Hurray for Viva Terra!

I received the spring Viva Terra catalog in the mail last weekend, and it is gorgeous! Above is a screenshot from their online catalog, and you can view this listing here.

I was also excited to see selected items from the catalog, including my bowls, reviewed by Apartment Therapy.

I spoke with the catalog buyer today and she told me that they are seeing really strong sales already in the first week that the catalog has been out (especially for the green bowls), and she may be calling me on Monday to place another order! Yippee!

The Story of 100 Mandala Record Bowls

Today is the day, I am finally going to ship out my big wholesale order of 100 Mandala Record Bowls for Viva Terra. I worked on this order during September, October, and November, finished it on Thanksgiving Day, and now I can finally ship it (they wanted me to wait until after Christmas). After reading the vendor guidelines about 5o times, I am pretty sure I have done everything right with the packing list, box labels, etc., so all I need to do is get it dropped off and I can breathe a big sigh of relief to have it off my hands, allowing me to look ahead to my new spring line.

I have posted some of these pictures in previous blog entires, but I wanted to consolidate the entire process into one story, so here you go, this is how I did it.

I started out with lots and lots of vinyl records. I got a 4' x 8' board at the Home Depot and had them cut it in half to make two manageable 4' x 4' boards. I pounded nails into the board every 12" so that I could hang 16 records on each one. (Here's Julius.)

Then I sprayed the records, 32 at a time, with white primer.

I allowed the primer to dry.

I carefully sealed up the spindle holes of each record, and allowed that to dry.

Here is what a stack of 100 primed, sealed records looked like:

The next step was to paint the base coats. 50 of them were to be green, and 50 of them cream-colored. Each one took two coats of the base color, which meant a lot of drying in between times.

My best friend Melodie helped with the base-coat painting. Thanks, Melle!

Soon the disks were taking over the house. I didn't want to stack them, so it was a bit crazy for a while...

...until I went to Goodwill and got several of these vertical files, which saved the day.

So yeah, the next step (and the most time consuming!) was the painting of the mandala designs onto the record. That's a lot of the same mandala, over and over again. Each one was painted freehand, and a lot of them required two coats, too.

Once I finished the 50 green records, the next step was to form them into bowls, and each one was individually heated and sculpted by hand to make 50 groovy bowls.

The next step was to paint my signature on the bottom of each bowl. I used white and black paint to paint a psychedelic eyeball over each spindle hole, and to paint the words Eye Pop Art somwhere on the record label.

After that dried, I coated the bottoms of the bowls with a protective semi-gloss finish and allowed that to dry.

Then I flipped 'em and proceeded to do the same thing to the tops of the bowls.

Here are the 50 finished bowls, peeking out of their boxes.

Once the 50 greens were out of the way, I had to repeat the whole deal all over again, painting the same mandala design 50 times in green on the cream-colored records.

These also were heated, shaped, etc...

Vanna!

...and the bottoms were done...

...and the tops were done...

...and they were all wrapped in tissue paper and put to bed for a month.

These are the temporary boxes that the order has been living in for the last month. I have since repacked them uniformly into four large boxes, each containing 25 bowls.

Today the 100 bowls will go on a journey, and some time very soon they will make their appearance in the Spring 2009 catalog by Viva Terra! I can't wait to get a copy.

The Green Room

Yikes! My room has been taken over by green disks!


Okay, that's 50 of each color (green and cream) with the backgrounds done. Today I will begin painting the designs!

100 records ready to go

I'm pleased to announce that I now have 100+ records primed, prepped, and ready to paint for my big order. It took me one week to get to this point. Now it is time to start painting them!

It's time to prime, prime, prime my records

As I dorkily sang in my "That's Clever!" episode on HGTV, "It's time to prime, prime, prime my records!" (My kids will never let me live that down.)

I have been spending every spare minute prepping records for my big catalog order (100 Mandala Record Bowls) for Viva Terra.

Chuck helped me set up a priming station under my canopy in the backyard, which worked pretty well until the wind blew everything over (while the paint was still wet). At the same time I was dealing with this crisis, our washing machine was flooding our basement! So we were both running around like crazy trying to clean things up and prevent too much disaster.

