omg omg omg omg omg[/caption] In case you managed to miss it, we're TOTALLY EXCITED to be included in the (mega-juried and super elite) Unique LA 2014 Show. We've received our table assignment (when you get an assignment, you make an ass out of i gn ment... right? is that how it goes?) and our vendor info packet and OMG WE ARE TOTALLY GOING TO BE IN A SHOW. (please come to the show because we will love you forever if you do) In an effort to bring our super A game to this awesome event, we have started working on our table. We decided to go with a table instead of a booth because we're just a bunch of tiny little soaps and filling a 10x10 booth with soaps seems insane... but of course as soon as we started laying out our displays, we realized that what we really need is an entire interactive experience around our soaps, not just some table. ... so we got to work ... Russ, always the master of building things, has been working on a display fixture that will replace the standard tables that Unique provides (yeah, we cleared it with them first and it's ok). We want "our kind" of people to be comfortable in their native environment: a bar. Meanwhile, I'm hard at work doing what I do best: waving my arms like Kermit and shrieking all over the place:
"YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!!" - Kermit D. FrogOh, and working with lasers. Russ had the brilliant idea of creating little wood signs to describe each of our soaps, so I got to work designing some easy-to-read little placards, along with a couple other informational signs (like the fact that we're offering FREE SHIPPING to some people and what kind of payments we accept). Here are some photos of that progress... [caption id="attachment_7241" align="alignleft" width="420"]
I totally messed up the print area so you see that I have a row of half-signs on the right... lame.[/caption] First, of course, I made all the individual signs in Adobe Illustrator. I'm not very skilled at Adobe Illustrator, but totally honestly, these signs are about as basic as signs can get. It's text + a box. Whee. Then I went into Techshop, pulled up my handy illustrator files on Dropbox, and of course immediately realized that I didn't have the right fonts and consarn this stupid piece of... so I improvised and picked a reasonably similar font. It's not our font, but it's a font. I only had two pieces of wood, one of which already had a hole in it from my last experiments with the laser, so if I messed up these pieces, well, I was kind of fuxed. Soooooooo.... of course I messed them both up RIGHT AWAY. As you can see, I mis-aligned the print area on the lovely grid of signs you see to the left. Oops. So three of my signs got cut off and we nearly ran out of room on the bottom, but through some miracle of the lasergods, it barely fit. For the other sign (which I have a photo of but is really boring), I accidentally restarted laser etching about 1.5" lower on the board than the original etch, so you see the shadowy beginnings of another set of letters. I decided I didn't care. [caption id="attachment_7242" align="alignright" width="320"]
Tackett is actually capable of using sharp spinning things and sneezing at the same time. I have seen it with my own eyes.[/caption] I had just enough wood for the two signs that were cut off by my print area mishap and we salvaged the "why yes, it IS bacon soap" sign even though it doesn't have a fancy border anymore. My friend Tackett helped me cut the boards on the [insert name of saw thing], which you can see at the right. After the cut the boards into strips using the [saw], he went to [insert name of another type of saw thing] and cut them into little pleasingly shaped squares and rectangles. So I had a little pile of pleasingly shaped wooden signs that I decided I needed to show darn near everyone I saw for the remainder of the day. That's what pride in my work feels like. -- day change -- I asked Russ about how I could make the signs look all weathered and ancient like the rest of our stuff and he said I could literally just wet the signs down and lay them on our rooftop garden area for a few days. Even better if I used salt water. Which is how I ended up standing in the sun with a pot of salt water, "washing" some wood signs. Now that I'm writing it, it doesn't sound that absurd. At the time, I was like "what the hell am I doing? this is stupid. I should put this in a blog." Huh. I hate getting 70% through a blog and going "the punchline... it is not there." Ok, we move on. Anyways, here are photos of that: [caption id="attachment_7244" align="alignnone" width="500"]
"HAHA!" I thought, "This will make for a hysterical blog post!" ...And ... no.[/caption] [caption id="attachment_7240" align="alignnone" width="500"]
And here they all are, laying in the sun.Note my alarmingly dorky choice of footwear. Don't hate.[/caption] So now, we wait... Have you tried weathering wood? Does this work?
