mattress bunny

posted by Robert

First, I must appologize to our millions of adoring fans for such a late post.  We had done some work on the project last week, but busy schedules and a bit of procrastination delayed finishing this post until now.

So last Tuesday was our big mattress bunny day.  We had plans of getting up really early and doing a lot of planning and cleaning of our found mattresses.  We had the whole day to dedicate to our project – sun up to sun down… Best laid plans, right?  Well It wasn’t until about 11:30am that we finally woke up.  We knew that there wouldn’t be another good day to work on this for a while so we had to make the most of it.  So, with half of the day gone, we went to work.

The best place to wash our mattresses was decided to be in the ally in front of the garage door.  all supplies were gathered and the garden hose was pulled over the fence.  We laid out some heavy plastic sheets on the asphalt to keep the mattresses a little bit cleaner and to prevent any unnecessary damage.  We whipped up a little cleaning cocktail and used a long handled brush that I picked up just for this job.

A few glugs of simple green and a dash of laundry detergent to make it sudsy.

Our super secret mattress cleaning formula seemed to work pretty well.  All the water that was being rinsed away had that mirky blueish-brown tint that you would expect, but aren’t really prepared for.  Hey, don’t forget, we said used mattresses not filthy mattresses.

Mmmmm... I love the smell of used mattresses in the morning.

Every so often a person or a car would pass by and we had to stop spaying.  The last thing we needed was to explain to an angry passerby that they are covered in used mattress slop because we are trying to make some art.

Yeah, we're washing mattress covers in our ally! What? You don't?

After their final rinse, we rolled up our mattresses to wring out as much excess water as possible.  It was reassuring seeing the colors coming out weren’t quite as strong as when we began.  The damp covers were then taken into the back yard where I had installed two clotheslines.  We hoped that they would dry soon before another crazy storm came by and soaked them again.

So up until this point we were using Lucy’s digital camera to document this part of the process.  Everything was going smoothly until I tried taking some pictures of the mattresses hanging from the clothesline.  the camera seemed to be having trouble focusing.  I snapped a few blurry pictures, shrugged (knowing that i can just finish the shots with my camera), and figured i just needed to give the camera a rest.  However, when I hit the power button I heard a very depressing little crunch and grinding sound.  Some part of the lens mechanism  was malfunctioning and not allowing it to focus or retract.  I took it in side to give it some TLC and eventually got it to work by “assisting” the lens into its closed/off position.  It works fine now.  I guess it just needed some encouragement. 

Lucy is usually the one who takes blurry pictures, but this one I will take credit for along with her camera, of course.

hanging out to dry

still just a little wet

The whole experience was quite a work-out.  Our hands and arms were soar after wrestling with soaked mattress covers.  In the end we worked up quite a sweat in Chicago’s humid afternoon sun trying to clean these covers, but it will make working with them later much more pleasant.  Lucy will be doing some full scale drawings soon which will turn into our templates.  It won’t be long until we’ll see just how big this bunny is going to be, so fasten your seatbelts everyone!