Festival of Stuff 2015

13 July 2015

Our Festival of Stuff may be over for this year but we have been reliving it through an epic amount of photos that were taken. Can you spot yourself in any of them?

This year's five day Festival of Stuff began with four days of masterclasses. These included: basket weaving, paper cord weaving, tape measure plaiting, wire weaving, shaker box making, pyrotechnics, material explorations and glass blowing. Take a look at the pictures on our flickr page.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our festival culminated in a public event on a grand scale. We took over the whole street outside of the Institute of Making, filling it with demo-stalls and making stations, bringing back this year's favourite activities and some new discoveries.

Visitors contributed to a large scale woven willow sculpture, made a pair of bespoke spectacles with different optical effects with Shelley James and watched yellow road marking being painted. Urban alchemist Hilary Powell was printmaking on a massive scale with a road roller and reclaimed demolition materials. Visitors could have a go at raising copper sheet into a bowl, made their very own spoon from copper pipe, and created wire sculptures with artist Helaina Sharpley.

Chemist Andres Tretiakov performed a dangerous thermite experiment, set fire to custard and sacrificed a gummy bear all in the name of science. Visitors launched rockets about 10m into the air made from alka-seltzer, water and a small plastic tube. They took photographs without using a camera with Angela Easterling and made LED electronic badges using conductive paint, copper tape and paper with Codasign.

Take a look through the pictures of the open day here.