My Interior Design Blog

Hey guess,

I know I haven’t been here in a while but I have a really good reason. I’ve been told that my grandma is in the hospital, she broke her leg so hopefully it’s nothing serious. I bought a last minute ticket back home to Israel, and I had to do some packing and organizing. Don’t worry though, I took pictures of all the things I have done throughout the semester so I would be able keep writing there. I don’t know how often it would be but I’ll try as much as I can.

Last time I talked about my Mondays which were the worst days. Now, we are moving to Tuesdays which honaslty for me were the best it gets. The day was full and long but a lot of work never scared me. I used to start the day at 9:10. Drafting was the first subject. When I started the semester I was sure I’m going to be very good at it since I have it in my genes, I thought it would come naturally, boy I was wrong… Our first project was just to take the handout and trace it, sound easy, don’t you think? Well. No it wasn’t. Since it was our first project we had to practice all our new tools, rulers, comps, and most importantly the drafting board. I really left those homework for last and I didn’t know how long it would take. (Took a long time). The next project was to practice architectural lettering, again I thought that from what I have seen my dad do I will do it quick and good, wrong again… It took me about three hours to finish everything. I remembered the instructor saying something about using a ruler but it was taking such a long time that I decided to do it free hand. After all I’m young, sort off and artist, my hand is steady, than why wouldn’t I be able to do it? I got a C, my first C ever, or maybe it was C+ but still, awful… With time I learned that I need to dedicate much more time for drafting, and never do it last minute.

Right after drafting I had volleyball, I thought it would be an easy A, just to relax and keep me slim. turned out completely different… We ended up writing three articles and had a final project. Since I’m not going to talk much more or at all about volleyball I’ll write everything now. The articles were about fitness, volleyball and group or team games. It wasn’t that bad, but the thing that really annoyed me about the instructor is that I handed in the last of the articles about a month before our finals. What did she do? Returned all of them a week before the semester ends at the most stressful time and says like it’s nothing: “Oh, everything is wrong, you need to redo all three if you don’t want to loose 30 points off of your grade. And hand in the final project.” I really came close to hitting her, but I decided that my continuing in the institute is more important then satisfying my need. The final project was just something artistic so it took me like 5 minutes and the articles took me no time. Do you want to know how? very simple. I asked my boyfriend to write them since I have no time to spare. He was sure that he did a bad job, I really didn’t care, but I got an A

After an common hour I had the most fun, hard and satisfying class I ever had. STUDIO 1. It’s the class that you spend most of your hours both in school and out. You learn all the basics of design. I had the most amazing and tough teacher ever, luckily she is going to instruct studio 2. It was 4 hours that felt like one, and needed to be doubled. I’ll talk about this subject a lot more.

Stay tuned to read more about Drafting and Studio, but now I need to catch the subway to the airport. I sure don’t want to be late. Wish me a good and safe trip, (I’ll sure wish it to myself, I hate flying).

Chau.

Today we will officially start the new year. Hope that everybody had a great new years eave and a wonderful beginning of 2009. What better way to start the new year than move one from the admission process to the actual 1st semester.

When I got accepted to FIT I also got a brochure saying that there will be an orientation week. I truly recommend that you will go and participate even though you don’t know anyone because that’s the whole point of those activities. I personally had a blast, and got to know my first friends here in the US, this is particularly important if you are international student, I know how hard it is to be so far away from your family and childhood friends.

My first day at FIT I had only two subjects, 3D Design and Survey of Interior Design. I’m not going to talk a lot about those subjects because 3D was the most boring and useless subject ever. You can’t even imagine how boring it was. The instructor always talked and kept going to things that are not related, but even things that were related even a small bit were boring. We didn’t learn anything but cutting geometric shapes and gluing them together. I will though show you our final project. Because as bad as it was, it also was an easy A.

Survey of Interior Design on the other hand, was not as bad but come on guys it’s history, it can’t be too much interesting. I will say that our instructor was an easy one. What do I mean about that? Well he never gave home work, you didn’t have to take notes either. He was teaching everything from a power point slide show, and before we had our midterm and final tests (which were by the way the only ones) he just printed his slide show out with specific questions on them. So if you have good memory, and you can memorize three pages, you’ll be fine and will get an A.

After the first day of school, I wondered if this is the profession for me. I had high expectations and after 10 minutes of the first class I just doubted my decision. But, don’t worry, Monday was my least favorite day, everything got better the next day and on.

Let’s pick up where we left off two posts ago. I promised to guide and explain everything I know about cardboard furniture. Than why don’t we start at the beginning. I entered this field about a year and a half maybe two years ago because my brother was sitting on my had (not literally, but almost). He wanted me to make something, anything, doesn’t matter what out of cardboard. So, I googled it and found a nice chat, (I would have added the link but it’s Hebrew, I don’t believe it would be useful ). I went to the first pages and started reading questions and answers, but it was too much so I just looked at pictures turned out I got it right. Well, there are several techniques I’m going to talk about the really, really easy one.

Ingredients For Any Project:

• Lots of cardboard
• Gummed tape
• Craft paper
• Hot glue gun
• Glue-All, white Elmer’s glue
• Acrylic paint
• Water based varnish
• Utility knife

• First step is getting a lot of cardboard, and I don’t mean like the boxes you buy shoes in, but the big ones, like from appliances and electronics. One really easy way to get those free is being familiar with your neighborhood’s “junk days” - the days that everybody put out the big trash. There is at list two “junk days” a week, and you will definitely find enough cardboard like this.

• You should figure out what do you want to build, I’m going to teach you about the rocking dog. After we decided on what we are building, you need to trace the image on a piece of cardboard. Don’t forget you should already draw the image the size you want it to be.

• Cut the image, and retrace it so you would have a total of 6 rocking dog profiles. Than after you cut everything, make three sets, each set glue to each other with the glue gun.
• Now, cut the “support beams” which are suppose to be about 2″ by 4″. Glue those beams in rows when the side of the 2″ is glued to the image of the dog. When you feel it’s enough put glue really quick on the edges of the beams and place over them another cardboard image. Do that again and you get a 3D rocking dog skeleton. Add a rope or wooden stick for comfortable grip.

• Measure the thickness of the dog, cut a long stripe of cardboard and cover where needed (around the perimeter of the piece).
• Now, comes the covering part. It may sound easy, and I’m not saying it’s hard, you just have to have patience. Take the craft paper and cut big piece, big enough for the whole side of the dog to fit. Put the white glue on the dog itself, place the paper on the dog, from the center and stretch out. Exactly like you would do with a wall paper. Put more glue on top of the paper and keep stretching from the inside out avoiding air babels. Do the same thing all over the dog. (For additional strength you may do another layer.

• Now it’s really FUN TIME!!! Paint, there are no direction for this. Like my presentation instructor always says :”It’s time to use your creative license”. You do whatever you want however you want.

• After painting, is one more step and we are done!! It’s time to sill the rocking dog for both paint protection and durability reason. I prefer the varnish that comes in the spray bottle, because it is simple application, not messy at all and the bottle is enough for several projects of this size.

Enjoy!!!