Making The Rifle

My Plan, using maths and ratio to work out dimensions

To start with I had to work out the actual size of the rifle and break that down in to part, as I wanted this to be accurate in dimension so the impact that the change of material and use would be more prominent. This wasn’t easy as I only had the full length and the barrel length of the gun, not width, magazine size and all the other bits. So to get around this I found a good quality image of the gun in full and measured the image and using some maths worked out the scale ratio of the image and measured to other sections to get the dimensions to work from. This may not have been hugely accurate but it gave a good indication of the size sections needed to be.

Basic Shape of the rifle

So I then began making it using plastic pipes for the barrel and chicken wire, bubblewrap and parcel tape for the rest of it. This work well as the materials were easy to manipulate in to shape and held their form to give a solid structure.

Once I had the shape I began to fabricate the gun using a floral skirt from a charity shop (re-using it in the spirit of make do and mend), I used a hot glue gun and hand sewing to hold this in place whilst I added the rest of the materials, using the same methods. I used knitting to define the wooden areas of the original gun and the floral material was used in the area’s with more metal. Then using small pieces of crochet I created the trigger and define the rest of the knitted sections. I used ribbon around the top of the barrel to highlight that area.

This skirt was from a charity shop

Knitting and Crochet

Crochet detail on the side

Corset-Like detail at the bottom

What I noticed after creating this was that the section where the pipe and the chicken wire met was slightly flimsy because they were not held tighter by anything more than pressure. To have made this stronger I could have glued them together, however, the nature of the project (conflicting materials and products) actually means that in a way it makes more sense for it to be softer and less rigid. In reality a floppy gun is useless, but then again it would be useless to be made from knitting and a skirt. The point is that its warped beyond the point of it’s intended purpose (which typically a masculine one) so you question what it really is and can appreciate it more as a piece of design, rather that a war tool. I personally found inspiration form the hippies of the 60’s at this point with sticking flowers in the end of a gun, making me think that this could be used as a type of vase or flower pot (a much more feminine use). 

Vase?

Video of Process: