Week 2 – JitterKat

I visited the Exploratorium in San Francisco in October.   It is a hands-on kid’s museum that has lots of interactive exhibits about sound, light, motion, sense, etc.   I founds some wind-up toys in the gift store by Kikkerland, a company from the Netherlands, that were simple, elegant, and fun.  You can easily see the mechanisms that power movement.  These machines inspired my interest in making wind-up toys.  I based this next design on “Critter”, a creation that uses a counterweight to make movement jittery and the toy sort of scuttles around.

I found a lot of parts at the East Bay Depot for Creative Reuse.  It is an organization that collects and sells used/excess/discarded arts and crafts materials, fabric, paper goods, and lots of random materials in bulk.

In this piece, I used some green rubber coated wire, a kitty head, gears from a play-skool car, small arms with claws from an insect, and a gear box with counterweight from a green sea monster.  I also used the back fin from the sea creature to make the kitty mohawk.  I originally cut the mouth out of the kitty because I wanted the arms to emerge as fangs, but I liked the design where it’s head spins around as the gear box unwinds.  I think it still looks pretty nice without a mouth.

Watch the video of JitterKat in action!