I ended up moving everything inside and downstairs once the basement was dry. Now the small area at the foot of the stairs is draped with tarps and dropcloths, which Chuck loves. He says it's "totally E.T." He enjoys having to go through lots of plastic curtains in order to get into his band room, where he has been playing lots of guitar lately. By the way, we are playing a show tonight at the Ash Street. Here is a flyer:I still have a couple more batches of records to prime. In the meantime I have been working on plugging the spindle holes of the primed records, which is the last step before I actually start painting them. I have about 64 done so far, here's what they look like in the drying stage:

New cuffs and other news

I made a few new cuffs this week and listed them in my shop. Above is "Butterfly Love."

Here is "Autumn Leaf":

And this one is called "Groovy Flowers":
In other news, the Foster Art Walk happened on Saturday, and some vendors set up in the plaza outside of the Trillium Artisans store. Here are some photos - this is Jaynette and her daughter, from Bluejaye Crafts:

Here is Elissa from Elissa Tree Designs (really wonderful beadwork!):


And back in the corner there we had Mary from Lolly-tots and Autumn from Autumn Comfort Candles.
I did not set up a booth, instead I headed over to Gilly's and had Emie cut all my hair off!
Emie is also a fashion designer and she is submitting her items to Trillium for product review. Check out her website: www.beautymarkdesigns.net.

That night Chuck played his (supposedly) last show as the temp drummer for Advisory. It was a benefit show for the Rose City Rollers. Also, Andrew was in town for his 21st birthday! Yes, I have a 21 year old stepson. NO, I am not old enough to be his mother!

I'm also happy to announce that I received an official purchase order from Viva Terra, for 100 of my Mandala Record Bowls for their spring catalog. So I am pretty much going to be working on that for the next couple of months! I've applied for the Crafty Wonderland Super Collosal, but that will probably be the only craft show I do (oh, and maybe the da Vinci Arts Fair too, gotta support my kid's school!).

Okay, time for me to get to work!

Wrapping up the summer

Well, my silly kids are back to school and how weird it is to have a daughter in high school! Julius is now in 7th grade and I'm pretty excited about the awesome visual arts classes he is taking at his arts-magnet middle school. But we're all still pretty bummed that summer is over already.

We had a fairly quiet, uneventful Labor Day weekend. My parents bought new mattresses for our kids, and that spawned a big day of cleaning and rearranging our entire house.

Chuck played a show with Advisory. It was at Audio Cinema during their annual art collective show. I had never been there before, and while it seemed pretty cool, I can see why it would not be the best venue for a craft show. But it was fine for a rock show, art show, and fashion show! Here are some of the tattooed bathing beauties who pranced around in fancy hipster swimsuits, parasols, and go-go boots:

The art was great, and what better place to pose than in front of the Habermans (I swear that guy is everywhere) - here's Justin and Chuck, aren't they sweet?
They played up in the balcony - can you see them up there?
Here's a view from above, before I got kicked out of the balcony:
In other news, I am waiting to receive the order from Viva Terra. They liked the Muted Green bowl (this one):

...but they also requested to see it with the colors in reverse, so I sent them this one:
I have joined PDX Indie, the new co-op that spun out of the PDX Etsy team - check out the new website, it's quite nice: www.pdxindie.com. I am also in the process of joining the new Portland Craft Mafia.

I'm trying to decide whether to apply for the big Crafty Wonderland holiday show. It's at the Convention Center this year - wow! If I do, it will probably be the only holiday show I do this year - well, I might do more, I just don't know. I am trying to be conservative, knowing that I am most likely going to be getting a big wholesale order which will be due in December.

It would be a dream to not have the stress of doing one or two shows every weekend throughout November and December - I can just stay home, work on my green-and-cream bowls, and maybe even make cookies! It would be great, BUT I also worry about all the missed sales and opportunities that could come from NOT doing all the shows...oh well, we'll see what happens if and when I get the order, right?

I love my friends. Here's a picture of Suzie, me, and Melle from the last Dartgun show:

And finally, here's what I'll be doing next week (teaching another art camp at Buckman for the DIY Lounge):
Eye Pop Art has recently been featured on Eco Craftiness, Simply Sentimental, KB Squared, Etsy Trashion, Outsapop, The Coma Girl, and Packrat Mag's "Catch the Green Fever" issue.

...and that's the news! See you next time!