I’ve been incubating plans for the Fire Bird for Burning Man (and trying out as many bird puns as I can in here in the blog). I’m going to make it using bent reed which is a new material for me. I’ve used it a little bit to make lanterns, which is basically what the Fire Bird will be, minus the skin of paper. I have friends that have worked with it pretty extensively, Sarah Lovett has made some quite large scale kinetic sculptures for the Solstice Parade and my friend Nicole has shown me how she uses it to make luminaries. So I’m not quite flying without a net but definitely figuring it out as I go.

First step was a trip to NW Cane Supply, just North of 80th on 15th NW, where I picked up some #7 and #5 round reed and had an amusing chat with the guy who works there. Next step was to test dyeing the reed. I followed the really simple instructions in the Dharma Trading Co. catalog and it dyed up beautifully.

Yesterday I came up with a drawing I liked but felt I needed a maquette to figure out the scale and determine the amount of materials. I don’t want to start dyeing the reed until I know how about how much I’ll need. So today I made a maquette out of really basic materials: pipe cleaners and bamboo skewers. It helped to get my hands on some three-dimensional materials. I can only go so far with drawing, everything starts to make more sense once I start moving it into three-dimensions.

I’m feeling much more confident about the project now. There’s still a lot to learn and I’m very much flying (!) by the seat of my pants but it seems to be the way I always work. I wouldn’t go buy reed and learn how to use it unless I had a project it was going toward. And it’s pretty low pressure gig, I am going to burn it when it’s finished, after all.