State of the art, project management and documentation¶

1. My Objective¶

I don’t come with a clear objective as such, but rather with a wish, or perhaps many wishes.

I wish to be inspired. I wish to grow. I wish to discover and I wish to play. I wish to create to share, to amaze myself and to go beyond what I thought I was capable of.

After years of artistic production, I had reached a place where I wanted to dedicate myself again to research, experimentation and learning. I wanted to challenge my own habits, encounter new ways of thinking and expand my practice in directions I could not reach alone.

So my research for inspiring courses began. I had no particular idea on the type of course I was looking for, only that it had to revolve around textiles. When I stumbled across Fabricademy it instantly wowed me. It felt like a place where many threads that have accompanied me throughout my life could be woven together: my textile passion, my background in performance, my ongoing interest in technology and my commitment to sustainable, participatory artistic practice.

2. References, research & inspiration¶

Where I find inspiration¶

Generally speaking, I get inspired by life itself. In order to tap into my inner muse, i need to be able to take the time to empty my mind and let my senses take over. As this is often no mean feat, I have several ways of helping me get there: tending to my plants, dancing, freeform crochetting, automatic writing, people watching.

Images: Rebeca Fernandez Lopez

Somatic Rituals¶

I made a mini tutorial to explain two practices I use regularly to centre and ground myself.

3. My work on this website¶

The tools and the language presented to make this website were mostly new territory to me and it was a steep learning curve. The hardest part though, was to gather material of mine to present. I am pretty rubbish at documenting and presenting my work in image, so my photos were all scattered, unorganised and uncurated. The documenting part of this Fabricademy journey will be a great process for me to start automating my documenting - no excuses anymore!

From a technical point of view, I worked on my website 100% online this time, as I couldn't work out all the steps to do it locally on my PC. I will be sure to ask my mentor for a session to learn this, as it was quite a tedious process to have to wait for the refreshing of my site after each commit.

Tools I used

Some code I played with to style my CSS
In order to colour my h1 titles, I added these lines to my CSS stylesheet:

.md-typeset h1 {
     color: #247BA0;
}

.md-main {
  background-image: url(../assets/Serpent-Reworked-and-Recoloured\ III.jpg);
  background-repeat: no-repeat;
  background-position: top left;
  background-size: auto;
}

Inspiring websites
I looked at a ton of websites to get inspiration for my own. However, I found that with all this research, I got more and more confused as to I what I actually wanted to create. So in the end, I started building my site without any external influence. It was only at the 'layout' stage, that I began to look at examples again.

UnMake by Rebeca Fernandez Lopez

4. Resources¶

How to crochet a Number 1¶

I decided make little crochet numbers for the assignments' index page so I researched some simple tutorials for numbers and chose this one.

*As I wanted to crochet a flat object, I only made one piece and simply crochetted around the border with single crochets.

Glossary of tech lingo**¶

As I already mentioned, I didn't know most of the terminology nor tools used to make this website. I used w3 Schools and AI, to explain more in depth, what everything is and I decided to make a little cheat sheet to remember these explanations.

5. Conclusion¶

After some days of feeling pretty lost with this new website and documenting world, I feel today that I have grasped the beginning of something and am happy with where I have arrived in such a short amount of time. I am sure that the site's layout will still evolve quite a bit over the coming months, and I love the the thought that the site will be a testament of my learning in Fabricademy.