In early summer 2017, Streetcat (https://www.streetcat.media/) participated as a node leader for the inaugural Digital Naturalism Conference (or DiNaCon), hosted by Dr. Andrew Quitmeyer and Tasneem Khan in Phuket, Thailand. Streetcat applied her project idea~ the Recycloom ~ in during the call for proposals for DiNaCon in early 2018. Her project idea encompassed building a textile tool that was made from recycled materials and utilized recycled plastics as string for making reused textile objects.
The final design for the loom came from a workshop that Streetcat took in early May 2018 at the Southeastern Fiber Arts Alliance where she built a strap on an inkle loom. The construction of the inkle loom is pretty simple, and Streetcat was able to source all the materials needed to remake it from various places like dumpsters, old woodworking projects, and Home Depot.
Before leaving for Thailand, Streetcat practiced making straps on an inkle loom that she borrowed from SEFAA, made a bunch of plarn, and constructed / deconstructed and packed the recycled loom ~ the Recycloom! ~ for the conference!
At the conference, Streetcat deliriously reconstructed the recycloom right after arriving at the conference from a 27 hour travel period from Atlanta to Phuket. There, she started experimenting with several stringing methods on the recycloom to play around with making straps out of cotton string and plarn. After working through a few projects, she started to teach other conference attendees how to use the loom with showing them: what the heck warp + weft means, how to make a shuttle out of cardboard, how to string the loom with plarn, how to make a patterned strap, and how to start/finish a project.
The loom lived on after DiNaCon by being adopted by Tasneem Khan and the Diva makerspace ship!
Check out more info about the project:
+ https://www.streetcat.media/creative-tech/recycloom
+ https://www.dinacon.org/2018/01/12/maggie-kane/
