The team behind Fort Makers don’t refer to themselves as a design studio but rather an “artist collective,” and there’s a marked difference: They make functional objects, but instead of producing a stream of products with a unified aesthetic, they each work individually under the studio umbrella, experimenting with whatever interests them at any given time. In a way, it’s that same sense of structureless structure that first attracted Noah Spencer to the idea of making mobiles: You can hang pretty much anything from them, as long as you get the balance right. “Any kind of visual language can be carried into the mobile world,” says Spencer, a Paul Loebach and Uhuru Design alum who co-founded Fort Makers in 2008. While he primarily makes models hung with simple wooden shapes, he’s also been toying around lately with more expressive elements made from polymer clay (aka Sculpey), a method he graciously offered to teach Sight Unseen readers in this tutorial.
When he first began designing mobiles three years ago, Spencer had to teach himself. Born and raised in a small neighborhood outside Boulder, Colorado, called Sunshine, he grew up visiting the home and workshop of local artist and antique dealer Chris Voorhees, where a few years back he discovered a wooden fish mobile that Voorhees’s father had made in the ’70s. “That was the initial exploration point for me,” Spencer says. “I basically just copied that one and made it out of applewood.” His first few attempts “collapsed onto the floor,” and a Calder how-to book he purchased turned out to offer little help. But he kept on practicing and improvising until eventually his mobiles — sans fish at that point — were solid enough to become an official staple of the Fort Makers lineup.
The idea to bring Sculpey into the series arose from some of the studio’s collaborative art-making sessions, where they’d been using the colorful clay for jewelry experiments. Spencer would occasionally borrow pieces created during those workshops and turn them into mobiles, though Fort Makers hasn’t made any of those available for sale as of yet. When we asked the group to adapt one of their projects into a how-to story for us — others in their current repertoire including block-printed tea towels for West Elm and products for Martha Stewart and eBay’s forthcoming online shop American Made — Sculpey mobiles seemed like the perfect choice. They’re inexpensive to make, require zero design experience, and (surprisingly) don’t involve any math whatsoever. And since you can hang pretty much anything from them, there’s a wide margin of error. Check out the step-by-step directions in the slideshow at right, and if you do attempt to make your own, be sure to post the results on Instagram and tag us!
This summer, Noah Spencer of Fort Makers invited us to the group’s studio near the Brooklyn Navy Yard to learn how to construct a mobile like this one, with beads made from Sculpey modeling clay.
Spencer has been making and selling wooden mobiles of his own design, like the one pictured above, for the past 3 years. They’re sold both at Steven Alan Home and in the Fort Makers webshop.
Our workspace for the morning: a modular central studio table that Fort Makers built themselves.
The other wall of the studio, which was too beautiful not to share: It’s covered in stray marks from the painting process of Naomi Clark, another FM founding member and Spencer’s wife.
Spencer insists that you can make a Sculpey mobile with nothing more than your fingers and a butter knife. But his tool set includes a plexi cylinder for rolling out the clay; the cutting tool second to left, which is an easier way to make clean, precise shapes; and the quill at right, for piercing holes.
The first step: Using whatever tools you have at hand to make the pieces that will hang from your mobile. Spencer stresses that it doesn’t matter how they’re shaped or what size they are — you can make almost anything balance later, when you’re constructing the final mobile. Just make shapes you like.
Here, Spencer cuts a zigzag into a piece of Sculpey he’s rolled out with his rolling pin. He suggests wearing latex gloves while handling the soft Sculpey, as it tends to pick up fingerprints easily.
Each shape will need to be hung from your mobile somehow. If there’s no obvious way to tie a cord around it securely — so that it doesn’t move and throw off the balance of your mobile later — you’ll need to create a hole. Here, Spencer uses his quill to poke one through the top of his shape.
Some of Spencer’s finished pieces. Yours don’t all need to be flat, however — 3-D elements work just as well. Many of Spencer’s shapes are ones that have begun to naturally recur throughout the work of everyone in the studio: “Even though Naomi and I have very different approaches to working, we’ve passed certain language back and forth,” he says. “I used to be a landscape painter, while she’s always been an abstract painter, and over the years I’ve felt myself being influenced by her shapes and motifs.”
Sculpey needs to be baked to harden. Once you’ve completed all the shapes for your mobile, gently lay them out on a foil baking sheet and place them in the oven for about 20 minutes, depending on their size and thickness.
Spencer uses the studio toaster oven to do the honors.
While the pieces bake, you can prep the armatures for your mobile. Spencer uses 3/16″ dowels, which he purchases from Utrecht Art Supply. He pre-cuts them to many different sizes and drills small holes into each end.
Next he applies butcher block oil to each dowel with a soft rag, though this step isn’t mandatory. “I think it protects the wood a little bit, and I like the tone, but it’s just a choice,” he says.
