Happy Birthday to Frilly!

Hurrah!  We've made it through our first year - and in such a blur that we actually managed to miss out on our birthday itself.  Kirsty was looking through accounts and numbers and suddenly said, 

You do realise it was our birthday last week?  Frilly is 1!

Obviously, in my overworked endofyear brain I probably just grunted back at her - but we did decide it would be a useful moment to pause and reflect.  The past year has been mostly manic, and unsurprisingly stressful - but it's also been an amazing time for us.  We've met SO MANY new people and organisations, we've worked with a LOT of different people, and we've made some awesome things.  Above all, we've had a lot of fun! In a snapshot, here is team Frilly in the past 12 months.  Kirsty has experimented with various shades of orange, and Adrienne has had long, medium, short, then medium hair starting off black then bleached all the way back to white (with some pink and grey thrown in for good measure.)

We've worked with lots of people and made lots of things in the last year, including: 

• decorated and moved into our awesome studio with Lee Allen
• secret codes
• cardboard kinetic sculptures
• multisensory classroom environments
• films
• animations
• books
• websites
• blogs
• pillow heads
• photographic alphabets
• nail signs
• cling film sculptures
• outdoor installations
• zines
• maps
• resin embedments
• modelling clay self portraits
• lifesize interpretive bodies
• masks
• mini sensory environments
• learned how to letterpress 

And here's the visual evidence as a quick rundown - not in any order!

Frilly began in response to a very unpleasant situation and was our way of moving forwards and continuing to produce work and engage audiences in a variety of fun activities.  We had no idea where our first year would take us, and would never have been able to guess the range of people we would work with or the types of projects we would be involved in.  Our first year has been awesome, and we've really loved it all...

..but now I wonder what we'll be blogging about this time next year?!

Hurtling towards the finishing line {creative learning environments - indoors}

See the full gallery on Posterous

So next week is our last week at the school we've been working in to make a creative indoor learning environment.  We'd had many different ideas about how this could have transpired, and now that we know what the end is going to look like it's interesting to reflect back on the decisions we all made and how we ended up with this particular set of changes/outputs/THINGS.

The class itself have been particularly challenging, and so required a lot of planning in terms of what our ideal goals for them would be, and then plans B, C, D, E and F in case the former plans went awry.  They often went awry (either the kids struggled to achieve certain tasks/goals, or they surprised us all and flew through them!) but overall we managed to combine elements of design, consultation, research and planning with them so that even though we didn't give any of them power toold to use - the room is still completely based around their ideas and research undertaken.

Next week is the 'big reveal' - more pictures will come then!

"Watch this Space" - making zines short by Lee Allen Photography

Frilly makes some zines from Lee Allen on Vimeo.

Short film made for Frilly to highlight some of the work they are doing right now.
Shot on a canon 5dmk2 using a 50mm 1.4 and a 50mm 2.5 macro lens and then edited in FCE. This is the second piece I have shot in the last few weeks and feel it is a definite improvement on the last one. Any comments and suggestions welcomed.

Lee

(PLEASE ignore my very tired scrunchy face.  The last couple of weeks have been LONG.  I don't always look quite so bedraggled!)