I’ve wanted to make this for a while (click ‘more’ for a bit of thrilling backstory). Building on some unprofessional yogurt pot candles I made during summer, I had a go at making a candle dipped in a different layers of colours (three; blue, red, and yellow. We like our primary colours). It was pretty difficult as you’re no doubt meant to use giant vats of wax, which I unsurprisingly don’t have and instead started with small Activia pots to begin with and ended up using bean cans. It’s pretty bumpy since towards the end it outgrew the beans pot and I ended up just pouring the wax over it. It should be nice when it melts. I suppose it’s one of those ugly children type things again. I think it’s lovely anyway.

Back when I was in Year 6 back in 1999 we went on a school trip to Guernsey. Aside from visits to the dark and eerie WWII underground hospital and some sort of expedition to watch a canon be fired, we also ended up in a place where they made swanky candles. They were essentially multicoloured, dunked into wax, cold water, and then a different colour [and repeat until done], then cut up so you could see exactly what was going on inside. Two sensible peple (not me) were chosen to have a go at making and cutting one each (I didn’t really fancy hacking up my candle with a pair of blunt scissors), and I’ve found some old photos courtesy of my Pa at home arguing with my old scanner. Apparently during the year I also developed a love for taking photos at 45 degrees.

Shortly after the candle-making we ran into Simon Thomas of blue Peter fame who was banding about filming a show there (luckily I’ve left my garish fleece-wearing days behind me, no doubt to recant them in my old age). According to Brownies, Blue Peter is still cool these days. We all mobbed him with cameras. In a strange way, the turnover of blue Peter presenters makes me sad.

I help at Brownies because where I come from we all believe that the quintessential Tuesday evening should be spent with high-pitched children who enjoy shuffling. Also because I get to help kids make finger puppets, and make my own. Here is Mr Lion:

Here’s my very old video from Kinetica that I’ve just put together. Because of camera ineptitude there’s no video of my favourite part: the lights that reacted to sound, but there’s an inadequate photo of them here on Flickr.

The exhibition had a section with the pencils that rotate and make circles (above) – which drew on our ability to stand aimlessly watching pencils draw motorised circles. Something I noticed is that the holder design didn’t allow for the pencils to get shorter – it didn’t compensate by pushing defaultly against the wall, but left them suspended away from the paper when they were blunt going round in sad little circles. Perhaps I’ve got too much pencil empathy.

There’s also the small beer robot that poured you beer into plastic cups and then flashed red in an alert to tell you it’s drinking time. Lots of good stuff there.

Kinetica, a number of Saturdays ago, was a mad mess of flashing lights and things that swirled. I love that it counts as art. I spent the day joining the league of irritating people with cameras, toting an EP-1 that’s never left the house – and thus have video footage.

Beside the robot that served you beer, my favourite bit was a block of hanging lights that reacted to sound. Simple but wonderful to watch. As part of the league of camera holders the adults lined up against the wall to do camera jiggery pokery, whilst a small kid ROARED at them. It was lovely, but I failed to hit the record button or some more technical error (very sad). May have to practice my button-pressing. Video on way – my laziness with it has already delayed this brief post. It will appear one day.

A little Flickr set lives here.

I saw this today and ooh ooh it’s very good. It’s made solely of music segments from Disney’s ‘Up’. The music’s all made by Pogo. Unfortunately with a library of songs made of copyrighted material he’s not on Spotify (just last.fm instead…).

It reminded me of Alice, a similar track that cuts Alice in Wonderland in the same way which turns out to be by the same guy. This made sense when I found out. I saw Alice on yoooooooooutube.com – a site which delayed and tiled Youtube videos to make strange and hypnotic patterns – and made it all look mad. Yoooooooooutube seems to be gone now though, which is sad because it was silly and nice.