Tag Archives: Sisusavi

A light-weighted cup made of Sisusavi full of tea

Sisusavi is a light material

Today we listened to the European Union’s research priorities and proposals from different countries. Germany and Sweden in particular highlight an important need for the future: lightweight materials. Light materials reduce energy consumption, for example in transportation. Sisusavi® can be used to make dishes so light that a gentle breeze will carry them along.

Greetings from Helsinki handicraft fair, where we presented Sisusavi® for the first time. Many interesting contacts were made there. The fair gave ideas into the development of Greenbutton’s products.

Sisus clay is suitable for small children, as it is easy to shape and does not harm if eaten. Depending on their age, the child can modify the colorless Sisusavi® and then dry it in room air. Dry parts can be glued together with Erikeeper and painted with watercolors or whatever colors small children use.

Indoor clay is suitable for adults and especially for those who know clay. At the fair, we heard how attached they were to clay. You can make a clay pot light when you mix paper in, and the paper burns off in the oven. You can also make the interior clay lighter, if you can leave air pockets inside the material.

A cup made of Sisusavi® does not break when dropped on the floor. However, we did not drop cups on the floor at the fair. We heard from somewhere in the distance that something had broken. The sound of the chips can be heard even further away, so breaking the glass cannot be done in secret.

A cup made of Sisusavi® either with a mold or a pottery wheel does not need an oven but dries at room temperature. If you build your work from several parts, the small pieces dry faster. Wood glue Erikeeper is very suitable for wet or dry gluing to Sisusavi®. We have tried coloring a dry object with watercolors, acrylic colors, liquid markers, oil colors and watercolor colors.

The object can be varnished with wood varnish and probably also with nail varnish, as one fair guest suggested.

One visitor to the fair thought that Sisusavi® does not have a completely flat surface. Yes, you can, as you can see in the pictures. The cellulose in the inner clay is a thousand or a hundred thousand times smaller than the millimeter-sized particles. In that respect, it is easy to believe that it will be even. 

When an adult does very precise work on Sisusavi®, it’s worth practicing and finding a new route to success. Sisusavi® is a completely new material and nobody knows much about it yet, what it can do.

At the fair many picked up the dishes and were amazed at their lightness. When the cups were in the hands of many people, we thought to wash them properly. So, we washed them with Fairy and rinsed well afterwards. We put the cups to dry in the dish drying cabinet.

The cups dried quickly, and we thought of drinking tea from them. It is good to drink hot tea from these cups because the material insulates heat transfer. The cup does not feel too hot in the hand.

The cups made of Sisusavi® are really light and sturdy. The cup can carry a large load. We compared Arabia’s Arctica coffee cup with one made from Sisusavi®, and the cup made from Sisusavi® was 72% lighter. Arctica weighed 113 grams and the cup made of Sisusavi® weighed 31 grams. Lightweight materials are the materials of the future.

The trend is towards light materials. Around the world, large sums of money are invested in the research of lightweight materials.

Sisusavi® already exists, although lightness is only now being announced more.

The year of Sisusavi begins

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.