A new loan for the festive season
It’s been a little while since I started a new Kiva loan. The last loan to Janet in Samoa was paid back a while ago and the credit has been sitting there waiting for me to get organised..
Since I last made a loan the Etsy Lending Team has got more active and there’s a number of regular lenders boosting up our lending numbers. We’ve just hit $4000 in loans! Are you an etsy seller and a kiva lender? Come join the team 
My latest loan was a little hard to find. I’ve noticed there’s a lot less makers on Kiva and a definite increase in people selling cheap mass produced products. This makes me quite sad to be honest. I thought Kiva was about reducing the need for sweatshop economies..
Regardless, I did find the Morales family in Barranquilla, Colombia. They make and sell a range of things to help their family prosper including hand made shoes, jewelry and clothing.
So give them a wave people, and wish them luck!
And for those of you out there still looking for last minute christmas ideas, consider a kiva gift voucher! It’s a great last minute gift idea and the recipient gets to chose the person(s) to lend to. Go on, make a difference!
Happy festive season everyone and see you in the next decade.
xox
Gocco!
If you’re a twitter follower you might have picked up a while back that I scored a new Gocco set for super cheap and it was PRETTY BLIMMIN EXCITING!
It took me quite a while to gather up the confidence to have a go. It’s all new and scary, you see. But I finally had a project I really wanted to do so I hitched up my pants and leapt in.
I was armed with the awesome tutorial by Pip which I wholeheartedly recommend checking out. Even if you’re not planning on doing the fabric thing and printing on paper with actual gocco paint, this tutorial is super helpful. I definitely used Pip’s tutorial alongside the official instructions and it made heaps more sense with both.
So I’ve now made TWO different screens and made a heap of patches.
The first lot were made as some pretty banners for vacant blocks of land. We’ve attached ribbons on the corners so they can be tied on to fences. I thought this was a good first project since the prints don’t need to be perfect and we can’t be too attached to them since they’ll probably get taken down.
Here’s a bunch drying.
And here’s a couple in action! The first one was in St Kilda and the second was on Malvern Road somewhere
FUN! Part of my little creative contributions to the realestate4ransom.com campaign highlighting the stupid waste of land we’ve got going on round the place.
The next project I did was in honour of Buy Nothing Day 09 and also as my wee action towards Copenhagen. Being seven and a half months pregnant does preclude a fair amount of activism so I took the creative option!
I got the idea after a cool chat with an awesome Friends of the Earth volunteer at the Green New Deal conference. Sorry I can’t remember your name! Hope you see these and like When I get around to sewing up some more I’ll send some to the FoE shop. I decided to border some of them with small black satin ribbon, just to make them a bit glam. I also decided I very much like printing on calico. It seems to pick up the ink best and it looks nice too.
Printing on fabric with Gocco is a little bit hard and takes a bit of perseverance. I’d very much like to try it with someone else doing some of them!
What is really easy though is printing on paper!
Last weekend I went to the open studio for the super cool Gemma Jones. The open studios were part of the Big West Festival – which was also super cool! Can’t wait til the next one! (I should also write about that – especially the knitted bridge installation – but I reckon it won’t happen so go check out the other cool crafty stuff on their website).
Gemma gave a couple of demos on how to use a Gocco and we all got to have a go. It was MOST FUN. I picked up some new prints for my wee girls new room so the walls are quickly filling up with rad art.
Those prints were done on an old sex guide book. Some of the pages were hilarious! My favourite was ‘what to say in bed – and when not to laugh’. Genius.
So now I’ve gotten over ‘the fear’ I’m psyched to do more!