Tacoma Postcards

I went to a fun party this month called Tacoma Postcards.  It was a community building party for the Tacoma Historical society with a arty twist.

Everyone was encouraged to make at least one postcard representing one of their favorite (or least favorite) buildings in Tacoma. 

Now, I think of myself as an arty person that is interested in architecture, but when it came down to making my own, I was a little stumped where to start.

Building a Boat Sculpture: Part 1

 The great thing about being at artist in Tacoma is that a lot of community art events exist here.  I've been asked, along with 9 other artists, to create a boat sculpture for the Maritime Festival in September.  It seems a long ways off but I want to make a fun, unique sculpture and that take time so I have started my sketches and prototypes now. 

I started by researching different boat types and making a lot of sketches.

And Now for a Total Geek Out

 My husband and I were on our way to meet some friends at a local wine bar and found ourselves to be a bit early and so stopped into what I thought was a comic book store next door. 

It was a comic book store, but also a total geek out vintage shop full of toys, games, and other ephemera from popular science fiction and fantasy.   Each area of the shop was given to a different show or movie, like Star Trek, X-Men, or Star Wars. 

When I saw this Darth Vader, I knew I had to have it.  I had actually owned one of these when I was about 7 or 8 and foolishly sold it at a garage sale when I had moved on to other hobbies, like collecting model horses.   But what is it?

Is Your Home in Need of an Energy Audit?

 If you own your own house and you have drafts that you can feel or high energy bills or are unsure whether your walls are insulated or not, it might be worth it for you to get a home energy audit. 

A home energy audit is a process in which your house is assessed on its energy uses versus the overall efficiency of your house with energy conservation as the final goal.  We've only been in our house a little over two years and now know enough about our energy uses (extreme waste because of baseboard heaters) that we decided to bring in some professional help to guide us in steps to make our house as efficient as possible.   It's not free where I live, but it is heavily subsidized to encourage you to take part.

Don't Quit

 Dragon Boating. It’s a thing. A thing I’ve been rather obsessed with for almost a year now. How did I get involved in this thing you ask? Well, it started with a monkey; a four foot paper mache monkey to be precise. 

Play Date with Metal

I had a zillion things I was supposed to do last weekend but I was reckless and blew them all off to go play with metal all day Saturday at the Tacoma Metal Arts Center.

It's my friend Kimberly's fault.  She had a gift certificate for a class and asked if I was interested. I studied making jewelry at North Seattle Community College way back in my early twenties and after getting my degree in sculpture, I haven't played around much with jewelry except tinkering around with reclaimed tin and wire work.

Wine from Tacoma

 While Washington State is prime wine country, little wine is made on the western side of the state.  I am assuming this is mostly because the nice hot weather the east side of the mountains gets is much better suited for wine but there could be multiple other reasons as well.  Any wineries that are over here are usually sourcing their wine from vineyards in the east and then fermenting and aging them over here.  Such is the case of 21 Cellars here in Tacoma.

A friend of mine had purchased a wine tasting for two from the cellars and invited me along for the fun.  Now this winery styles itself as a boutique winery (I always thought that was code for expensive and I think I was right) and uses only wild yeasts for fermentation and ages all the wine in French oak.  Sounds fancy, huh? 

The wines were okay, but a little bit too much of the fruit bomb and oak was happening for my taste.  My friend, however, really liked the Tempranillo and the Malbec.  So, it's all a matter of personal preference really.  The prices were so high as to really turn me off.  I guess if you are really into shopping local, then this really is the wine for you.  But you can easily, easily buy wines far less than half the price of these that are just as tasty or even superior. 

Again, what is it that makes people buy this?  It's nice that someone local is trying to do this but I feel like it's his hobby and we're all paying for it.  They are small batches so maybe that is what this is all about: the exclusivity of it all.

The fun part about the tasting was that while on Thursday and Saturdays they are at the North End winery, on Fridays they do tastings in downtown Tacoma inside Anthem Coffee and Tea which is right next to the History Museum and also pretty busy so it feels festive to be in this big, bustling space, sampling wine. 

But don't listen to me, your tastes could be totally different, so get a tasting at 21 Cellars for yourself!