Once your Sculpey pieces are finished baking, the fun begins: It’s time to lay out your mobile design. Spencer explains that nearly any arrangement — within reason — can be balanced in the final steps of this tutorial, so don’t worry so much about which pieces go where. “It’s whatever looks good, for the most part,” he says. “And I make sure that the arms aren’t going to hit each other in its kinetic state.”
When you have a layout you like, start tying the pieces together. Spencer uses matte black waxed cord that he purchases at a beading store, but you can use anything as long as you make appropriately sized holes.
Next, tie your beads to the wooden dowel. Spend time making sure you’re happy with the length of each side, because you’ll want to finalize them, knot them, and trim the ends of the string all the way down before you’re ready to construct the next tier of the mobile, in order to ensure a fully accurate balance.
The balancing act begins: To determine where to drill a hole into the dowel, which will hang this tier from the one above it, Spencer uses a thumbtack, moving the length of the dowel along it until the arm hangs perfectly horizontal. “It’s amazing how fine the balance can be,” says Spencer. “You’re just moving it a hair in one direction or the other.”
Mark the spot where the thumbtack rested, then drill a hole into that spot. “If you don’t have a drill, you could just tie the string around the dowel at that spot, but there’s a chance it’ll slip to one side or the other,” Spencer cautions. “That’s initially how I left the first one that I made for my parents. But it ended up that the wind blew it over, because it wasn’t fastened securely through a hole.”
Using the hole you just made, tie the first tier to the dowel above it at whatever length looks best to you, then tie that tier’s beads to the other side at whatever length looks best. Trim the ends of the string down to the knots.
Repeat the thumbtack balancing method with the second tier of your mobile.
Drill a hole into the correct spot on the second tier dowel.
If you tie a string from the hole and find that, despite your best efforts with the thumbtack, it still isn’t hanging 100% straight, try altering the shape of the knot slightly, or shifting the way it’s sitting on the dowel.
Spencer holding up his near-finished mobile. To complete it, just repeat the thumbtack balancing method and hole-drilling one more time on the top tier, to add the cord you’ll hang it from.
If you don’t have the fortitude to build your own Sculpey mobile, of course, you can always purchase one of Fort Makers’ existing wooden mobile designs in the studio’s online shop.
On occasion, the editors of Sight Unseen spot a story about creativity told from a viewpoint that’s not unlike our own. In the past year, we’ve noticed that documenting the studio interiors of people who spend their workdays making things has become a bit of a cottage industry on the web; our most recent obsession, Brooklyn-based photographer Jennifer Causey, chronicles the interior spaces of local fashion designers, florists, perfumers, jewelers, and food producers. We’re excerpting here Causey’s feature on Kings County Distillery, a homegrown moonshine producer that’s been run out of an East Williamsburg studio since early last year.
From an outside perspective, the Brooklyn furniture-design studio Fort Standard exudes the aura of a successful business with a clear DNA. Yet that wasn't always the case: When co-founders Ian Collings and Greg Buntain first joined forces in 2011, after graduating together from Pratt, they had no idea what direction to take — they simply dove headlong into the making process. “We had one goal: to do our own thing,” Buntain said in a recent interview. Their stock may have risen since then, but behind the scenes, the pair still make an effort to keep things loose; to maintain a sense of discovery in their shared practice, they both do separate solo work on the side, little personal experiments and objects they create for their own homes. Occasionally these prototypes are developed into Fort Standard products, but most of the time they go unseen, as was the case for Buntain's marble Tombstone chairs before we spotted them on Instagram. When we approached the designer to ask him if we could share them with you in the interview after the jump, it turned out he had a home full of personal pieces he'd made but also never shared with the public, which he was kind enough to walk us through in the second half of this story.
Anyone who was in New York for our annual Noho Design District event this spring should be familiar with the Irish online homegoods brand Makers & Brothers; they would have been the ones making a beautiful mess on the floor of the Standard East Village hotel, as their woodworker James Wicklow carved stools made from Catskills-grade green ash by hand over the course of four days. But most of what namesake brothers Jonathan and Mark Legge do to showcase their particular brand of native handcrafted goods takes place a bit closer to home — which in their case is a shed located on the same property as their parents' home and architectural practice in Dublin. Since founding their online retail venture less than a year ago, the two have made a point of visiting and documenting the workspaces of the people who create products for them — the basketweaver who grows her own willow on the banks of the River Boyne, the Irish RCA grad who knits stool covers from a warehouse in East London, and, most recently, a family of glassblowers in Kilkenny whose Jerpoint brand drinking vessels the brothers grew up with. When we wrote Jonathan to ask if we could reprint some of their text and photos on Sight Unseen, he confessed he hopes to collaborate soon with Jerpoint — so perhaps a follow-up story will be in the offing for fall. Until then, if you're in Dublin, you can pop by the brothers' shed this weekend for a summer opening. If not, live the Makers & Brothers life vicariously through our excerpt after the jump.
