Preparations and making products for the upcoming Bloomfest has been consuming our apartment and our lives for the past month, and although I’m really really super excited for our first ever physical store/booth, I can’t help but be just as excited for when it’s all over. I’m so worried that I won’t have enough items to fill the 10’x10′ booth and that it’ll look so boring…a lot of the layout and design will have to be done the day of, as we’d like to do some sort of radial string display with the canopy and I’m not sure if that’s possible at all. I really need to make a SketchUp mockup of the tent…
Anyway, here’s where you can find our booth on July 23rd, from 2pm to 10pm:
There we are!
I’ve only been thinking about the booth design with a middle booth in mind and so the news that we have a corner booth has thrown me off. I hear that corner booths are usually the most desirable booth location as you will receive maximum exposure, but I’m a bit anxious about how to present such a space and how to fill it. Whereas a booth in between two others only has one side to face, a corner booth has two that need to be addressed and is not quite as controlled. So, back to the drawing board…
But it’s slowly and surely coming together. Here’s a few camera phone pictures of our works in progress:
Things have been crazy over here in the workshop. There’s only 11 more days until Bloomfest and there’s still so much to be done. Rings, scarves and necklaces to be made, banners to be printed, booth decor and lighting to be figured out…
Here’s the official BloomfestLA poster, designed by Christine Hale. Isn’t it great?
Cute!
In other news, I trekked over to the fashion district today and we now have 3 new chain styles available for necklaces! If you’d like to purchase an apple necklace with one of these chains pictured below, please send us a message at info@orderlycivilians.com!
Images from You Can't Be Serious photography - Hailey and Andrew Bartholomew
I’ve always thought that engagement shoots were just an excuse for coupley glamour shots, but who can resist the infectious joy of giant bear heads? I’ve seen a few couples with giant blown up engagement or wedding pictures in their newlywed homes and it’s alway a bit…cheesy. But how amazing would the shopping cart or construction site look on a mantelpiece?
Ham & Pea Design & Paperie is the work of Li-Ann Scott, over in Australia. One of the kindest and most open-minded people I know, Li-Ann also has the distinction of being the childhood friend that I’ve known the longest and it’s hard to reconcile the now busy and energetic mother of twin boys and with the Troll doll loving girl who would come to our My Little Pony-themed birthday parties. She’s always been super-creative and talented, sending us these elaborately drawn penpal letters with ribbons and stickers, so it seems only inevitable that she’d capitalize on that talent and launch a successful card and graphic design business!
I recently won a giveaway on Ham & Pea’s Facebook page for a collection of the ‘Spell it with Pasta’ greeting cards and was so excited when they arrived!
Perfectly packaged!
The collection
Back of card detail
I really love this collection as it’s both cute and clever. The attention to detail is amazing, with the design theme of each card continuing on the back of the card, where it’s usually boring.
Even the envelope interiors are designed!
Prior to starting Ham & Pea, Li-Ann was also working as an architect in Australia. Architecture is often a thankless field and so it’s amazing to see how my friends in the industry have expanded their interests into other creative avenues.
Ham & Pea is having a sale this week only (July 6th – 12th), so head on over to their Facebook page for details and a sale album!
My lovely Gocco arrived a few weeks ago, and it’s been such a great tool to have. It’s so much fun and terribly easy to use that I’ve decided that it’s just about the best investment I could make for a tiny business’s printing needs.
This is the kit I bought off eBay, image by eBay seller import_express445106
So far, I’ve printed tiny muslin bags, business cards and mini Moo-sized cards that will debut at Bloomfest on the 23rd. I’d like to purchase some kraft paper merchandise bags and print our logo and QR code, but that’s for a bit later.