Farmers' Market and Camera Troubles

 Went extra early to the farmers' market today to take Oskar so that he could meet other people and dogs without being overwhelmed by the masses that show up later on in the morning.  I am having a little dinner party tonight and decided I needed flowers.  I bought one giant bunch and split it up and added in that gigantic rose from our garden.  Can you believe how big that thing is?  I also bought a flat of strawberries and some ground coffee from our favorite local roaster, Valhalla. 

 All three of these shots were taken with my camera phone because, alas, my nice SLR camera seems to be dying.  Something has been wrong with the shutter button for a while and I have been in avoidance of fixing it.  I know it will be expensive.  That's why, sadly, I have been missing out on posting so many wonderful things in the last month: no working camera. 

But it's all about to be all good because I just ordered a new Panasonic Lumix and it is supposed to arrive Monday and I will be a snap happy blogger once again!  Bonus: it is also about 1/3rd the size of my bulky Nikon and will fit nicely in my purse for taking more shots at restaurants and other outings.  (I hate being one of those obvious people dragging around a giant camera.  For some reason that really bugs me, especially in restaurants.)  And some day I might get around to taking the old Nikon to a repair shop to try and fix it as well to keep using it in studio shots.   Huzzah!

Most Awesome House Warming

Before we hosted our housewarming party a couple of weeks ago, I spent a lot of time thinking about what to name our house.  I wanted the name on the invitations but I didn't want to rush myself because I wanted a good name with a lot of reference to our location and the history of the place and also something that meant something to us. 

First off, why name a house?   Long before there were street names and numbers, houses had names.  Think England and Jane Austen and Jane Eyre: Mansfield Park, Pemberly, Gateshead, Thornfield Hall.  But not only big estates had names.  Small places also had names:  Shell Cottage, Orchard House, Rose Cottage, Stag's Leap, etc.

We ended up with "Gertie's Lair." Our good friend Kelly ordered this welcome mat for us and it couldn't be more perfect!

 

Now for the story behind the name.

We live right next to the Tacoma Narrows Bridge and have a fabulous view of it all along the house.  These 2 bridges (but we always just refer to them as the bridge) are the 5th largest suspension bridges in the United States.  Originally, there was only one bridge and it was called Galloping Gertie.

If you know anything about the first Gertie, it is represented by this photo:

Galloping Gertie collapsed during high winds on Nov 7, 1940.  It had only opened on July 1, 1940.  Not a very long life!

Now when the original bridge collapsed, large tresses fell into the water and were left there.  Sea life took over and Giant Pacific Octopuses moved in, making their dens in the sunken ruins.

Now, my husband and I, we think of Gertie as an octopus that lives in the ruins of the old bridge under the water.  Hence the name, Gertie's Lair.  I have always been a bit obsessed with the octopus.  I am in the process of making a giant octopus vessel for my fiber arts class.  (Photos coming soon.)  I also plan on having a hand railing built with an octopus designed into it.

Long live Gertie's Lair and thoughtful friends!

Making Felt is Super Fun

 Last Sunday I taught another felting class at Tacoma Art Place.  This time it was a smaller group (6 students) and a much longer class (5 hours) and I taught the process of wet felting.  At the end of the day everyone had made a sample and a small scarf.   As you can see above, it was pretty messy and took up a lot of space.  Unfortunately the space was not the best for teaching wet felting.  It was a little too crowded with other art stuff crammed into the room and other members of the center kept coming in and out of the facility.  Crying babies in the back room is not the best thing for teaching.  More importantly, the sink is way too small and takes forever to get hot water.  So this is inspiring me to get my studio at home up and running the sooner the better!  I have a giant utility sink and lots of space to make a mess.  Yay!  Classes at my studio!

Here is an action shot of making the felt samples.  Towards the end of the process when the fibers have felted together but you are working them, "fulling" them to cause them to shrink, throwing them down on the table helps a lot, believe it or not.  Water was flying everywhere.

This is the sample I made to show how to make fringe, a scalloped edge, and Nuno felting: the use of silk in between the layers of wool.  

Here are the finished samples and I think they just look amazing!  I absolutely love how everyone's turned out so different.  

And here's my lovely students with their samples.  An awesome day!

Needle Felting Class

 Last Sunday I taught a beginning needle felting class at Tacoma Art Place. As you can see, it was packed and the students concentrated very hard to make their little works of art.

