Evaluation

During 'Simulating experience' I feel like I portrayed my idea well. 


As a child, I was the child that always made dens, would eat anything (edible or not) and was obsessed with willy wonka!... I even once threw my dinner at the wall to see if I could have lickable wallpaper, but my mum was not impressed in the slightest!


The installation was to give the simulation of my childhood, my happiness and memories. 
Now that I have finished my installation and I have had time to reflect on it I have had so many new ideas of how to expand and improve my idea in a was that would help portray the idea more. Because although I needed the strong, well made structure to be weight bearing for the beaded sweetie door curtains... when you were a child did you used to make a strong structure out of wood, screws and brackets?! I used to drape my duvet between my mums chair and the family sofa and play under that! So if i had more time to develop the idea I would try to do something like that because i feel like it really would communicate better. 

Oh no...

The last thing goes wrong! 

My experiments for the lickable wallpaper were sometimes successful and sometimes not. 

Because the citrus lickable wallpaper was to be made with freshly squeezed fruit juice it required to be made the night before hand in, so it is fresh for marking... so that required to get it right within 2 attempts. 

I did it in 2 ways. 1st using gelatine to solidify the juice into a paste, and 2nd use liquid glucose to turn it into a syrupy paste. 

Sadly, both attempts failed. as the gelatine required to be put into the fridge to solidify, it became too solid to paste on. and the other only turns into a paste when it is very thinly painted on to the surfaces and left to dry for 5 mins, but during this period it soaked into the paper and leaked underneath the stencil I made. therefore I had a smudgy wallpaper that tasted like paper, not citrus flavours.

It's all coming together nicely!

This posts shows the final stages of putting my installation up. I feel like it has been a big success so far, because everything has all gone to plan for my dandelions, sweetie beaded door curtains, nests and mushrooms.. lets hope the last few stages do so too!

Structure

This is my structure I made for my tent like structure, I used wood inside the sides of the fabric so they were strong enough to bare the weight of the sweetie door curtains. 

final ivy leaves

This posts shows the final stages of adding my ivy leaves onto the inside of my structure. 

I think they look very effective as they are not uniform, they look similar to as they would if they were real. 

Soldiering on!

It was much harder and time consuming than I initially thought to sit and use writing icing to draw on the veins on the leaves... but it was worth it, because they look effectively brilliant and they taste lovely!

lollipop dandelions

For my lollipop dandelions I used 12mm dowel and 10cm polystyrene balls, I also made a base for them to stand in of MDF, then painted. 

With one of the dandelions I pierced the polystyrene several times to make a very full one, then with the other one I only stuck a few lollipops in then scattered some on the floor so it looked like it had been blown. 

Mushrooms... Again!

I think I have found a miracle! I have found these coconut / marshmallow mushrooms that are amazing! 

With the other mushrooms that were savoury and sweet, although they were edible I don't think they would have been particularly pleasant to eat... so these are the perfect solution as they are sweet, so they fit perfectly with the rest of my installation!

At first I thought I encountered a bit or a problem as they don't stand up very well... but on my installation floor I don't want it to be flat all the way through, I would like mini mounds with foam underneath the floor I will be putting down... so I am putting these mushrooms on cocktail sticks and putting them in the foam!

Lickable wallpaper round 2!

 Experiment with lemon jelly! 

I decided to take another route and explore different ways of doing lickable wallpaper, because of the gelatine disaster... So I thought of jelly! it's sweet, cheap... and I think everyone likes it! but to give it more colour I bought yellow food colouring and to give it a little tangy kick I added a bit of freshly squeezed lemon!

 It didn't go as planned, because although it sets well, it needs to be refrigerated for a while, and it's not lickable! For instance when you lick it, no flavour comes off and it has a funny texture. 

 Another experiment with lemon lickable wallpaper! With this one I used freshly squeezed lemon, glucose syrup and a small amount of yellow food colouring. It initially seemed like it wasn't going to work because it is so funny when you first mix it! But when you paste the liquid onto a surface it sets rather quickly, and is very lickable! I think I have a winner of a technique right here!!! 