Printing Orderly Civilians business cards on the Print Gocco, front and back, two at a time
Finished business cards drying in the sun
Mini muslin bags for rings and necklaces
Moo-sized mini business cards
I’m really pleased that I decided to go with the Gocco over the Yudu as it’s much smaller and thus more suited to the items that I will be making. As I’m doing very repetitive projects, I also find that the stamping (or pressing down) action of the Gocco is much easier than repeatedly pulling a squeegee across a screen. I was also pleasantly surprised at the fineness of lines that is achievable on the Gocco which allows for beautifully legible type. However, (as seen in the image above) the screens tend to expose a little unevenly, giving an imperfect and distressed look, which isn’t all that bad in my opinion.
I purchased the PG-10 Super Gocco model because I liked the idea of a repositionable platten and the registration plate that it came with, which allows exact placement of multiple-stage prints and was cheaper than the PG-11, which has the same features plus a lamp housing that is supposed to be better angled to expose the edges of the screen. If you’re interested in purchasing a Gocco, here’s a great chart that breaks down the various models. Here’s a video that shows the registration process with the PG-11:
One of the cons of Goccos is that the master screens aren’t reusable and cleaning isn’t very easy. The inks require a special cleaner (although I’ve heard that one can use Goop hand cleaner or vegetable cooking oil, but I’ve not tried either) and it’s really not fun or easy as the screens are cardboard and hard to rinse out. I also tend to load up my screens so I can print multiple projects at different times with one master and the ink blocking that keeps colors separated tends to get saturated with ink and comes off in the cleaning process, which is a bit wasteful. I’ve also ruined part of a master by forgetting to put a piece on paper on the part of the sticky pad that I wasn’t using at the time, which led to the non-printing film on the mesh being pulled off the mesh and rendering that part unusable.
Here’s a great video on YouTube created by Etsy that shows how to use a Gocco for a simple, hand illustrated card:
I havent tried a hand-drawn print, yet and usually I lay out the screen in Adobe Illustrator before printing it out on a laser printer. The image to be exposed needs to be drawn with carbon-based ink, which most inkjet printers don’t use, although HP inks supposedly do contain carbon. I haven’t tried it out because our HP printer is quite old (8 years and counting!) and doesn’t like to print straight lines anymore, so it’s off to Kinkos I go.
I’m at my parents’ house today, and one of the best things ever (besides delicious food that I don’t have to cook) is blogging with a friend:
Sushicat!
In other news, over at Re-Nest.com today is a post about In.gredients, an Austin, TX based micro-grocery store that privileges sustainability and follows in the footsteps of UK’s Unpackaged by encouraging customers to bring in their own containers to hold groceries such as grain, beans, flour and eggs.
In.gredient’s system (which they refer to as ‘precycling’) has the customer bring in their own containers, weigh it for tare, fill it with their food of choice, weigh again and pay for the difference in weight of their filled container. Although the bulk bin section at conventional supermarkets (candy, usually, unless it’s Whole Foods or nutritional stores) is nothing new, customers at these ‘normal’ stores are discouraged from bringing in their own containers and must use disposable plastic bags and twist ties. Even though it may seem novel to a generation raised to abhor non-boxed food (did anyone ever eat bagged Malt-O-Meal cereal?), In.gredients points out that bringing one’s own containers to the store is nothing new. In the past, food bought in markets was commonly taken home in burlap sacks and baskets, a tradition that continues in some mostly third world and developing countries where waste is sacrilegious. It’s something that I can definitely get behind, as I really like the idea of bulk bins, but I’ll admit that there’s something disconcerting about the system as is. Perhaps it’s the idea that the food is sitting out in bins that aren’t air-tight or that people’s hands could possibly have wandered through my rice that gets to me. I also hate getting home and have to dump the contents of my saggy, unstructured plastic baggie into yet another container, only to trash the now dirty plastic bag. It’s great, though, to have the option of buying as much or as little as you want, which allows me to try small quantities of dry goods such as nutritional yeast or steel cut oats (which I still haven’t finished). And if I’m to be completely honest, buying from the bulk bins also includes the added benefit of allowing me to share self-important, do-gooder smiles with my fellow bin-ers.