It is adorable what everyone came up with in such a short amount of time!  I think Aurora's tiny red owl looks a little sad.

Class portrait.  That is my friend La's one in the back with its hands out reached trying to get all the attention. 

Next Sunday I am teaching a felt scarf making class and it is full already and so we may need to add another class.  I love teaching felting.  I really love seeing what everyone does and how so wildly different everything ends up looking.

Economic Gardening: Expanding Your Business

 The City of Tacoma has a wonderful resource called the Economic Gardening Program.

From their brochure:  Our program seeks to grow our local economy by providing businesses with the tools and training that they need to be successful in today's marketplace.

They provide one on one consultation along with free quarterly classes that teach you how to run a more successful business.  I have been to about 5 of these workshops.  They are hit and miss of course because they bring in different people to talk about different topics and not all of the people are the best speakers or the best organized.   For the most part I can walk away with at least a few ideas I need to make my business better.  And all sorts of people come to these classes: artists like myself, massage therapists, restaurant owners, professional organizers, retail shop owners, etc. so it is a great way to network.

 

Today's session was "Four Ways to Grow Your Business" presented by Audrey Godwin.  It was a little too business-y for my taste.  I know, I know, it is a business workshop, but when people start talking about "synergy" and developing "unique core differentiators" I start to zone out.  Why, oh why, can't people talk in normal speak?  A lot of people in the class were pretty shy at first because she just jumped into business-speak and then kept asking, "What, aren't you people awake yet?"  

Let me give everyone out there some advice about public speaking:  NEVER ask your audience if they are awake.  It makes them uncomfortable and afraid you are going to call on them when they don't know the answer.  So everyone looks down at their notes.  We think we are going to the class for her to tell us info;  we didn't know we were expected to bark out answers to things we might never even heard of before we walked in the door.  It was also tough because she was acting like we are all making $100,000 a year and knew how to map out sales forecasts and track conversion rates at the drop of a hat.  

I am making this sound like the worst workshop in the world.  She did eventually cool it on the "Are you all asleep?" question and the class got better after she gave us some worksheets to fill out.  I took away a lot of ideas for putting together a marketing plan and catering my different products to their target markets.  I am excited to implement some of my new ideas.  I also might have found a shop to sell some of my products in. 

Whether you live in Tacoma or not, if you own a small business, you should definitely look and see what free resources your city offers.  I am very surprised more people don't turn out for these classes! 

Pop Up Shop

I had a fun opportunity this week to set up a little table of scarves at a Pop Up Shop during Tacoma's third Thursday art walk.  Unfortunately, I left my good camera at home so these are just off my camera.  I took more but for some reason the camera didn't save them.  

I haven't shown my scarves to many people yet so it was nice to get some feedback on them and play with the display.

I sold 5 scarves!  I will be busy putting some of these scarves up on ETSY in the coming days.

Felting Demos at Tacoma Art Place

Last Saturday I set up shop at Tacoma Art Place to teach needle felting. I had an enthusiastic
group show up that spent 2 hours making needle felted spheres. Tacoma Art Place is a great non-profit that provides are materials and studio space for a very nominal fee. They have workshops and drop in classes for knitting, photography, jewelry making, and sewing.

I brought a lot of supplies and examples of my work.

Here is one of my student, Rebecca, and her little doll head: very creative!
I also had scarves and starter kits for sale. I started a mailing list with people interested in taking a more detailed felting class at TAP sometime this summer. Watch this space for upcoming classes!

Chihuly in Dubai

OK, what major city doesn't have a piece of Chihuly public art?

About half way through our trip to Dubai, my sister and her husband took us out for fancy Middle Eastern food at the Atlantis Hotel, out on the Palm, the giant man made island in the shape of a palm tree. With only 70km or so of beach front, Dubai came up with an insane idea to double it all in one giant project. Each frond is filled with luxury beachfront property. In this picture you can see the Atlantis at the center top of the outlying crescent. They engineered a tunnel to get to it so it really is separated from the rest of the palm. Crazy, huh? And that hotel is gigantic, the scale is hard to catch here.
When we walk in the lobby, what do I see but a big beautiful Chihuly.

I absolutely love the color shift and shape of this one. It makes the space really magical.

Those yellow bits are all glass casts of sea life like octopuses and nautilus and rays. Very cool.

