My project is about creating a pair of hearing aids. There are two things that inspire me.
One is my classmate in primary school. Her hearing is not very good so she wore hearing aids. The hearing aids she wore were so obvious that everybody would notice. Some kids even bullied her about her disability. I really wanted to do something for her, but I was a little child myself. Today, after about 14 years, I decided to create a new pair of hearing aids for her.
The other is that I read an article about a mother in England sold some self-made dolls which all have some disabilities like harelip, fistula, hearing disorder, and so on. The dolls are to remind people, including the little kids that people who look different as us are normal people too. They live in this world as we do, they live their life seriously as we do.
I’m going to make the hearing aid planets shape. I decide to make a hat, and I will dye the fabric or hat into the colors of the earth. And I will use wood balls to creat the hearing aids. I will use oil painting sticks to draw the wood balls in colors of Mars and Venus (my tutorial is about oil painting sticks, I tried to draw on wood and it works! ). Also, I will use cotton string to make a lanyard for anti-lost. The lanyard will look like Milky Way.
The whole background is set in the Galaxy. Besides the meaning that the planet-like hearing aids may stop the bullying, they also have the meaning that everyone is the child of the universe, everyone is the same, discrimination is not supposed to happen anymore.
My sketch
The hearing aid part went really well. Because in my tutorial, I tried to draw oil painting sticks on the board, and then I found that the advantage of painting oil painting sticks on wood was that the oil painting sticks are not easily stained on the board, and the paintings will be very hierarchical. So I chose to use the wooden ball as hearing aids and drew Mars and Venus on the wooden ball. Sure enough, the sense of accumulation is very strong——the color will not merge, and there is a strong sense of the whole.
The wooden balls—-Venus and Mars
To tell the truth, I am not very satisfied with the finished product of this work. The main reason is that I chose to knit my own hat. I’m a beginner, so I didn’t have a good prediction of hat size, which made my knitted hat not match the circumference of the plaster. But It took me about five days to knit the hat, so I couldn’t do it again. I think that’s one of the reasons why I’m not that satisfied with my work.
When knitting the hat
What I have learned the most is dyeing in this assignment. Joelle taught me how to do natural dyeing in her tutorial. I chose not to use natural materials but bought stains to dye. I dyed the hat I knitted. The stains need to be painted on something made of pure cotton, and I need to soak my hat before dyeing so that it will be more convenient to color. However, during this process, my fault was that my use of color was not very rational——my blue and green almost blended together, which made the boundaries couldn’t be seen. Next time I’ll try to use more colors to distinguish the shades.
When dyeing the hat
The hearing aids part
Final product
I really like the Bridge 3. I felt that I had a lot of room for inspiration when doing this assignment, and I really learned a lot in the Bridge 2 tutorial. Joelle’s tutorial has taught me a lot so that I dare to use this method of dyeing in my next project. For Bridge3, I am very happy because in the Bridge 2, I have carefully explored the difference in painting oil painting sticks on different materials. Therefore, when I chose the materials of hearing aids in Bridge3, I immediately thought of the benefits of wood and then chose the wooden balls, which greatly saved me time. In the next work, I think I will continue to try new things I have learned and constantly learn from the work I have done, so as to master more skills and enrich my work.
