Giveaway #1

Weekend Giveaway

Over the next few weeks I'm going to be giving away a few items. These items were destined for my etsy shop but because of some small flaw or imperfection I just don't feel good about selling them. There is nothing structurally wrong with these pieces, there not going to fall apart or anything. They just don't pass my quality control to be sold. So, instead of just keeping them in a drawer somewhere I'm going to give them away. The way I'm going to do it is pretty simple, just leave a comment in this post and you'll be entered to win it. This giveaway will also be sponsored on a few other blogs. My Sisters blog, and Moorea's blog. Feel free to check out their blogs and also have a chance to enter two more times to win by leaving a comment on their blog. You have through Sunday to enter. All the names will be collected and a winner will be chosen randomly and announced Monday morning. Good luck.

Here is the item I'm giving away in this weeks giveaway.

Spindle Motor Pendant.

This pendant is a reclaimed spindle motor from an old hard drive. It has been set inside polyester resin and polished smooth. The sides have been rounded giving a lens effect. Its roughly 1.25 inches wide by 1.5 inches tall and .5 inches thick. It hangs from a 20 inch waxed cotton cord and clasps with a hand made sterling s-hook.

The flaw. The copper tube from which the piece hangs from shifted while the resin was being poured and is crooked.

Interested in acquiring this piece? Leave a comment for a chance to win.

If you don't end up winning go to my etsy shop where I have another piece similar to this one for sale.

Watch This

SEA to NYC

Here is the cross country time lapse I took back in May.

 We were tasked to deliver a sculpture we helped create for John Grade. It needed to be driven from Seattle to New York. The piece was finished the morning of May 5th, packed into the truck, then we headed off. We had two half days and three solid days of driving. Listened to a lot of music and a lot of Sterolab. We encountered pretty much all weather you could think of. Each night we found the cheapest motels to crash at and one night to save money we decided to sleep in the truck in a Walmart parking lot.

In all there were 27,373 pictures taken to make up this time lapse. A canon t1i mounted on the dash with a Ti-82 calculator acting as a intervalometer to take a picture every 7 seconds. The stills were either taken with another Canon T1i or a Canon Ae-1.

The song is Go Do by Jónsi.

What I Was Up To

Alderbrook Station

This weekend I went down to Astoria to help with an instillation at Alderbrook Station. I mostly helped finish up the piece then became a parking attendant/bartender. Not exactly the kind of work I like doing. Usually at art openings I like to stand back in the shadows and actually look at and enjoy the work. Anyways, it was good to get a little bit of work, even though it was three hours away, and five hours back today.

Alderbrook Station is an old gillnet shed on the Columbia River. Its one of the few surviving and has been restored and maintained to be used for art instillation, studio space, and other various things. You can see their facebook page here.

Here are some pictures that I took while I was down there.

What I'm Up To

Wood Paint Buy?

(would it?)

So I'm making a bar top for this guy that's been shaking up with my sister. I'm using scrap pieces from Andy's guitar shop which I went down to pick up this morning. I'm going to make it out of a combination of alder and ash, butcher block style ranging in thickness of 2 to 4 inches.

Here are the rough pieces.

And here are the remains of the day.

More pictures of this project to come.

Another project I've been working on is painting Daniels truck. Here is a before.

And after a few cans of spray paint.

My etsy relaunch is still coming along but it's been put on hold until next week when I have more time. I'm gong down to Astoria this weekend to do some work for friends of Annie and Daniel. I should get back on Sunday and plan on posting more items on Monday and also plan on a few jewelry giveaways in the next few weeks. I'm also going to finish the cross country time lapse here in the next few days now that I finally got some pictures from Moorea. A lot going on right now.

Another thing, I'm selling this Jewelry display cabinet for Annie and Daniel. They had it for a show and it's just been collecting dust in the shop.

I'll give you people(or person) reading out there first dibs before I post it on craigslist. Price is negotiable, will consider interesting trades, or food, spicy ok.

Video

Windfall

Here is a video I put together of the project I helped install at the Seattle Center.

You can see the progression of this project in pictures in this slide show which progresses from the install back to the raw bells.

New Stuff

Pictures

I've been taking new pictures of all my old and new items. Its seems fairly simple but it ends up taking a long time.

Here are some of the pictures. I tried to capture them as to work best on etsy.

Here are some pictures of my ghetto photo studio I have set up.

I just have three light sources diffused with white paper. It works fairly well, its easy to set up. I found the lights at a thrift store. The paper on the two side lamps is June from my big calendar ripped in half and taped into a cylinder, it works really well because it's such cheap thin paper. Patent pending.

The top lamp is also diffused with a piece of paper, this time an old credit card statement, again really cheap thin paper.

No fires, yet. In all I think this set up cost me $10.

Etsy

Keywords

I use Google Analytics to keep track of my etsy shop and I've posted before on how I get some strange results when it comes to keywords that bring people to my items. Now I wish I could see just which items people are looking at when some of these search terms bring them to my site. I have no idea how these terms bring people to my shop. There are a lot of strange ones but these are my favorite ten, so far, in no particular order.

1. what is a headband with feathers called
2. vintage salt and pepper ducks
3. keepsake baby shower cake toppers pregnant lady 
4. fleece cat hat pattern
5. cat boutique
6. hanging kitchen towels'
7. hang low nipring
8. whole body skincare
9. womens upcycled recycled clothing
10. vintage nose studs screws

I'm at a loss for words.