There is also a gigantic indoor aquarium. While not as magnificent as the even more gigantic one in the Dubai Mall, it is nice because it is open only to hotel guests and is not very crowded. I love this school of rays that are coasting by the window.
It made me more than a little proud to be able to say, "That artist is from Tacoma!"

Holiday Cooking Madness

I love Thanksgiving because it is a holiday that focuses on family and friends and eating good food and isn't so commercially driven. We traditionally have friends over for Thanksgiving. Last year was pretty decent sized with 8 of us. This year it will just be three of us. (Which is just fine with me because we plan to geek out playing Settlers of Catan all night. If you don't know this game, you must go here and here.)

So I am planning a somewhat unconventional Thanksgiving meal. Personally, turkey is not my favorite bird in the world to eat and with only 3 of us that would mean a lot of turkey leftovers. Instead, I am making bacon wrapped pork tenderloin. Oh, yeah, it is going to be magnificent. I also decided for kicks to make a traditional green bean casserole and roasted potatoes and parsnips. And an apple cranberry crisp for dessert. I will probably toss a little green salad in there somewhere, but overall a fun and easy meal to make. Bacon makes me happy.

Except that when I went to the grocery store today, my patience and happiness were truly tested. Crazy people that don't normally buy groceries, let alone cook, were out in force at Fred Meyer's. Aggressive and panicked, they didn't watch where their carts were going and didn't care if you couldn't get past them. Come on people, it isn't really that hard!

But then I got to the meat section. I saw people picking up huge frozen turkeys and I am thinking to myself, "Doesn't it take more than 24 hours to thaw one of those suckers?" Whatever, not my problem. Turns out my problem was that they were completely out of pork tenderloin! Now I was starting to get a little peeved. But I took a deep breath and finished my shopping as fast as possible and got out of there.

It really wasn't that bad since I would now have to go to the gourmet grocery store I usually try to avoid. And since I had to go there, I might as well pick up some good wine while I was there too! And some Reubens for lunch since their deli makes the best Reubens. And a mocha.

A mocha topped with whipped cream and sprinkles put my mood back on the right track.
Happy Thanksgiving!

Snow Day

The view from the front porch is a lonely one today. Not many cars or people are out and about on our street at all.

I know a lot of people in our area are really excited about the snow but I am not a big fan of frozen droplets of water. Sure, it is fun to look at and play in for a bit but then you have to get back to work. And when it is 30 degrees outside, I cannot heat up my studio at all. So I am dragging things to work on inside the house, but I need to be cutting and filing and sanding metal and that is not something I want to do in the house.
But I do enjoy all the shapes in the garden as they get covered in snow. This bird feeder looks especially funky.

Last, but not least, it is the perfect day for soup. French Onion soup with smoked cheddar melts with marinated mushrooms.
And I am making more coffee. Because you can never have enough coffee on days like today.

I did buy a gigantic, ankle length white fake fur coat at a fund raising auction a couple of weeks ago. Maybe we will walk to the bar tonight and I will put on the my snowman coat to keep me nice and warm.

Economic Gardening

I just love the term "Economic Gardening." To me, it means not only trying to nurture and grow your audience but also working with other members in your community. Healthy and growing businesses can contribute to other healthy, growing businesses.

This morning I went to a free economic gardening workshop put on by the city of Tacoma. They do 3 -4 of these per year with different topics. This is probably the 5th one I have been to in the last 3 years. Let me just say, this is a fabulous service. A lot of small businesses could benefit and either just don't know about, can't take the time, or think it doesn't refer to them.

This morning's session was Marketing Your Business in Less than 2 Hours Per Week. I wasn't the only artist there. Also in attendance were owners and managers of a pizza chain, a security service, a massage therapist, a farmer's market, a new distillery opening in downtown Tacoma, a landscaper, a tea wholesaler, and a ton of others. I am pretty confident everyone left the room with some ideas on how to get the word out on their businesses.

The main idea I took away is that I need to focus on one area to really see progress.

I made an astounding decision. (Sometimes, I amaze myself.) I am too scattered. I have decided to focus on my reclaimed tin jewelry and sculpture. Starting by reworking my Etsy site into focusing solely on reclaimed art/jewelry/housewares and taking off all of the paintings and prints that weren't selling anyways I hope to give Raven Meets Crow a more focused brand.

