Climate Change Barbie

Climate Change Barbie Hits the Road

Introducing the newest false product from Stuff You Can't Have: Climate Change Barbie. She joins the ranks of the predicted 25 million to one billion refugees who will be forced to flee their homes over the next 40 years due to drought, floods, famine, and other climate-related threats.

Because water is scarce and temperatures are rising, Barbie has chopped off her locks and seldom shampoos or bothers to comb it. She sports the "black mask" many eco-migrants have painted on around their eyes to reduce glare from the sun.

Click to enlarge

During hot weather Barbie wraps a versatile single piece of cloth around her waist and then between her legs to form cropped, baggy pants. 

Click to enlarge

All eco-migrants who consider themselves Sixth Extinction adherents carry pouches of heritage seeds. Ever since the Global Seed Vault located in the arctic circle in Norway flooded due to global warming at the end of 2016 as the permafrost began to melt, Barbie and others realized a fail-safe back-up method was needed. That method was to give individual migrants small doomsday pouches of precious heritage seeds so that when and if climate change can be slowed or reversed, humans will have a shot at growing a wide variety of crops again.

Doomsday seed pouch

Pack with retractable solar panels

Barbie's backpack has retractable solar panels that are hooked up to a rechargeable battery inside the pack.

More about the pack and its contents below.

Close-up: Pack with retractable solar panels, side pockets for water bottles

Pack straps

Pack solar panels deployed

Inside the pack there is an assortment of supplies.

Click to enlarge

Tools

Solar oven closed for storage

Setting up the solar oven

Solar oven fully assembled

Climate change isn't only about heat, drought, and deserts — there are also superstorms, floods, and periods of unseasonably cold weather. As a seasoned eco-migrant, Barbie is ready for whatever happens next. Or at least she hopes she is.

And finally, Barbie needs a place to rest her head on her long trek to nowhere (most countries have closed their borders by the year 2025, refusing to accept any eco-migrants). Her poncho converts into a tent.

Note that development of every item and accessory in Barbie's wardrobe and equipment is based on the anticipated needs of human eco-migrants as predicted in a range of scientific reports and academic papers. And that failure of the Doomsday Seed Vault in the Arctic Circle? It really happened: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/may/19/arctic-stronghold-of-worlds-seeds-flooded-after-permafrost-melts.

Search terms: Climate change Barbie, eco-migrant Barbie, global warming Barbie.

Giving a Little Lost Sock a Soul

Tsukumogami: little sock with a soul

Anyone who has followed this blog knows I love discovering and transforming found objects. When I learned about the Japanese folk belief that objects have the capacity to become alive and self-aware, it changed the way I relate to the objects I find. Somehow they have already managed to break free and venture out into the world on their own. Now I try to help them discover their soul. Then I release them to continue their journey. To learn more about Tsukumogami, see a past post, Tsukumogami: Objects with Souls. For other past work with found objects, follow this Found link.

Lost by the wayside

This Tsukumogami began with the discovery of a little, lost, blue-striped sock, found on the walking path beside Lake Merritt in Oakland, no doubt tossed from a stroller by a heartless renegade toddler. The first step is to study the object a while, searching for whatever is within yearning to break free.

Communing with lost object

The next step is to animate the object, bringing the hidden pirit of the sock to the fore.

A little worried

A little sad

A little surprised

The next step is to send the Tsukumogami back out into the world to meet whatever fate awaits.

I decided to attach a little tag to the sock so that the people who discover it and help it begin the next stage of its journey have some idea what they are dealing with.

Tag

I decided to release the newly awakened spirit sock close to where I had found it, and left it sitting on the base of a light post right by the Lake Merritt walking path.

Little Tsukumogami waiting for its fate

Close-up

Upcycled Fourth: Red, White, and a Little Blue

Cannibalizing two shirts for the greater good

Two thrift store men's shirts, each sporting a red and white stripe pattern, are combined together to create one new upcycled shirt. And here's how:

The how-to

Some detail shots:

Detail, top of shirt

Detail, inset pocket (hand-stitched)

Detail: patches covering old shirt logos

Detail: Cuffs reattached at elbow height

And a bonus for the Fourth of July: Since the shirt sports red and white stripes, I decided to add a pin to round out the ensemble for the holiday. The pin is fashioned from an old tin can lid (for more how-to info on tin can pins see Tin Can Frames Tutorial, or enter "tin can pins" in the search window of this blog and see a whole range of past tin can pins).

