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Article by Alan Ayre

me2.jpg - 21Kb Do you want to escape the rat race? Carlisle teacher Rob Ives has cleverly invented several surreal options to do just that -boarding a flying fish and travelling to the moon, 'surfing the web' with a spider and heading off into oblivion or even Mexican waving with deranged chickens.
At first glance, Rob, who is 35 and married with a four-year-old daughter, looks like your archetypal primary school teacher; bespectacled, sensible, nothing out of the ordinary, really. But press the right buttons and he enthuses madly about hopping sheep and pigs on the wing. There is more than a touch of Victorian nonsense writer Edward Lear and 70's comic madmen Monty Python about Rob Ives' sense of humour and his brilliant, wacky cardboard kits. "I'd describe my humour as quirky," he says. "It's a bit surreal and I've got loads of ideas for future models. My latest is called 'Leisurely Lunch' and it features a tortoise coming out of its shell and munching at a lettuce leaf." Worth waiting for.
A Yorkshire childhood spent taking clocks, watches and cameras apart and looking at all the pieces set Rob on the road to hispresent obsession. "When I got older I learned to put them back together again!" helaughs. He is largely self-taught. Ideas for new models come into his head at any time of the day, on his bike, in the garden, washing the dishes. "I love the creative side of all this. Having designed a model the danger is not having the discipline to put in the effort to make the actual kit."
Rob works at Carlisle's Robert Ferguson Junior Primary School and has just gone part-time to concentrate on marketing his models.
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shs.jpg - 11Kb He trained as a maths and science teacher at Ambleside's Charlotte Mason College in the mid-80s after abandoning a design course at Teesside Polytechnic. "They'd ask you to make a toaster, it didn't matter how it worked, as long as it was a box with two holes in the top," he says critically. Now, he commutes to work, from his home at Broughton near Cockermouth. Rob's first book of cut-out-and-put- together kits was published in 1995. It fea- tured different types of locks, appeared in the London National Science Museum, Hamley's toy shop, Cabaret Mechanical Theatre and sold about 5,000 copies nation- wide. His latest book, entitled 'Hopping Sheep,' is due out any day and features four of his crazy creature creations - a flying fish,
a pecking hen, hopping sheep and a paper fool. You bring them to life by cutting out their component parts, sticking them together and winding a handle that turns gears. Childishly simple but wonderfully entertaining. As any author or writer knows, getting book publishers to produce your work rarely makes you rich, and Rob is no exception. He receives only a fraction of profits from his books that retail at around the £5 mark. He plans to branch out on his own and has his own web site on the Internet - hence his spi- der 'surfing the web.' Orders have already come in over the wires from Paris and America. So what is Rob's big dream? To find a manufacturer who will mass produce his designs, make him rich and allow him to retire? His face lights up at the notion. "I want to escape the rat race, to make a living from my mod- els," he says. My favourite design, a hand with tapping fingers called 'The Impatient Outpatient' sums up designer Rob Ives' life at the moment; bid- ing his time, waiting for the big break that could make his toys as familiar to the kids of 90s as Ker Plunk and Mousetrap were to the kids of the 70s. I reckon he won't have that long to wait...

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