I also need to make an action plan so that I can have something to measure my results against. All of these little exercises made thinking about marketing more interesting and challenging and I am excited to see what I can do with it all!

Once I have decided upon an action plan, I will share it with you and then we can see whether this turns into folly or success!

When You Just Can't Take It Anymore

I am talking about my house here. I bought our little "salt box" house (some people in the Northwest prefer to call them Cape Cods, but they are not real Cape Cods and they are just fooling themselves to say that) before we got married. It was all I could afford by myself. It was a bare canvas. No updates and old wiring.

Slowly, but surely, we have worked on the house. I tiled the bathroom. We remodeled the kitchen and dining room. We had a rock wall built up front. We built French doors off the back of the house and added a Trex deck and dug up the back yard and put in a fence. We converted the 2 car garage into a perfectly decent studio space for my artwork.Now, 7 and 1/2 years on, it is just not doing the trick anymore.

I know, I might sound a little pathetic, whining about a perfectly reasonable house that was purchased at an insanely reasonable price. And it has been a good house and we have no plans to sell it anytime soon. I think it will be a great rental.

However, we have come to the point: If we put any more money into this house, we will have priced ourselves out of our neighborhood. (You should never own the nicest house on the block.) Also, our needs are not quite being met. The layout of the house is poor with lots of doors and angles and small rooms and little storage and a cramped upstairs. We can't get any serious furniture up the stairs. We can barely turn around in our bedroom. And my husband practices piano (sometimes 3 hours a day) smack dab in the living room because there is nowhere else in the house that you can maneuver a piano with ease. Our square footage is just about right (1600) but the layout is horrible. And there is little charm in these salt boxes. They were built right after World War II with returning soldiers in mind and without eaves or built ins or attention to fine artistic detail.

My fantasy is to add about 300 square feet and pull the whole house down to one level and open it all up and voila! we would be in a mid-century ranch house.

Yesterday I took the monumental first step to start looking at houses. Luckily, I have a Realtor in the family and so we can go and look without a lot of pressure. After 9 houses plus (I lost count), I came home with one very important realization.

We cannot afford the house we want.

I don't see this as necessarily bad or a reason to get depressed. We are basically starting from square one since we are not planning to sell the house we are in now. To be perfectly honest, I don't want to move into a moderately expensive house that is ready to go because I will still find things I want to change. I prefer to find a shell of a mid-century ranch and then have at it myself. I like projects like this.

What is stopping us from getting a house anytime in the next week:

1)Tacoma is not flush with Mid-century. We have to turn away from downtown living and look out in the narrows. It is still only 5 miles give or take from downtown, but this is a big emotional leap for us.

2)Banks are holding onto roughly 4000 (not a misprint) foreclosed/abandoned homes in the area that they are not selling because they don't want to flood the market. Our dream home might be waiting for us in that pile of houses.

3) We both work from home. This might sound like a blessing, and it is, but we have specific needs that most people don't have to think about. Like two separate offices where we can spend all day without bugging one another as well as a workshop space for me.

4) We need room for (an eventual) baby grand piano for my husband.

5) I would prefer a larger than normal lot to allow for garden and studio space. This is the most flexible of the 5 needs but still pretty important.

Phew! You'll be hearing a lot from me in the coming months on this topic. I have photos of houses we have been looking into that I will post soon.

Making Something Special

Yesterday was the Tacoma Artist Studio Tours and it was my best year to date! Over 40 visitors and 21 sales! I set up an adult jewelry making activity that was very popular and generated some fantastic pieces.

I sold jewelry and prints and sculpture and felted critters.

But the most important item of the day was my Goats In Trees painting. My friend Patrick (in above photo) commissioned me to paint this piece for our mutual friends Greg and Rosie. It was a deeply held secret, only to be revealed once Rosie saw the painting in the studio.
Funny thing is, when Rosie came in, the studio was crowded with a lot of people, including some people she knew. So she chatted and gabbed about and didn't notice the painting for almost a half hour! Everyone in the room was in on the secret and my friend Danny finally introduced the subject by casually mentioning he "liked the goats."

I was relieved that she and Greg liked the painting. You never know when you are creating a commission exactly how it will be received. Now I am about to go deliver it!