PROJECT 1 TOYS FROM TALES Faculty: Sajith Gopinath
Ruttikorn Vuttikorn
Some story or a tale that inspired me when I was kid....!!!!
Small plum girl with 2 little ponies, running here and there, loves to play with nature and stuff around. Stones, leaves, wood, old bottles, papers, toys……..collecting scraps ….Breaking toys and joining different toys and scraps around together so that it looks like a dog or tree. Looking into clouds and see different forms in it elephant, flowers etc. Imagination, fascination… and loves Cinderella... Used to dress up Cinderella… and act like as if she is the fairy with magic sticks in her and…. She can convert any toy into new toy…
It is with a sense of secret hope of getting back to playing with toys and games that I took up the elective of Toys from Tales. Wanting to reconnect with all those hours of unadulterated fun, stitching little doll dresses and playing innumerable board games, I was hoping for two weeks of absolute fun.
Although life is meant to make you regret hoping for things, for once, it didn't disappoint me at all! In fact, this elective has turned out to be even more fun than I had imagined.
Classes with Rutti and Sajith and a whole bunch of similarly excited classmates are extremely interesting and enjoyable.
The very first day, we were asked to make a toy that best described an incident from childhood or ourselves. It was such a delightful experience-and also nice and self-absorbed- to sit and think about oneself and recreate the flashes of childhood memories that sifted though our mind.
Everyone came up with a toy by the next morning. The toy I made was called the 'Ollikuchchi Octopus'(Eng:Stick-Thin Octopus); a dig at the stick figures my sister used to draw as a kid. The Octopus represented the extreme anxiety I had in me from childhood(it continues, till date) of trying to do many things at the same time. A juggler of activities, I needed 4 pairs of hands to finish whatever I had undertaken. Also, as per Animal Symbolism, the Octopus is a sign of creativity and insatiability. What better a way to represent it than using the Octopus?!
As a child, I was too full of myself and in all arrogance, I used to boss around the people in my class. Later, this 'higher than thou' attitude lead to a fall and a whole reanalysis and reformation began! Stick-Thin Octopus); a dig at the stick figures my sister used to draw as a kid.
I shaped the OO out of a thin bamboo branch over which a cloth octopus was strung. The bamboobranch resembled stilts and was signaling at the fact that I never had my foot on the ground. To represent my flighty attitude, I made four rotor blades by crossing two ice-cream sticks in the centre and keeping them in place with a board tack. These blades, I stuck to the bamboo branch octopus with adhesive. I strung little ghungroos(bells) at the tips of the rotor blades to provide some sound every once used- a dig at my talkative nature.
I used bright primary colours to paint OO, to attract kids. The stick , tack and ghungroos were painted bright blue, the rotor blades were poster red in colour and had some intricate hatching patterns on their top side. The head of the Octopus was a moss green with white polka dots and had a happy expression painted. The hands were made of multi-coloured cut cloth. A small white band held the head and the body together.
In all enthusiasm, I decided I'd develop the merchandising also for the OO. Hence emerged the pamphlets that go with it, and the poem that it has.
As my original doodling brought forth a gingerbread woman, I decided to explain my toy in the form of an act. I covered my toy with another piece of cloth and as sense strikes the OO, it sheds its cloth skin and emerges to fly off into the sky.
OO can be used for two things- one as a rattle for babies, and another as a fly-away toy. You need to spin the bamboo stick between your palms- almost in a churning movement- and then let it go. It spins in flight and then crashes down, unless you catch hold of it in a while.
However, OO was a parody toy- meant for me to laugh at the person I was and be thankful for the improvements that have happened, and hopefully get working on the parts that still remain.
