Greenwich Locksmiths in New York City looks like my kind of place.

Happy Santa Lucia Day! 10% all day in both stores with the coupon code: STLUCIA10.

In addition, buy two or more prints from Irving Place Photography and get the shipping free!

Irving Place Photography

The Floating Market

Canton City Lines Token Cufflinks II

Rockville Centre Token Cufflinks

Sheboygan City Lines Bus Token Cufflinks

Mixed Michigan Bus Token Cufflinks

Mixed Transit Token Cufflinks, Blaumont and Winfield

Use coupon code FBTW10 for 10% off any order at Irving Place Photography or The Floating Market, now through Monday!

Additionally, if you buy two or more prints from Irving Place Photography, shipping will be free, now through Christmas. (Etsy will still charge the shipping, but I will refund the charge.)

My Canton cufflinks are included in this nifty Father's Day treasury:

For the Most Interesting Man in the World

I was obviously not the only photographer at the Floating Market. Here are some that were actually shot during the market. (And with better lighting, since she was working with more than just the pop-up flash.) It's a very nice set.

Also, here is another excellent write-up of the event, featuring some of those photos.

I want to pass the word along on this, as well as making something of a bookmark/reminder for myself.

There is a call for artists for the Habitat Restore Annual Salvage Art Show and Auction in October of 2010.

The Salvage Art Show will be juried by professional artists. Interested artists will submit three examples of their work, which will be evaluated on such elements as originality, design, composition, subject matter, choice of materials, and skill of execution. Submissions to the jury will be due by May 22. Artists will be notified of their status during the week of June 1.

Worth a try, I think.

My first treasury in Etsy's new Treasury East beta. It features buttony selections from the Etsy Recyclers Guild, the Etsy Trashion Team, and the Etsy Wisconsin Street Team.

IO9 put together a gallery called What to Wear to the End of the World. There are some excellent examples given, but I know what is still my favorite.

And now, a brief break from Film Fest talk to write about how I spent my Sunday and Monday.

I've been following along with the pre-production of Lineline Theater's upcoming stage adaptation of Neverwhere. So, when I heard that they would be doing an actual Floating Market for their annual benefit event and where looking for volunteers to help *be* the market, I signed right up. How could I miss something like that? I've been missing the "Below" since the end of Boston Between the Cracks.

Sunday afternoon, I drove down to Crystal Lake, IL where I parked my car and hopped the Metra the rest of the way to Chicago. (Have I mentioned lately how much I love riding trains?) There was a rehearsal/costume parade for all the volunteers at Lifeline's space from 3:00 to about 6:00. While there, I got a rough preview of what the set is going to look like, and I must say, I'm impressed.

Following the rehearsal, I took the CTA towards Grant Park, to find the friend I was going to stay with for the night. I was already regretting that I decided that my combat boots were too bulky to carry and that I couldn't fit a spare pair of shoes in my pack. Ow.

One delicious Thai dinner later and both of us were pretty much ready to crash for the night.

I had to work on Monday, but had gotten clearance to do so remotely. (Have I mentioned how weird it is to use my PC desktop from a Mac? Always have to remember to avoid keyboard commands.) This made it a day of wi-fi surfing via three different coffeeshops. And more walking. Oh, the walking. (Did I mention those damn boots?)

The day was gorgeous, and many picturesque opportunities presented themselves, but I weighed the originality of any of the possible photos vs. the amount of stuff I was lugging around with me and decided that none of them were worth the effort. Sometime, I'll make a trip just for photos.

Evening came and it was time to ascend to the 4th floor of the Chicago Cultural Center and get ready for the event. Luckily, I did have time to run around and take some quick photos of some of the people and the place. There were a number of people and things that I never got a chance to capture on film, and the overall quality of what I shot was very snapshotty, but it did make bringing the Canon worthwhile.

