because, here we are in europe, where the 2nd floor is 3 floors up). We then had to walk alll the way back to school, for the info session, and then back to the apartment. Natalie met her friend from home who was getting in to visit for a few days, and I walked around the area with Cody, who was here since sunday night (monday morning denmark time). Then when we got home I was really hungry, and REALLY tired, and it made me really homesick, and I skyped with mom (I miss you guys!). I fell asleep while Natalie & Maria (her friend) cooked pasta for dinner, and cody woke me up when it was ready to see if I was ok. I felt better after sleeping only 1/2 and hour and some food, and then we watched danish discovery channel, on which they take american shows and either re-dub them in british with danish subtitles, or in danish depending on the show, and then the futurama dvds I have.

We had to get up early today to take a bus to our studio ( which is a little farther than city center from here, but I really need a bike because it's easier and cheaper than taking a bus. They showed us around, including the mini scandinavian (and famous originals) chair museum at the Royal College, where the studios are, and then made us sit in a very hot auditorium and watch an hour and a half lecture about the history of copenhagen & it's growth from medival times through present day. It might have been interesting if they hadn't shown it at the absolute worst time for us, and hadn't we all been dozing off because of our exhaustion & heat & hunger. They gave us lunch (we furniture people didn't get to go to the "canteen", we worked through lunch... on the first day) which were FANTASTICALLY DELICIOUS deli sandwiches. We got assigned to sections for hte materials we'll be using to make our chairs: Steel rod (the one I got), steel tube (would have liked), wood veneer laminate (the one i traded brekke for) and solid wood (the one i really wanted). Brekke and I traded, and we're both very happy with that decision. We also got assigned to group A or B, which alternates the times we have studio shop use, so when we're working on our chairs later on for a week we get to use it in the morning, and the next week we have to use it in the afternoon. It also decides our study tour schedule, because group A goes around scandinavia (western denmark, stockholm, helsinki and oslo) one way, and group B goes the other way. Brekke, Doby and I all got group A, and Cody got group B. Natalie is in textiles, so her tour is different anyway. We all also have different materials for the chairs we're making, they really did a good job of splitting us up.

After all that studio stuff we took a boat tour of the city by canal, with an architect/teacher as our guide, and it was FAN. TASTIC. I loved it. It woke us all up, and we met a bunch of U of Cincinati kids (apparently they have like twice the 16 kids pratt sent to copenhagen... who knew?) who are in the arch program, and very nice and funny. We walked around that area once we got off the boats, it's the main downtown area with really old buildings and shops you'd find in soho. The first real danish food I got here was the Belgiske Vaffel with Soft Ice (belgian waffle with soft serve) and it was sooo good but I couldn't eat the whole thing! Cody and Doby both got what I like to call tube hot dogs, which heather actually told me about in amsterdam. Basically the bun is solid but has a hole in it, the condiments are squirted in and the hot dog slides in and sticks out hte ends. It's really really bizarre looking, and hilarious!

We managed to purchase train tickets which they didn't check (there's a stop between the mall and our apartment, very close!) and spend about 20 minutes trying to read the maps with numbers and letters and color codes and danish words which were all very confusing, even though all the trains stop at our stop, but there were no labels for which way the trains were going! But we worked it out and guessed right. The trains are very modern looking with glass doors blocking the exit areas and cushy seats with ugly upholstery, but a very smooth ride.

All in all, I am much happier with the city today, even though our apartment is kinda far from where we'll need to be most of the time. But it would be like that if we were in the dorms too, just not as far. I do wish I got to meet more people though from living in the dorms, but we've got all the other dis people in our classes, and I'm sure we'll explore the city and meet Danes. I'm definitely glad to be living with my friends, htough. I like this city much better now that I had a great time today, and I can't wait to see all the sights and go shopping and do lots of danish stuff! (And natalie and I promised we'd never leave each other behind when in the city because we don't want to get lost (cody is our guide, we're so lost and confused right now. all the streets look the same!!) or pick pocketed at night by people targeting tourists. So I'm happy about that, too!

Oh, and I posted pictures from iceland on my facebook tonight!!

COdy is bugging me to watch pushing daisies (he actually fell asleep while i was writing this, haha!) so i'm gonna leave it at that for now. I miss all of you, and keep in touch!! (and comment on my blog!!)