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1. State of the art, project management and documentation

Artists, processes, and resources that inspire me

Artists

Artist Collage

  1. Danni O’Brien, Pie Hole Pessary, 2024, Found diagram from 1967 US patent for a pessary, silicone baby food tray, paper pulp, pipe cleaners, rhinestones, LED light, electrical cord, ceramic hardware, foam, wood, 24 x 20 x 4 in.
  2. Rachel Youn, Leah, 2024, disassembled baby swing, hardware, fake plant, folding fan leaf, dog shoes
  3. Dana Sherwood, Bedroom Bestiary (still image), 2022, Digital Video, 5:23
  4. Jiabao Li, Squid Map (still image, Map after the squid lived in for a month), 2022
  5. Emma Hasselblad, Vallmo (Poppy), 2024, Public Art - Hand Knitting, Slussen, Stockholm,

I highlighted artists for the themes, materials, and processes they use. Jiabao Li and Dana Sherwood’s explorations of interspecies interactions inspires me to consider how I might communicate or highlight my own experiences with non-human life. Danni O’Brien and Rachel Youn use found objects and imagery in ways I can relate to. Emma Hasselblad is just one of many fiber artists I admire who are using craft to replicate environments in new materials; her flowers and imagery make me think about how I can translate observations of what’s in my local ecosystem into sculptural forms.

Process and Practice

Crochet, knitting, weaving, perler beads, shrinky dinks, mold-making/casting, collage, found items, collection, natural dyes and inks, touch, scent, cooking, bioplastics, poetry

Artist Collage

Bioplastic Samples, Maddie Olsen, 2022-23

My first steps into working with biomaterials were taken because I wanted to find alternative processes that could replicate my favorite childhood crafts made with petrochemicals. This investigation led me to Fabricademy and many other open-source catalogs of DIY biomaterial recipes. Below is a short list of resources I have saved over the years (but there are many more):

Resources and Reading

Editing my site

With the help of Asli and my peers at TextileLab, some web browsing, and ChatGPT, I was able to significantly change the look of my site. Below you will find a list of resources I consulted for inspiration.

I have a personal website!↗ for my portfolio that is hosted by Cargo. The design of that site was the basis for the way I wanted my site here to look. They're nowhere near the same, but I was hopeful they might appear related.

References and Inspiration

This website uses PicNic↗, a font designed by Mariel Nils and distributed by various open source type foundries. I found it available for download on the foundries listed below. It also uses Xanh Mono from Google Fonts.

I discovered the open source type library typotheque↗ from browsing past participants’ pages and following a link from Jeanne Neboit's↗ documentation. Looking at the code from Isobel Jo Leonard's↗ page also helped me size the headers in the way that made the most sense to me. Asli Aksan's↗ code for the home page also helped me remove the table of contents and navigation bars to free up space in the margins for my content. Since there is navigation at the header of the page it felt redundant to have the same tools in the margins.

Here is a list of design tools I employed while customizing my site.

Markdown and HTML bits

I asked AI to explain how I would apply a background color, and give a different font and color to my headers.

I explained that I have no experience doing this and asked for actionable steps to make the changes I wanted. I provided the hex codes, font names, and font sizes I wanted. The blocks of code below belong to my css file. 

body {
    background-color: #FCFCED;
}

/* Paragraph text */
p {
    color: #380505;
}

/* Load custom PicNic font */
@font-face {
    font-family: "PicNic";
    src: url("../fonts/PicNic.woff2") format("woff2");
    font-weight: normal;
    font-style: normal;
}

/* Regular headers (Markdown headings inside page body) */
.md-content h1, .md-content h2, .md-content h3, .md-content h4, .md-content h5, .md-content h6 {
    font-family: "PicNic", sans-serif;
    color: #FF82D7;
    text-align: center;
}

After this I felt kind of icky for using ChatGPT, but I had a better understanding of where and how to apply the CSS and HTML. I'm comfortable using AI for troubleshooting purposes because it has caught little typos and missing characters I am not yet trained to look for. I have since looked at W3, used the inspect function, and looked at the code version of other fabricademy particpants' sites for features I am interested in.

For example:

I wanted my home page to take up the full width of the screen. Asli's site used this phrase to remove the navigation tool on one side, and I used it to remove them on both sides. 

---
hide:
    - toc
    - navigation
---

On Isobel Jo Leonard's page, I noticed header sizes and alignments were written differently. I wanted to be able to customize these features on my site.

<center>
<h1 style= "font-size: 68px;"> Thanks for visiting my site! 
This is the destination for my Fabricademy documentation.
</h1>
</center>

Challenges

I went through several iterations of font and color. When it comes to graphic design I have trouble making a final choice. I may still make changes to the visuals.

As a novice with Markdown, HTML, and CSS, I think there are some redundant bits of code here and there. I feel a little unorganized but if I can find the time to understand the syntax and functions deeper, I would like to.

I found it frustrating to resize my images. I have tried many softwares and methods. Obviously, the image quality is also going down because I am compressing the DPI, but to me they look blurry. My work has lots of fine details that get lost by compressing.