Martha Goes Green at Spark
Posted On: Friday, 16 July 2010, By: Stephanie Fawcett
Vegetarian food authors Rosie Percival and Ruth Friedlander will be among the presenters at Wintec’s international festival of media, arts and design - Spark.
The Melbourne-based pair teamed up with fellow Wintec graduate, photographer Jessica Symonds, to create cookbook Martha Goes Green with more than 50 of their favourite vegetarian recipes.
“It originally started out as ten recipes and it was going to be a Christmas gift for some friends and family but friends started giving us recipes and we put our favourites were in there and it just grew,” says Rosie.
Rosie studied Moving Image at Wintec and although she knew Ruth, who was studying Digital Media Design, their friendship developed after they both moved to Melbourne and discovered a shared love of vegetarian cooking.
“Rosie and I are both vegetarians and we wanted to organise our recipe collections in some way so we started working on that in the evenings,” says Ruth. “We really wanted to do something that was different to our day jobs and over time it evolved from that into Martha Goes Green.”
After a year of hard work selecting recipes, proofreading and making changes, the book was completed in March last year. The authors say the response has been incredible.
“At first we made 100 copies of the book, then 500 and now we’ve sold around 2000 copies,” says Rosie. “The response has been overwhelming really. It’s definitely been bigger than we ever expected.”
The book is printed on eco-friendly 100% recycled paper using vegetable-based inks and is packaged in an unbleached cotton bag.
“We wanted it to be packaged in an appealing and unique way,” says Rosie. “It definitely appeals to the gift market since it come in its own bag.”
At Spark, Rosie and Ruth will be part of panel discussion about their work. They will also lead a workshop on designing and creating publications.
“The main point is really about self-publishing or independent publishing versus commercial publishing,” says Rosie. “We’re going to talk about the process we went through in making Martha Goes Green from brainstorming all the way through to production.”
For their workshop, the pair wants participants to bring in their own favourite vegetarian recipes and they hope to use these to create a small publication for the event.
“We want to cover the whole process: brainstorming, layout and design, image making, marketing and the final stages of creating a publication,” says Ruth. “It’s a lot to fit into two hours but hopefully we can get it done.”
For more details on Martha Goes Green visit www.marthagoesgreen.com.au
Spark 2010 will feature presentations and workshops by artists from in the fields of film, fashion, photography, graphic design, music, painting and sculpture, performance art, TV media, animation, digital media and journalism. Visit www.spark.net.nz for more details.