The Fringe project and one more AA2A activity

I've been putting a lot of hours into my project for the Norwich Fringe Festival. The idea was relatively simple, a fringe for the fringe. It was to be a "beaded" fringe of giant beads. The giant beads would be whatever was bead-shaped, but larger. The most obvious ones would be the cardboard tubes from inside toilet paper and paper towels, painted, of course. I have been saving tubes myself for months, and had asked a number of people to save them for me. A few came through.

But it became obvious, especially after I visited the site, that it would take far more of these tubes than I could expect to collect, even after an appeal to fellow artists in Produced in Norfolk and to Freecycle. (I would link each of those if I had the code for linking handy right now. Unfortunately my browser makes it necessary to insert the code rather than just highlight or some such simple method.)

Aluminum foil tubes? Wrapping paper tubes? Tubes from rolls of wraps that delis and fishmongers use? Not enough.

Finally, I thought of the tubes that fabric comes on. Anglian Fabrics, both the apparel fabric and the furnishings fabric stores, helped me out. Without them, I couldn't have finished the project the way I wanted at all. And then there's the Jade Tree, which let me store bunches of the tubes in their back room to be picked up and brought home as I managed to paint them. This wasn't simple, either because I don't have a car.

I painted and painted and painted. Even one "string" of cardboard tube beads per foot adds up to a lot of feet of cardboard tubes when the entry way is twelve feet high and at least twelve feet wide. And the cardboard tubes that fabric come on don't cut up easily. The logistics of the construction of the "strings" had some considerable restrictions. In order to get the piece to the location, it had to be transportable at least by a car. Therefore I decided that each "string" had to be separate, and consist of "beads" that were not much longer (and usually smaller) than two feet long. So the painted tubes that were anywhere from 4 ft to nearly 6 had to be cut into smaller pieces. I discovered that we didn't have a tool in the house that could do this.

And how to join the beads together in a string, given how large the center holes were. I decided I needed two holes at either end of each tube. By now, I had planned there to be some 41 "beads" to be cut from about 20 long tubes, which means 164 holes. But how to make the holes? I would need some kind of a drill.

So I got a little hack saw and an egg=beater-type drill, and with one week to go, I'm still painting and sawing and drilling. And then comes the tieing together.

Whew, this is SOME project.