Nests!

 For the 1st attempt at the nests I used candy sticks and strawberry laces, but I struggled with how to attach them together, for instance, I tried to weave them, then plait them, but it was difficult as the candy sticks kept moving because the strawberry laces arent strong enough to tie tightly.

 In my second attempt I just twirled the strawberry laces into a large swirl and layered it ontop of each other to create a nest shape... I then placed 3 creme eggs ontop.

I decided to leave the wrappers on the creme eggs because of my influence for this from willy wonka's geese that lay golden eggs. 

Sweetie door curtains

I want my sweetie door curtains to be vibrant and fun, as it will be the first thing you see, so it needs to make a good first impression!

This 'experiment' proved to work straight away! I am using dolly mixtures, fizzy cola bottles and marshmallows, I bought some fresh, clean needles to use for this in order to thread the sweets onto the cotton. It works brilliantly as long as I start off with a fairly hard sweet such as the dolly mixtures, because I accidently started with a marshmallow and once there was a bit of weight on it it slid off the bottom! 

I'm being hygienic!

Now I have reached the stage where some of my final experiments may be going into the installation I am making sure that all work surfaces in my kitchen / dining room have been washed thoroughly with Dettol anti-bacterial cleaning fluid. 

Change of plan!

Edible Ivy!

This is my experiment with the edible ivy I want crawling up the right wall in my installation. 

For this experiment I bought a few packets of edible rice paper, green food colouring and writing icing. 

I found an ivy shape on the internet and traced it, then using a stencil I cut a few ivy leaves out of my rice paper. 

This one is the one where I used food colouring to paint the veins of the leaf into the rice paper, and as you can see, they look thick and a bit clunky and clumsy. 

 With the next two leaves on one I used yellow and the other green writing icing, and they turned out fantastically! because the writing nozzle is so small I could create intricate lines for the veins of the leaf... and as a bonus the writing icing sets fairly quickly, so it will not drip, smudge or run! 

 I am creating 4 different sizes of ivy leaf for my wall, so it wont look uniform and rigid. 

I am also going to use yellow, green and white writing icing for the leaves as they are the main colours you see in ivy leaves veins. 

Lickable wallpaper!

For my first experiment with lickable wallpaper I am going to keep it simple and just use freshly squeezed fruit juice and mix with some gelatine to thicken it up into a paste. 

I was stuck with how to display the fruit on the wallpaper because i was originally going to just draw an orange, lemon and lime how they actually look, but it looked boring and not very exciting. 

It finally came to me how to make it more visually appealing after sitting looking at my flowery bedding - I can display them as though they were cut in half showing the segments! 

With the fruit I had to add food colouring because the colour of the freshly squeezed juice is very bland. 

Sadly this experiment did not work out well at all, because when using gelatine in such strong quantities with little other strong flavours to mask it, the gelatine actually has a very distinct, horrible flavour. 

Heston Blumenthal!

After the incident with the mushrooms not wanting to co-operate I decided to watch Heston Blumenthal's Chocolate factory feast that was part of his channel 4 series of feasts. 


In this feast he catered for celebrity guests in a fashion that Willy Wonka would have been proud of. 
He created lickable wallpaper, psychedelic duck a l'orange, a magic mushroom wonderland dish, and a chocolate waterfall. 

2nd Experiment with mushrooms

This is the 2nd experiment for the mushrooms. 

For this experiment I used button mushrooms, royal icing, red food colouring and writing icing. 

I wrapped a button mushroom in royal icing and painted it with red food colouring... then left it to dry over night. 

Once again this experiment did not work, this time it was because the mushroom is smooth and slippery therefore the icing slipped off into a heap underneath the mushroom. 

I then had a quick experiment that I thought would fix the problem... with a button mushroom I gave it a small coating of jam to try and make it sticky, something for the icing to stick to.. but sadly it failed and the icing slid off again.