And yes, the sentiment is both political and emotional.

Home Decor for the Anthropocene

Eking beauty out of the apocalypse

We have entered the Anthropocene, an epoch in which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment — leading to the Sixth Extinction,  a sudden and dramatic decline of diversity of life on earth due to those same humans. Thus this addition to home decor, a reflection on our current plight.

This project began with a delicious poke bowl (pronounced po-kay), the Hawaiian food trend sweeping the mainland. I was sitting at home enjoying my to-go order of salmon and tuna poke when I began eyeing the bowl. Here is a food container that would never fly in Berkeley, but is somehow still okay in Oakland — a surprisingly sturdy plastic bowl.

Garbage? Discarded take-out bowl

One thing was instantly clear to me: this bowl should not be discarded. I use bowls as organizing vessels, and this looked like a prime candidate.

Organizing bowls

I scrounged through my supply closet until I came up with my personalized bible, awarded upon graduation from primary Sunday school at the Shrewsbury Presbyterian church. It has been a stand-by for years when I need thin, biblically-themed paper for decoupage or, in a pinch, when I need makeshift rolling papers. The passage I decided to use was apt: the story of Noah from Genesis.

Decoupaging with glue stick and strips of Genesis

Looking down on creation

As an embellishment I added a few gingko leaf prints in copper paint as a complimentary nod to an ancient tree with incredible survival skills that has, so far, managed to survive anything man throws at it. In fact, it is being increasingly used in urban settings because it thrives in polluted conditions. For how-to tips on printing with gingko leaves see an earlier post, Inside-Out Boxes.

Copper gingko print embellishments

Look inside the rim of the bowl in the photo above, and you will see the words "Surviving the Anthropocene" added to the decoupage, printed onto the margins of bible paper using my handy vintage typesetting kit.

Intriguing attitude on the part of god towards creation

And here is the finished piece. 

Embroidered Dinoflagellate

Just because...

A winsome one-celled creature

I was attracted to images of dinoflagellates that I found in the Biodiversity Heritage Library and decided to try embroidering one of the over 2,500 different dinoflagellate species. Then I got curious, started investigating, and learned that these single-celled creatures, found in both sea and fresh water, have more DNA content than the human genome. There are also bioluminescent species, and you can keep them as pets (http://biolum.eemb.ucsb.edu/organism/dinohome.html).

You never know where that first stitch is going to take you.

Exotic Upcycling: Indigo Dreams

Shirt front

I have a friend who lives in London and travels around the world, and she periodically brings me some of her wonderful finds from thrift stores and local markets. This time around she brought me a gorgeous piece of West African indigo-dyed cloth comprised of many individual strips of cloth stitched together to form a checkerboard pattern. The challenge was that there wasn't enough of the indigo fabric on its own to make a garment. The solution? The addition of a man's pajama top from a local thrift store and a tricky process of blending the two together with a relaxed frame of mind so that quirks like ending up with a portion of a pocket on one sleeve caused delight rather than consternation.

Shirt Back

And here is how it all came together...

The how (click on image to enlarge)

More of the how - right sleeve

Left sleeve

And there you have it.

Found: Wandering Rabbit in Search of a Purpose

The amazing flying rabbit chewing gum jar

Here is a quickie, throw-away piece, but an important reminder to keep your eyes open as you roam around the world; you never know what you might find. This rabbit was lying on the floor near the driver on an AC Transit bus in Oakland. I had my eye on it for a couple of stops, and it had clearly been dropped and left behind by someone who was no longer on the bus. As we reached my stop I headed up front, picked it up, showed it to the driver,  and said, "I'm going to take this home and make something out of it." He said, "Great!"

And here it is.

And a final aerial view just because.