The new year 2023 kicked off with an order of one helmet and white earrings with two balls due to the interest inspired by the brilliance of the white color. So we needed to learn how to manufacture earrings with two balls and we managed to make them in different colors, including earrings with Ukraine colors.

Sisusavi is chosen as this year’s word. The small, thin-edged cups made from it can support at least more than 500 times the weight of their own mass. The thin-walled cups handmade with a mold from it are ready at once and varnished with food-safe varnish on the inside and environmentally friendly varnish on the outside. This way you can drink water or something else from them.

From the point of view of the circular economy, Sisusavi is the optimal material as it can always be reused. It is a completely natural substance and it is possible to mix it with soil. It consists of microcellulose, which is found in all plants.

Climate change is curbed in the form of dishes made from Sisusavi, because they do not need to be put in the oven like clay dishes, which are heated to a temperature of 1230 °C. The energy saving is enormous, which is also reflected in the economy.

The Belgian visual artist Hans Op de Beeck got tired of the perpetual whiteness of limestone and as we see in Amos Rex’s Silent Parade, that the new material and color tone have been carefully chosen. But it is sustainable to use Sisusave. It can easily be painted with a brush in different colors as desired. Sisusavi can also be colored through and, for example, shaped into different objects using a pottery wheel.

You can extract the new dye from the plants and use it to color the Sisu clay so that no dye is wasted. We have made beads with earthy colors extracted from plants. Each bead of the beads is handmade and twice varnished. The beads of the wooden beads are round, but they are boringly machine-made and their colors do not reproduce as well as in Sisucellu beads. We know a lot about pigments since we did a thesis dissertation on it.

We saw Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto’s work at Amos Rex’s underground exhibition and his works were scented with spice powders. That gave us the idea to make scented Christmas balls, but we made the scent without spice powders, because we only needed the scent. We are constantly developing something new.

Sisusavi is safe, because you can eat it and we do eat it often.

The circular economy is a lifelong process. We dismantled thousands of tea bags and got the filter cloths we need for making beads. We used the string from the tea bag as strings for the Christmas balls. The string is strong and, in the summer, we used it when we supported the tomato seedlings on a stick. As a gardener’s daughter, we know plants and now we fertilize plants with tea leaves that we get from bags. There is a cardboard holder at the end of the string of the tea bag, which we did not find a purpose at first. When we made the new painting, we made trees with leaves made from tea bag cardboard.

The feeling of significance increases when you make something concrete with your hands. People want to shape and make their own unique objects. At the Helsinki craft fair on March 4-5, we will sell Sisusavi so that people can try it.

I hope this year will be better and we will be able to do new things after the war in Ukraine and covid.