wool + whale = pie!

The final part of one of my main study projects was to create packaging for a 'revolutionary food product'. I was asked to combine the material and food source from previous parts one and two of the project. My material was wool and my food source was whale. At first I was a bit clueless as to how I could combine these two extremely different items to make a brand new, exciting product. Some people in the group had materials such as plastic or cardboard which made the packaging stage a little easier so I was a little gutted at having wool initially as it is not exactly a diverse, modern material - in my mind its a material generally associated with tradition rather that revolution.

Although after brainstorming for a while I realised I could use wool to my advantage. When researching wool in the first part of the project as well as looking into its properties and functions I looked at sayings and phrases that are associated with the word wool. The most interesting one I came across was 'to pull the wool over someone's eyes' which most people know is a saying to mean to decieve or conceal the truth from someone. I thought about how some food products can have hidden ingredients or how the ingredients of a product can sometimes be misleading or slightly concealed. I thought this would be an interesting thing to look into and I began looking at food in the war time and how they put hidden ingredients into meat products as there was a lack of food, they put horrible things into meat products to bulk them out. I even discovered that they used whale meat in the war as 'one whale alone would provide alot of whale steaks'(http://www.bbc.co.uk/ww2peopleswar/stories/92/a1110592.shtml) I thought that using whale meat as a hidden ingredient would be an interesting route to take, although not particularly revolutionary, I thought it would be a good starting point. I then had to think about how I could put a modern twist on it, I began looking at pork products as pork was one of the main meat products used in the war and also some whale meat is said to taste like pork.

I looked into pork pies as they are small and easy to work with and seem to carry a homely,almost honest kind of feel so I decided to substitute the pork in the pies for whale meat - as an unknown ingredient. I wasn't sure if using wool just in a saying sense was enough, so I looked at how I could use it to package my food product and I came up with the idea of making a pie warmer! I decided to knit a wool cosy that can keep pie's warm while you're on the go, wool after all is a naturally very insulating material so it is perfectly fit for purpose!


I called my pie product 'porkies' as it suggests the inclusion of pork but also means lie's :) I was quite pleased with how my project turned out!


Here is a selection of pages from the 3 sketchbooks I used for the project.. :)