This Saturday sees the inaugural Big Craft Giveway, an event funded by Creative Scotland, which encourages people to make, enjoy, and share craft objects. People will be able to find a variety of craft objects geocached or by "wild release" (surprise locations which will be announced via the event's Twitter account).
You can request them by post, too, or you can go down to the Royal Botanic Garden, which is one of the focal points of this the first annual event, where objects will be given out at the John Hope Gateway.
The craft objects at the Garden – a variety of decorative porcelain leaves - have been created over the last month by community groups working with ceramicist Lorna Fraser. Fraser, who also works part time in the herbarium at the Garden, created a new ceramic piece for the Give-Away, inspired by the fruit, a seed pod, of the Firmiana malayana tree which was brought back to the Garden from Malaysia by Tropical Forest Botanist Dr Peter Wilkie.
Wilkie had noticed the tree growing beside the herbarium where he worked for a year and was attracted by the bright orange pendulous flowers that covered the tree when the leaves fell off. Wilkie has a PhD on this family of trees and has collected pods from many of them. The pods are all slightly different in the curvature of the follicle, or the wing.
Fraser asked Wilkie to take one of her porcelain pods back to Malaysia, so completing the circle, after coming from that country to Scotland where she re-invented it as a piece of craft. Wilkie often works with people in the villages to help collect flowers and fruits and so during his next visit he will present it to the head man of the Kapala Desa village.
A number of the pod pieces created by Fraser will be given away as part of the Big Give-Away draw which people can enter online from 22 until 29 September.