Cherie Fawcett will be wrapping up her tenure as Kwartzlab Artist in Residence at the end of the month. This week, she will be hosting both her Artist in Residence talk during Tuesday Open Night and her workshop on Wednesday.

The workshop will be directed by Cherie Fawcett and will explore memory and sentimentality. Participants of this workshop are asked to bring either a sentimental or mundane object along with them. There will be two parts for this evening. Firstly, the participants will render the object/objects that they brought with them in any style that they chose. For the second half of the workshop, participants will think of a memory or story surrounding this object and explore this concept in any style that they chose.

If you are interested in participating in this workshop, please RSVP Cherie at cherie.fawcett@gmail.com.

There will be a $5 fee for this workshop to cover the cost of supplies.

Artist Bio

Cherie Fawcett was born in Sudbury Ontario. As a child, her family frequently uprooted, and to this date she has lived in 22 different houses. Constant relocation brought with it a strong interest in the idea of relationships, recreating identities, as well as the temporality of memory. More specifically, she focuses on how documentation—whether it be photographic, film, text, or collected objects—can influence how and what we recall.

Cherie lives in Kitchener, Ontario. She received her BA from the University of Waterloo in 2011. Upon graduation, she was presented with the RCAA Howe Award. For the past few years, Cherie has curated at local galleries including The Artery Gallery and WalterFedy. She has an upcoming curation at Cambridge Galleries in September 2013. She is currently working at Kwartzlab as their Artist in Residence until the end of the 2012 year.

This post is mainly about my observations on how I’d do things differently if I were to run one again (and I probably will) as well as some reference notes for the people who attended.

What is Cryptography?

For those unfamiliar with cryptography, Khan Academy has an excellent series of video tutorials on the subject, although, they deal mainly with the basic mathematics behind the subject, which I find fascinating, but may not be your cup of tea.

How the Workshop Worked

The workshop was focused on the basics of the GNU Privacy Guard (often referred to as GnuPG or just GPG), which is a free implementation of the OpenPGP protocol, a public key cryptosystem.

The tutorial was broken up into two parts. The first part was a basic rundown on what public key cryptography is, and how to use GnuPG. This part ran pretty smoothly. The second part was the actual key generation and signing. Because of the large number of people present, this ran significantly longer than I had expected; I think I finally went home around 11PM.

How I’d Do It Better

Ideally, when you run a keysigning party, you want people to have their keys generated beforehand. Since this was a tutorial as well, this can’t really be done for some people, but it doesn’t take that long to generate keys.

I think next time, I’ll create some sort of script that will allow people to generate and print a sheet of paper, which can be cut into slips, containing their name, e-mail address, key ID, and fingerprint. Rather than signing the keys at the event, they can simply hand these slips out to the other participants (showing ID where necessary). Afterwards, people can just go home and sign the keys there using the slips to validate them. That way, only the people who are not familiar with the software will need to stay behind for help, and even then, they’ll probably get it after signing a key or two.

Using GnuPG through the Command Line

I was going to write an explanation of how to do the most common tasks in GnuPG, but I found this handy guide to using GnuPG on the command line so I won’t bother duplicating that effort.

ADDED WORKSHOP BONUS: make your own reusable heat transfer patterns using a Silhouette SD machine (its like a Cricut, but way better!). Choose from an existing library of designs, create your own with the Studio software, or bring an existing .dxf file (all objects need to be ungrouped before saving as .dxf)!

Silhouette SD draws the kwartzlab logo on paper with a heat transferable ink pen

When I ordered my Silhouette SD last June, I also added some fun attachments I knew would come in handy. The pen holder and sketch pens were part of that order.  The pen holder works great, but is limited to ballpoint Bic sized pens and skinny markers. After seeing what was available on the market for holding larger markers, I thought it shouldn’t be too difficult to hack my own version. The flow on my Silhouette SD sketch pens don’t work consistently, so I didn’t have any hesitations in sacrificing one or two. It didn’t take much to transform this sketch pen into a marker holder- a band saw, a drill press, an exacto knife (to clear away plastic shavings) 5 minute epoxy and a small nut and bolt set (to tighten the hold on the maker). 10 minutes later and voila! This guy will hold markers as thick as a regular sized Sharpie.

What you will learn at the workshop:

• how to choose and prep your fabric for stitching
• how to use a heat transfer
• how to prep and condition your floss
• basic stitches (split stitch, back stitch, stem stich, satin stich…more stiches will be taught on request!)
• how to tie off and finish your threads

What you will come away with:

• your own 4″ high quality plastic embroidery hoop
• stitching samplers
• reusable heat transfer patterns- designed by you!!
• needle and floss
• extra material to keep practising with
• confidence in your stitching skills!
• inspiration for future projects!

Workshop materials fee: $10, payable at the door.

Workshop is limited to 10 people! Visit http://learntoembroider.eventbrite.com/ to sign up for a spot!

If you need to cancel your reservation please do so ASAP so that others can join in.

KwartzLab friend and pumpkin carving guru, Jeff-o, held such a workshop for us on Wednesday evening. And as a graduate of the kitchen knife & stitches school of pumpkin carving, I was first in line! I’ll share some of the tips we learned after Hacky Hallowe’en. In the meantime, however, you can take a peek at our technique!

Andrew opts for a "fancy" lid.

Pumpkins are tasty.

Taping the pattern to the pumpkin.

Transfering the pattern to the pumpkin.

Doug shows off the KWAwesome pumpkin

Awesome-looking pumpkins, that don't require blood sacrifice.

More pics over here.