Island 2000 Trust Blog

We’ve teamed up with Biffa and IW Festival and asked artists to decorate 10 bins that will be used as part of the festival this coming weekend. You can see eight of them here, we’ll post pictures of the ninth one, done by Michael Forrest, when we’ve delivered it to the site. The tenth one is the lovely Bee Bin that Aaron Fletcher did which will actually be used as donation bin over the weekend in the Gift to Nature tent. We don’t know where they’ll end up but hopefully they’ll help festival organisers in their efforts to make the festival a more green and litter free place. Dave Badman enlisted help from students at Chale Primary school to do his large bin. After an educational lesson all about waste, recycling and what to do with your rubbish the children designed their own cartoon story based on imaginary festival goer ‘Rocky’, as he says, “Don’t be a litterbug”!

One of the island’s rarest flowers is in safe hands. The rather beautiful Yarrow Broomrape (the purple flower in the picture) has acquired ‘AlarmGnome’ technology thanks to a grant from the SBPF (Spurious Botanical Projects Fund). If anyone should approach the plants AlarmGnome issues a first warning: ” Step Away from the Flowers”. If this doesn’t ward them off and they get still closer risking harm to the Broomrape, then AlarmGnome gives a second warning of “Back Off Now, or Suffer”. If this still doesn’t deter the deranged intruder then AlarmGnome becomes AttackGnome and you really don’t want to know what happens next.

Suffice to say, it’s not pretty.

We now have a lovely new logo for our Magpie project created by Ventnor based illustrator Nicola Winsland.

Magpie is all about reusing and recycling scrap or unwanted materials in a creative way. This can be for a whole range of purposes and often results in a bit of ‘upcycling’ (which is a rather clunky term meaning making things better than they were in the first place!).

Most recently we have been asked to create some signs for the Council’s Big Green Picnic this weekend. Fortunately we have some expert Magpie scroungers on our I2k staff and we’ve managed to get a hold of some old lollipop sticks that aren’t used for school crossings any more and we’ve made them into handy signs that will be used to help direct people to the site.

Look out for Dan’s giant ‘Welcome’ arches on the day too.

We’ve also been working with the IW Festival and Biffa to get artists to decorate some large bins that will be used during the festival. One of them will actually be a giant collection box for bee conservation work so we thought who better do design it than artist and actual Bee (albeit the musician kind) Aaron Fletcher.

Last but not least, The ‘Dolly Mixtures’ exhibition is now up in the Learning Curve Gallery at Quay Arts. The exhibition has been brought together in partnership with St Georges school to help raise awareness and funds for their Dragon project (www.stgeorgesdragon.com) which is a unique project to help increase opportunities for pupils at the school. Catalogues are on sale from Quay Arts or Island 2000 (hannah@island2000.org.uk or 298098 ext 102) for £5 and they include a raffle ticket for a draw on Thurs 29th May where all of the dolls in the exhibition will be raffled off. There’s some real gems in there so make sure you buy your ticket in time.

On Monday, Island 2000’s bio-tech department reported the results of the latest stage of its GM trials. A joint investigation with Yarmouth Harbour Commission is seeking to establish whether splicing DNA extracted from the gribble (Limnoria lignorum) into the human genome can impart the ability to breathe under water.

Samantha Buck, who has been running the trial said “There’s nothing unusual about breathing in an aquatic environment. Lots of species do it. We just need to make some minor adjustments to the way our bodies function. If we can crack this one, it could provide a significant boost to the Island’s tourist industry and would be the perfect accompaniment to the launch of our Isle of Wight snorkelling guide. Although results up to now have been disappointing, we must remember that this study was very small and we cannot be sure that the results are statistically significant.”

The trial recently ran into controversy when three volunteers were admitted to St Mary’s A&E suffering from water on the lung and two others developed an uncharachteristic urge to gnaw wooden objects.

As part of Sandown Primary’s grounds development project Dan was commissioned to make a lovely wooden xylophone fence. The children love it and it’s a special musical addition to the rest of the creative outdoor classroom at the school.

Hmmm… but how would one transport a 3m wooden xylophone from our offices in East Cowes to Sandown I hear you ask…..?

At night, by bicycle of course.

No, you weren’t and yes, it did. And to make sure we had photographic proof of the miracle of the morning of Sunday April 6th we created this little reminder from the white stuff itself:

It’s wonderful to rummage around in the huge nest of materials that the Magpie scheme is gathering and pull out useful bits for different projects. The Vestas plywood has been specially versatile and has been put to some unlikely uses…

Haute couture

Wooden map for story-telling

Plywood nameplate

Sustainable transport

Inspired by the Footprint Trust’s ground-breaking scheme in which enthusiastic youngsters adopt the gardens of more elderly folk for the purpose of growing food, Simon proposed to make some changes to Dan’s garden. The pictures below show a team of Island 2000 volunteers digging over the ground, having dragged off the old anti-weed matting.

Next leaves and leaf-mould were collected from outside the Island 2000 workshop to dig into the clay-laden soil. This nutritious material was transported up the hill by environmentally friendly means…

Sam’s mum sent seeds of many exotic varieties, but Simon thought it was safest to start with something simple -

We’ll keep you posted on any exciting developments down on the farm.

Many companies spend vast amounts on viral marketing campaigns. We appear to have stumbled on one by accident. Well, part by accident, then we mercilessly exploited it. Very Island 2000!

Ian decided to post a picture to his personal Flickr site of the doors to our lock up at The Gatehouse, our old offices. It managed to creep out onto Reddit then hit the front page of BoingBoing and turned up on Digg too. At this point I must admit to only having a passing familiarity with these sites (shame on me, what kind of nerd am I?) but as the hit count at Flickr mounted I realised we needed to link Ian’s pic to the Island 2000 site. Result? Half a months worth of site visits in less than 2 days! (and our site is fairly well used anyway)

Well, weird is always popular on the internet, and we have all flavours on offer here. So, if you have arrived via Ian’s flickr posts, welcome. There is much more madness to behold, please browse the blog, <plug> and don’t forget, all this madness comes from positive charitable endeavour, so if you want to say thanks, why not joing our Friends scheme? </ plug> (Just trying to demonstrate I really am a nerd, even if I don’t do digg, read reddit or brave boingboing.) If you didn’t understand the < > bit, then go and learn html.