The event ran from 6:30 to 10 PM, but it rather flew by. There were some scripted elements, including a bit of stage fighting ("bodyguard auditions"). There were performances by The Space/Movement Project, The Afterlife, Read My Hips, Pyrotechniq, The Tubeway Rats, and The Beat. A couple of fortune tellers, a storyteller, and a caricaturist plied their trades while "Captain Destiny" encouraged folks to spin the "Wheel of Destiny" to win prizes. Meanwhile, the denizens of the Floating Market interacted with the patrons and exhorted them to bid on silent auction items. Everyone ate, drank, and were quite merry.

And then the Market was over and it was time to go home. At which point I discovered that I'd lost my socks somewhere. This was a bummer, as they were a pair of a really nice wool overknees. Alas! Fortunately, I still had the socks I'd worn in character, so I didn't have to go sockless in my boots. (Did I mention those boots?) Unfortunately, looking for them took time I didn't have, and I suddenly had 14 minutes to walk about a mile...at least a 17 minute trek, according to Google maps. Fortunately, a couple of fellow Denizens were leaving as I was and offered me a ride to the station. Hurray! I made the train just in time.

The ride to Crystal Lake was pleasant. The drive to Madison was a little less so, given that it was after midnight by the time I started driving. I got through with McDonald's coffee and BBC World News on NPR, plus a lot of opening windows and sitting forward. Also, my "check engine" light came on, which could be meaningless but gave an edge of stress to the proceedings. I can haz Madison-Chicago trane, plz? Thx.

All in all, it was a tiring journey, but well worth it. I can hardly wait to see the actual show when it opens.

I'm quoted in Etsy's Storque blog.

Also, more Film Fest write-ups coming soon, but in the meantime, I'm off to Chicago for Lifeline Theater's Floating Market benefit.

My MTA cufflinks are included in a cool Earth Day treasury (expires Saturday, just before midnight).

"Queen of Pentacles" was accepted at Craftgawker.

"Did he ever return,
No he never returned
And his fate is still unlearn'd
He may ride forever
'neath the streets of Boston
He's the man who never returned."

--"Charlie on the MTA," Jacqueline Steiner and Bess Lomax Hawes

Lovely, old-school Boston subway tokens adorn these funky cufflinks. MTA, not MBTA, which puts these tokens at pre-1964. (The more recently discontinued MBTA tokens feature the large "T" on one side. Of course, it's all Charlie Cards now.)

I must admit, the Boston subway holds a special place in my heart, and I think these tokens are might snazzy. Don't you?

The Floating market garners a nice mention in this article on the Etsy Recyclers Guild Team (see page 4 for a photo and page 5 for the mention)

What a nice way to start the week!

Like the butterfly...

Another Craftgawker acceptance!

A pair of my cufflinks is featured in this cool p-poc treasury: http://www.etsy.com/treasury_list.php?room_id=122237 Check it and click! (expires Wednesday morning)

A pair of cufflinks from The Floating Market has received a favorable mention on Small talk about big things. Check it out!

1. I am bound and determined to sell these hair sticks today. They are on sale right now for $5 off the regular price, and they are totally charming.

2. Starting today and for the next seven days, I have a tile ad up on Craft Cult. I'm hoping it does some good.

3. I have a wonderfully creepy treasury, "The Unsettling Toy Box" on Etsy at the moment.

4. This weekend, I expect to finish an art project I have been working on since December. I'll post pictures as soon as I do.

Happy Friday! What are you up to?

Apparently, at approximately 5:00am EST, Thursday December 31 2009, a treasury list that I made was featured on the Etsy front page. (It was about 5 hours later that one of my own items made the front page for the first time.) Check it out!

All hair sticks $5 off at the Floating Market, limited time only.

In Etsy's Treasury West, until early Sunday morning.

FREE shipping on any order $10 or more for the 100th person to make The Floating Market an Etsy favorite!

I posted three new items to the Floating Market late last night. Two individual buttons and one 4-button set:

Spikes, 1 inch Wooden Button with burnt-in design, OOAK

Clock, 1 inch Wooden Button with burnt-in design, OOAK

Hourglass, 3/4 inch Wooden Buttons with burnt-in design, set of 4

For starters, there is this excellent retro sash belt. Then, there are five new bags constructed from scraps: a cellphone holder/coin purse made from the end of a necktie and my Four Seasons bag collection, constructed from discarded decorator fabric samples.

