The Frog on Roller Skates

It started with a sketch of a frog on roller skates.

It is now an online shop full of handmade products, a podcast series, community-based events, and a long-term dream. It has taken me a while to find my pathway, dabbling in many crafts like music and prop making, but nothing has particularly stuck until I re-discovered rollerskating, or more specifically, park and ramp skating. I say re-rediscovered as I have been skating since I could walk. My dad was adamant that I would learn how to skate just like he did, and we went to the local rink every week together.

Skate culture and creatives have been intertwined for years, such as Tony Hawk’s “Birdhouse,” who not only create board designs but produce amazing photoshoots and build skateparks. Many people in the roller skate community are creatives too. From a tattoo artist to a video game designer, our hobby influences our art, and our art influences our hobby. My friend, my partner, and I decided to use our collaborative creative skills to open a small online shop called Kind of OK sk8. We wanted to represent more than just skating; we wanted to show people that being kind of okay at something is, well, okay. Running a community page, making products, and educating others about our sport has been a brilliant way to stay creative (and, dare I say, sane) during Lockdown. Every part of the creative process is down to us, even the stickers being cut out by hand with my trusty pair of scissors. We keep all of our processes handmade because it represents who we are—homemade, passionate, community-driven artists. Our shop has been a real project of love as all the money we make goes straight back into it or to fundraisers to help fellow skaters. Skateboarding culture historically is based around DIY ideologies, and we strive to extend this ethos to rollerskating. We now have big plans to create even more products such as t-shirts picked up in charity shops that we hand dye and cut into patterns and screen printing onto products using an embroidery hoop and an old pair of tights as the silkscreen. Other ideas include handmade drawstring bags to store protective gear in or small crochet animals to sit on your helmet - so you always have a friend at the skatepark.

My primary role is as the designer/illustrator and sticker maker; I dream up the fun characters and make our ideas come to life. My partner’s role is to make badges and create the budget, cutting out the badge printouts with scissors and using a badge press we found on eBay. My friend’s role is social media master, and she makes skate straps (a type of carrying strap). She does this during work with her sewing machine and her very own Fiskars scissors! She works as a costume maker, so Fiskars have seen her through school, university and now are by her side in her career. They also helped her make hospital scrubs and 100s of masks when Covid first hit. Collectively we have so many skills and are entirely putting them to use.

We have started a podcast series which we plan on growing over time to include guests from our community to speak about many different important subjects. In our first episode, we talked about the effects skating has on our mental health, how and where people can find support and how we can all be there for each other. In the following episodes, we will be covering being a beginner, what you need to start, and talking to other leaders in our community about their experiences at skateparks. A lot of our spare time is given to this project because of how much it means to us to make people happy and feel like they are part of a wider community. We create happiness through our hobbies for our chosen family. It has brought me life-changing joy, and I get to wake up and create things that I love, with people that I love, for a community I love.

Before I found my quad skating friends, I felt like I was drifting through life with no particular goal in sight. Now I have a clear vision for my future, a 5/10 year plan, something I’ve never had before. We have very early yet very exciting plans in the works for a quad skate utopia (Skatopia), an indoor/covered skatepark designed and made by roller skaters, for rollerskaters (and anyone else with wheels!). It is such a dream of ours to create this space and make it as welcoming as possible. This includes having an art workshop space, classes, and a shop space for small businesses, a space where artists and skaters can run workshops in their specific trades, with 90% of their profits going back to them. There are no covered skate spaces in South London, which severely affects us all throughout the winter/when it rains with many people traveling over an hour to get to covered spaces that are run purely for financial gain, with little regard for the community it attracts. There are also no skateparks anywhere that are made by quad skaters, meaning that most ramps and obstacles are usually too high for us, and it can be unsafe. Having an indoor community space would mean that we could run classes for children and adults, not only about how to skate but for confidence building and teamwork and independence – and most importantly, the value of being part of a community that cares. A sense of belonging and having your tribe is so important to us, even down to releasing a new line of stickers for Pride.

As “Skatopia” is such a big project, for now, we are starting on a smaller, DIY park. We aim to revamp our local park, as the equipment and ramps already there are hazardous and non-functional. It’s also right next to a pre-school, so the children's safety around these broken, rusted ramps is a big concern of ours. I had also noticed that that area was the only part of the park not being used. So I have personally been scouting this park and getting in touch with the council to make sure we have planning permission, and once that has been greenlit, we will be building our very own skate park! We want this to be a true community creation, harnessing people’s talents from the cementing of foundations up to social media marketing. So this is where the prize money will be used to make the first-ever quad-friendly, DIY skate park.

What started as a frog on roller skates has become so much more and will continue to build as it really is kind of ok to be kind of ok.