Freya Hardy
Website:www.aquila.co.uk
Twitter:@aquilamag
Skills:I've loved making all kinds of things ever since I was in primary school. I have a textile degree, so I can sew and knit, print and dye. Making something from nothing is my speciality so I LOVE papier mache, and using cardboard and other recycled materials to conjure bonkers projects into reality. I really enjoy automata and can usually wrap my head around simple electronics.
I am the editor of AQUILA children's magazine, and I design a lot of our makes under the name Hi-lo Piccolo.
Recent project reports
Description This making process is turning out to be very fun and very hard. I had a go at making a conveyor belt but it turned out to be difficult without access to precision instruments, so I spoke to another tinkerer (my friend Darren Kent from Spitfire Architecture) and we agreed that instead of a conveyor belt, maybe I could make a track of some kind, and run the plants around it on some kind of carousel. I got a hat box and painted white for the base. On the hat box sits a ring-shaped track. The plant capsules will be attached to castors so they travel around the track. These capsules will be like horses on a carousel-like structure, which will be powered from the top (or possibly from the bottom, depending on what works best), by a battery-powered motor (designed for spinning garden ornaments). The whole thing will be covered with a massive plastic cloche (the type you can use to cover seedlings) and this will act like the dome of my rocket. I am hoping to make it look like a kind of space plantation inhabiting the upper storeys of a dome-shaped nose-cone, with little astronauts moving around underneath. Wish me luck!
