Thursday, August 14, 2008

Building the Tool Shed

Hi, this is Mandy and Connie. We are volunteers here at Hester Street Collaborative. Yesterday, we brought long beams from the P.S. 134 Community Garden to Hester Street to measure and cut them into smaller beams so that they can fit into the tool shed in the garden. Jess cut the wood into long rectangular pieces and small square pieces. Each rectangular beam had to have 2 square pieces to support it. Mandy and Claire drilled holes into these beams. The holes on the beams were all in different places because we had to eyeball where the holes should go. Because of this, there had to be sets of 3 pieces of wood. We created a system where we had to label each set of wood with a letter of the alphabet.

Today we went to the garden to work on installing shelves and hooks to organize the tool shed. In the center of the shed, there will be many hooks to hold shovels, trowels, and rakes. There will also be a total of 8 shelves, 4 on each side. On the right side, the first shelf will be 3 feet from the floor and the others will be 1 foot apart. On the left side, each shelf will be 1 and a half feet apart. Today we (with another intern, Claire) worked on creating the support beams needed to hold the shelves. We had many problems in putting the nails into the beams. Two beams split in half because to too much pressure. Later on today, we will be returning to the garden to continue to work on attaching the support beams to the shed.

Today will probably be our last day posting a new blog (Mandy and Connie) because tomorrow will be the last day we will be working here at Hester Street Collaborative this summer. Good bye and have a nice summer. :]

Thursday, August 07, 2008

Finishing our designs

Hi, my name is Helen, i am one of the interns in Hester St Collaborative Design. Yesterday I've been working on t' shirt design and figuring out how to draw the letter H for "WatcH Us Grow". The design for the letter H was suppose to be a butterfly on a branch to make it look like an letter H. I tried out different ways to draw the butterfly and the branch together. It didn't work out because it doesn't look like an H or the butterfly is too big. My co workers, (interns); Melissa, Angela and Vivian were also drawing out the design and finishing the sketching as fast as we can because Vivan and Melissa last day of work is tomorrow. I am going to missed them a lot because we always have fun together and helped each other out.

So yesterday, i finally drew out a nice butterfly on a H instead of a butterfly trying to look like a H on a branch. I feel so proud of myself and my co workers. We basically gather our thoughts and design together and even our supervisor put in their designs. Its our master piece and the best design ever made. I had a lot of fun working in Hester Street Collaborative because i get to experienced a lot of things and doing something crazy such as working on the garden. I've never done that before and I'm glad i did. Afterward, we put all the letters together and scan it on the computer and print it out. This process sounds easy but its not from hours of drawing then we have to put it together. I'm glad we're finally finished with the design. Now we have to trace the design on a contact paper so we can silk screen it on a shirt. So I'll have to go and trace now!

Tuesday, August 05, 2008

t-shirts and shed plans

Hey, this is Connie and I'm a volunteer at Hester Street Collaborative. Other volunteers are Mandy, Daniel and Alex. Here at HSC, we are learning a lot of new things. For one, I have never made a t-shirt design before and here I experienced the process of silk screening. Everyday HSC is filled with something new to do.
At the P.S. 134 garden, there is a tool shed. Over the time, supplies and miscellaneous objects were piled and thrown in. Right now everything in it is a mess. So, one of our projects is thinking of a way to organize the tool shed. We had to draw out plans and side-views of the interior shed. Using our plans, we decided to put three to four shelves on the three sides of the interior shed. To organize everything, we will buy tubs or crates and label them.
This is Vivian. As with the silk screening, a design was picked out of the interns' and volunteers'. We worked on the design and finalized it. Everyone's been working hard and the table is now covered in layers of tracing paper.
For me and Melissa, this is going to be our last week at HSC. I'm going to miss all the fun projects we did and going to the garden. But, before I leave, I have to finish a research project. My project will be planning a proposal to build a stage at Sara D. Roosevelt Park. On every other Friday, there are performances at the park. The first one was a puppet show and I went to a Chinese Culture Dance Performance. I noticed these events are done on a soccer field. Therefore, I want to design a stage for these events because they seem to have this every summer. If there is a stage, it can be more presentable and not blocking children from using the soccer field. The stage will have to be versatile and able to be used for any kind of performance. I will show a plan of my design using Illustrator.