Anyone who was at the big celebration on July 16th remembers the banner. Big, 1 by 4 meters, printed for the occasion: 25 years of EORC and 10 years of EAGLE, a huge strip of fabric. It did its job beautifully for the weeks before the event and especially for our two days of celebration. And then, like every event banner that has a date on it, it faced the classic afterlife question: storage box or bin?
Sonja, one of our PhD candidates, had a better idea. Instead of letting the banner gather dust in a corner somewhere, she took scissors and sewing machine to it and turned it into something you’d actually use every day, a Federmäppchen. A pencil case, sewn right out of the leftover print. So now instead of a rolled up banner sitting forgotten in a cupboard, we’ve got a handful of little cases carrying the same design, but doing something useful with it.
It’s a small project, honestly. But it’s also exactly the kind of thing that makes us happy: someone looking at what would otherwise be waste and asking, what else could this be? A banner is meant to be seen once and then packed away. A pencil case gets pulled out of a bag every single day. The 25 years and the 10 years don’t disappear, they just move from a wall at an event to a desk drawer, and that’s a nice trade.
We don’t know yet if this turns into a proper trend around here, sewing kits waiting for the next banner destined for the storage room, but we wouldn’t be surprised. Thanks, Sonja, for the reminder that a good print doesn’t have to end when the event does.
