Making stuff

Here are some recent shots of Eye Pop Art works in progress.
And here are some pictures of some recently completed bowls that I made for a shop called Le Cadeau in Memphis, TN.


My work is also now available at Oop! in Providence, RI, and Sea-n-Green in New Jersey, and I have a second wholesale order in hand for BuyGreen.com, which will be keeping me busy for the next couple of weeks. Here's a picture of the Oop! gallery in Providence (from their website) - it looks so cool, I am stoked that my Mandala Suncatchers are being carried there. Speaking of suncatchers - I sold a bunch of them to Angela from summerscreations, and she made them into a nifty mobile to add some color to her new studio.

Angela said, "My husband just finished fixing up a beautiful new studio for me and it's in desperate need of color. Your suncatchers are beautiful and exactly what I needed! They look absolutely beautiful! I took off the suction cups and tied each with fishing line of different lengths. I screwed some cup hooks into the ceiling in a triangle shape and hung them up. They're so pretty spinning around lazily up there; I'm going to get a neck ache because I can't stop looking at them!"

Here's a picture that she sent me:


And one more thing: today is National Etsy Day! We're all supposed to shout "Etsy" from the rooftops. If you don't have an Etsy account (you can register as a buyer-only), sign up today and be sure to mention my Etsy username in the Referrer Username box at sign up! (It's EyePopArt.) Thanks and have a great day!

Pictures from the Portland Gift Show

Here are some photos of our Trillium Artisans booth at the Portland Gift and Accessories Show, which took place this last Saturday - Tuesday at the Oregon Convention Center.



That's Lacey and Kori, above. Here are Lacey's cute wallets made from vintage neckties:

Here's Kori with her awesome reversible hats:

We also had etched glasswares from Bread and Badger, book journals from Ex Libris Anonymous (very popular!) and recycled auto-parts jewelry from Emily Baker.

Ah, four days under the fluorescent lights! It was a great experience for all of us, and good connections were made. Now there is talk of a Trillium booth at the upcoming Seattle Gift Show - we'll see!

A sneak peek at Spring

Happy new year! It's been a while since I've posted here, mainly because I've been working my butt off getting ready to exhibit at the Portland Gift and Accessories Show, which kicks off tomorrow morning at 9 am at the Oregon Convention Center and ends on Tuesday afternoon. It's my first wholesale show and although it has been borderline-nightmarishly stressful trying to pull it off, I am super excited about it and hope to get lots of orders to keep me busy for a while.

I've designed a new line for spring and here are some photos of the new items, including clocks, bowls, mirrors, and cuffs. I based the colors on the Pantone Spring 2009 Color Report. The photos don't look as good as I'd like, mostly because I have been very short on time and haven't been able to do the usual hours and hours of editing. They look good enough on my new line sheets (I hope!).

I am sharing a Trillium Artisans booth with five other artists - Amanda from Bread and Badger, Jacob from Ex Libris Anonymous, Kori from Flipside Hats, Lacey from and Sometimes Y, and Emily from Sword + Fern.

In other news, Dartgun & The Vignettes are playing a big show tonight at Kelly's Olympian at 426 SW Washington in downtown Portland. Show starts at 10. Come check us out!

I'm wildly excited about a potential opportunity to have one of my Feng Shui Mirrors (this one) featured in a segment on Good Morning America next Friday! The wonderful folks at WorldofGood.com requested a couple of items from Trillium (including my mirror!) which will possibly be included in a segment around "greening" the Obama girls' bedrooms! How cool would that be? There's no guarantee that they'll use it, but there is HOPE! Keep your fingers crossed for me, please.

I celebrated my 35th birthday on Monday (yep, I'm old) and was thrilled to find my Goth Clock in Vampire Red and Black feautured in the Etsy Finds. What a great birthday present.

I will be updating this blog this weekend with pictures from the trade show - see you soon!

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.