I'm happy with the pieces, though I think I may redo most of the photos when I get a chance. Let me know what you think!

I was digging through a box of fabric and lo and behold, I found where I'd put those bags I'd been working on. It turns out that I had attached the handles, and just hadn't realized it. I also think that they actually don't need a button or a snap at the top. So they really are finished!

I need to get some photos taken this weekend and the pricing figured out, but look for them soon!

I was at the Dig and Saves today and brought home a bunch of new things. However, as new things come in to my life, I need to make room. I have a collection of wonderful vintage gloves, which I cannot resist buying when I find them...only none of them has a mate. Some of these made great costume pieces for a LARP, but while I would love to find a project in which to put them to use, I have not yet. So, I offer them up to the world. Someone else might have an idea for them.

I'm a little tempted to put the "This Item Made the Front Page of Etsy" icon on this one, except it wasn't exactly this item that made the front page but one very, very similar to it. Might be close enough, but there is still some difference.

I have a special fondness for this pair, since the original set was my first ever Etsy frontpage.

I can! I haz!

Both The Floating Market and Irving Place Photography have fan pages. Of course, right now they only have two fans, and one of them is me! Go on and keep us from getting lonely by ourselves.

I'm pretty happy to see it, though of course I find myself wondering if I should have worded some things differently. But I'm always going to nitpick my own words.

Go read it!

This wood-burned button pair is ever so simple. And sometimes, simple is all you need.

"That's what she said."

But seriously, who *doesn't* want to be good all over Wilkinsburg?

Excellent news! Holly Black and Bordertown anthology.

The Bordertown setting is, along with Newford and London Below, one of the major influences on my work. So this is very, very squeeful for me.

These earring are actually not something that I made. They are, however, old enough to be considered vintage by Etsy, so... That was a little weird for me. I bought these when I was in 7th grade, probably from Claire's Boutique or some other such mall store. I was into dressing crazy-funky, and I loved how outrageously large the hoops were. Of course, they were so big that I hardly ever wore them. I had to be careful to keep my head level, because they would touch my shoulders.

Part of me is sorry to let these go, but all things considered, I am happy to release them out into the world. Someone is going to be thrilled to have these crazy things.

Check out the Etsy Recyclers Guild Team Blog. It features lots of artists and artisans who make things with recycled and "upcycled" materials, including yours truly!

Sometimes I get a little silly when naming things, but when I looked at what I had made, the alternating discs and seed beads really made me think of plate spinning. The cheery yellow base and the pyrographic design also lend to the circus feel. I think these are fun and decorative, without being over the top.

These earrings are a wee bit less "found object" than my usual. The keys are found, the birds came from the same fabric store going out of business sale that netted me all my plain wooden buttons. But I just sort of love the idea of these hummingbirds bearing keys. Very much like something that might happen in a fairytale.

"We gotta go to the crappy town where I'm a hero."

Seriously, if you are a Browncoat, these cufflinks will get the "Hero of Canton" song running through your head.

One of the things I really like about this pair is that it is pretty much the same token (unlike my mixed sets) but the colors are not identical. We have one silver-tone token and one that looks like it may have been coated in a darker layer (copper?) that has started wearing off. It would be too easy if they looked exactly alike. The difference makes it interesting to me.

In a way, it was a LARP that set a good bit of this in motion. Not everything, but it certainly played a part. There was a period of almost 3 years during which I was taking part in a Live Action Roleplaying game based on Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere. I was, in fact, playing a version of Ingress (Ress), the youngest daughter of the the House of Arch, who only appears in the book very briefly and is still missing (and perhaps dead) at the end of it.

She was an Opener, and had a tendency to collect lost keys. I didn't even have to try very hard, as over the course of the game other players would seek me out and hand me bunches of old keys. Sometimes they would want the prop back at the end of the game. Usually they didn't. Then the key acquisition started to bleed out into the real world, and old keys continued to find their way into my possession. I amassed quite a horde of random keys and a desire to find things to do with them.

