Barack Obama

This week I have been working on a duct tape portrait of Barack Obama.
I started out by making one side of an 18x24 sheet of duct tape (one side is sticky, the other isn't). Then, I started out with simple shapes for Obama's head and hair and started layering and getting into detail with it.


Here are some pictures:

In progress-


Obama and Me-


The Final Product-

Wearable Art Camp II

This past week, a couple of friends and I attended the older session of wearable art camp.

The first thing we did was to make dress forms. Then, we crafted either dresses or, since there were two guys at the camp, they made shirts, onto the dress forms.

My friend Ella made her dress out of an old sudoku themed page-a-day calender. She used a bunch of pages from the calender and contact paper. Ella also made a hat and bag with the same material. She also made a mask, which was made from paper pulp.

My friend Ruby made her dress out of weed fabric, plastic bags from the Burlington Free Press, and plastic. She also made a necklace out of gum wrappers that she made into ninja stars.

Kate Donnelly's son, Sam, decided to make a modern western style outfit. He made a vest out of cut up cereal boxes and contact paper; a hat out of duct tape and newspaper rolls; a gun that looks like a candy cane out of PVC pipe left over from the dress forms; and a whip out of braided rope.

One of the campers named Aran made a complete rain outfit out of duct tape. He made a raincoat by covering an old shirt with different designs out of duct tape; boots out of foam, newspaper rolls, and duct tape; a hat out of duct tape; and lastly, a giant umbrella made of cardboard, 4 or 5 wooden dowels, and of course, more duct tape.

This time I decided to make an outfit without using duct tape at all. I made a dress out of fused plastic newspaper bags for the top, a sheet of plastic covered up with paint chips for the skirt part, and attached with safety pins. I also made a hat out of a place mat, paint chips, and woven fused plastic newspaper bags; gloves out of gaffers tape, fused plastic newspaper bags, and grommets; and shoes out of foam, and tin cans.

Birthday Bag

I made my friend Willa a bag for her birthday.
We went to see the movie Up, so I made the 'I' into a balloon. The movie was really good, and I definitely recommend seeing it.
She only invited a few friends, and we accidentally all got her bags! But she liked them all, which is good. One of my friends made Willa a bag out of potholders, which is really cool, and very colorful. The bought her a messenger bag, but also made her really cool earrings.

Marshmallow Shooters and Bags

A couple of days ago my friend Sally and I made marshmallow shooters from the book, Howtoons. It is a book that I got at Maker Faire and I got to meet one of the guys who worked on it.
Marshmallow Shooters are pretty simple to make. All you need are a couple of 1/2 inch PVC pipes and some joints.
I got Sally into duct tape, so we made bags to hold all of our marshmallows out of duct tape.
In the future I might alter the shooter to make it shoot more marshmallows at once, and add a ball pump to it to make it shoot with a trigger instead of blowing into it.
For now, though, I think I'll stick with a simple shooter.

Wearable Art Camp

This past week I've been working at a Wearable Art Camp, taught by one of our family friends, Kate Donnelly. Today was the last day, and to show off the camper's 'wearable art', we had a mini fashion show!

Some of the things the campers made were flipflops made out of foam and decorated with all sorts of things like pom poms and other things.

They also made armor, as well as swords and shields.

This girl decided to make a viking helmet instead of a mask. The horns are extremely big, but she loved how it turned out!

Another outfit was mail shirts, like chain mail, but these shirts were made with cards instead of chains. These girls decided to make dresses, so it was the same process, just longer.
Along with the dresses they wore hats, made out of place mats for the rim, and cut up cereal boxes for the head part. They were decorated with all sorts of things, such as fabric flowers, pompoms, feathers, and whatever they thought would look good.
The last part of these costumes were their bags. This project took a while. First, they painted five pictures for the five sides. Then, we laminated them in contact paper, and they had to sew the sides together. This part took them a while. The final part was creating the handles. We put in grommets (I got a few bruises from them hammering, but that's ok... nothing too bad) and made the handles with plastic tubing. They filled the tubes with glass and beads.

The final thing the campers showed for the fashion show were their masks and capes.
The masks are made of paper pulp, and they put it in mask forms that Kate made with a glass head she has. This project took a few days, because we needed the masks to dry, and then modge podge them, and then decorate them.
The capes were just cut out fabric that they decorated in sharpie, and then we put duct tape around the edges to make sure that it stayed together.

Duct Tape Gifts for my Core Class Teachers

This post is a little late, because the last day of my school year was last Thursday, but here are the gifts that I made for my Language Arts, Math, Science, and Social Studies teachers.

• I made my Language Arts teacher a wallet that looks like a book, because he teaches reading and writing.

• I made my Math teacher a tie with a duct tape calculator on it, because he lost most of his classroom calculators, so I decided to give him some sort of a calculator.

• I made my Science teacher a purse with a frog face on it, because this year we dissected frogs. It was disgusting, but fun! I don't think I want to be a surgeon when I grow up. It was hard enough for me to look at the frog.
  

• And finally, I gave my Social Studies a finger puppet of him. It doesn't really look like him, but he liked it anyway. The reason I gave him a finger puppet is because he has one of Benjamin Franklin that he plays with all the time, and other historical figures in finger puppets. So, I decided to help him add to his collection.

Duct Tape Tree!

This is a short video of my duct tape tree that I made at school. It was a project in 'Tech Ed' (which is 'shop' with a different name) where we designed our own project. I decided that I needed something to help organize my duct tape, so this is what I came up with.