By Max and Magalie
The first day we met the other trainees. We are from Norway, Finland, Denmark, Germany and Belgium. We were guided by our very friendly coordinator Ellen Sillekens. We also met our mentor Marina Toeters who gave us an introduction on the theme ‘Building with Textiles’. Her assistant Tamara Hoogewegen, a student from TU Eindhoven, will help us with figuring out how to create electrical circuits.
After a day full of information we biked home to our ‘jungalows’ (bungalows in the jungle of the Netherlands) in the Safaripark Beekse Bergen. What normally should take 30 minutes, took us two hours. We even had to climb over a fence and push our bikes over it: Exhausting! Besides fences the Safaripark has a lot more to offer. We have a lot of ducks in our garden who wake us every day and a nice lake for a morning swim.
Through this week, we got introduced to the museum and TextielLab. They offer weaving, knitting, embroidery, passementrie, printing and lasercutting all together in one place, which is a real luxury for us textile students. We’re all very excited to start making samples and get a lot of inspiration from the machines, library, samples and the exhibitions in the museum.
In addition we were given an introduction in soft circuits from Marina, which was so interesting and new to us all. In the picture you can see a soft circuit which blows a balloon when you sit on it.