This key actually did come to me during the course of some Floating Market session or another. So it seems appropriate that when it does eventually leave me, it will also be by way of The Floating Market.

A few years ago, I started a project of buying old leather coats from the Dig and Save and revamping them in an odd, urban fantasy way...the aesthetic that soon took over a lot of what I was doing. (I don't have any of the coats ready for sale just yet, but you an glimpse a bit of one here.) Part of the revamp was to replace the plastic buttons with more interesting things. Around the same time, a local fabric store was going out of business, and I ended up with a whole mess of plain wooden buttons that were crying out for some pyrography. Of course, I liked it so much that I ended up with way more buttons than I would probably use.

This particular button plays with surfaces and textures. The design is owes more to pressure than to burning—quick, heavy presses with the tool. When I finished, I realized that it reminded me of the old Aztec and Mayan calendars. (Hence the name.)

Have I mentioned how much I love my obliging friends? This is the result of a collaboration with the fabulous Anandi. I gave her a Project Runway style challenge, with a Floating Market twist. Assemble a costume for a Bridge Troll using only items that could be found in the trash of the Dig and Save bins. The modern samurai feel came in as a why to indicate troll as honorable warrior, rather than scary monster. (And we tried to do the whole thing in a respectful, rather than icky, way.)

I think she pulled it off quite well, and J., our model was quite game for climbing around and under an assortment of bridges, even wading out in the water a few times. I was extremely happy with how this shoot turned out, and look forward to trying it again sometime.

I wear hair sticks all the time. In fact, a twist held in place with a pair of sticks is kind of my default hairstyle. Of course, this means I own a *lot* of hair sticks. A few years back I ended up with a surplus of these yellow wooden hairsticks. I'd have to break or lose quite a few other before I'd need them.

They sat on a shelf for quite a while. Then I started playing with a wood burning tool I'd also had sitting on a shelf for years. Turns out, they went together quite well. I love the way the spiral turned out, as that had me a little worried. The butterflies are also a fun touch. I'd be tempted to keep these if I didn't already have more hair sticks...than you can shake a stick at.

Ok, technically, I can't get a Man Cold, but damn if it doesn't feel like that. Took the day off work and moped about the house drinking tea and feeling sorry for myself. However, the day wasn't a total waste, as I got 15 new items listed at The Floating Market. There was a long slog of color correcting and photo resizing involved in that, but I have a pleasant feeling of accomplishment—somewhere underneath all this grossness.

Time for some late-night pyrography, as I just sold a bunch of buttons. I want to take pictures tomorrow, so tonight is the time to create.

This is very neat. I can see the two front page treasuries I was in!

I was rather pleased with how these turned out, and had to fight the temptation to just keep them for myself, rather than selling them.

The purple beads and the larger silver beads (just below the purple) came from a necklace that a friend made for me about a decade ago. It was a beginner beading project, which I wore until the string gave out. I kept all the pieces, but after years of keeping it in a box, I decided to re-purpose the beads for something new, rather than trying to recreate the old piece.

I love these particular tokens. They are so petite—just the size of dimes—and the cutouts are very neat. I never thought I'd describe something made out of transit tokens as "airy," but I think that word really does apply here.

I've gotten my Movable Type updated, for the first time in years. Lots and lots of changes since I first installed the old version, so I have a bit of a learning curve. I'm also going to be tweaking the design a bit. The old one was nice, which I why I kept it so long, but it was also getting a bit stale.

This started out as a personal journal blog. Then it became more of a place where I reviewed movies I'd seen, shows I'd attended, restaurants at which I'd eaten. Then it became a photo blog. Now is is moving in a new direction once more, something that will have elements of those, and a bit more.

This time around it is still going to be heavily an art blog. I have two Etsy shops—Irving Place Photography and The Floating Market—which I will be featuring. I'm also going to try to document more of the creative processed behind them. I'm also going to throw in some reports and reviews of interesting goings-on around Madison and on the net, particularly as they relate to creative endeavors.

Hello, 2010, good to meet you.

They sold pretty fast, but then the sale was canceled since the customer couldn't pay. So they are back and ready to sell!