The BYOContainer system is appealing for these reasons (although perhaps not the open air, handled part), and it’s a wonder that it hasn’t caught on as quickly as one would imagine, given Unpackaged’s success with the 20-30 yuppie green crowd in London and the lowered cost of not providing plastic bags. It does, however, seem more labor intensive as I’d imagine that all that weighing and bin filling must require more attention than individually packaged and barcoded items. Sanitary issues that arise from customers who bring in improperly cleaned containers may also factor in, and it would certainly turn me off my egg-buying if I glanced over and saw caked on cheese stains in my neighbor’s Weck jar.
But let’s address the issue that In.gredients is not completely packaging free. Even though the brand’s mission is to support local business and agriculture, these grains and eggs and beers do have to arrive to the store in some kind of packaging and it’s doubtful that their register paper or disinfectant will arrive unpackaged. I may be nitpicking, but to make a claim that one is zero-packaging is pretty loaded. Sure enough, the company acknowledges that, at the core, grocery stores are all about convenience, and it’s not always convenient to haul 30 jars to the store. To this end, they plan on providing compostable containers and point out that there are certain foods, such as meat, which must be packaged for food safety.
This topic is especially timely for me as I’ve been reading Michael Pollan’s impressive book An Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals and finding myself questioning the way I’ve been eating. I’ve been thinking about the implications of what we eat and how we eat it, and packaging is an important part of the equation. While it’s hard to imagine that In.gredients will completely live up to its lofty goals of being a completely sustainable marketplace, it’s heartening to see that there are alternatives to the processed food-laden big boxes and corporate supermarkets and I believe that fundamentally, this shift in approach (embracing and accommodating customer-provided packaging vs. forbidding it) is a step forward, rather than sideways.
P.S. I can’t say enough good things about An Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. It’s imaginative and tackles many contemporary issues about food culture, from sustainable farming to foraging and the eternal vegetarian/carnivore debate. He makes intelligent points for both sides of each issue and I can’t help but admire someone willing to take on the ethical challenge of slaughtering one’s food and the awareness of species that it implies. It’s really a love-letter to the food chain that brings everything I learned in last year’s ecology class to bear. Please, read it.
P.P.S. Here’s author Michael Pollan, talking about food chains:
I had my wisdom teeth out last Monday and so currently am a housebound chipmunk on a liquid diet. It’s not been so bad as I’ve been having great friends and relatives to fuss over me and make me tomato soup, but I’m an incredible wimp when it comes to pain and it hurts so badly that I get headaches from it. How ridiculous that wisdom teeth give you headaches before and headaches even after surgery. Luckily, I only had three wisdom teeth and had a really great dental resident, so I’m doing much better than most. My sister, for example, had four wisdom teeth to get removed, wasn’t sedated and ended up losing sensitivity in half of her tongue due to complications from the surgery. She had hers done quite a while ago and perhaps technology is better these days, so maybe it’s a good thing that I waited so long to have mine removed. They hadn’t been giving me problems up until about a year ago and I’ve been having a hard time scheduling the surgery since school started.
I had also been having an internal debate about whether to have intravenous sedation or only local anesthesia, since IV sedation costs about $330, which can go far. I decided to bite the bullet and spring for sedation because it seemed like a good chance to experience it, having never been put under before, the recovery is painful enough as is, and it would allow the dental surgeon to be quicker and less delicate if they didn’t have to worry about an awake patient. I’m not sure if it was worth it yet since pain is easily forgotten and the whole process only took about 45 minutes, but the whole experience was very surreal. One minute they’re hooking me up to all sorts of monitors and wires (the scariest part, by far) and the next minute I’m awake and they’re wheeling me out. I’m pretty sure that I woke up at some point and made panicked sounds when I felt them stitching up my gums, but I fell back asleep soon after. I’d been watching those YouTube videos of kids post-extraction and was really excited to be this loopy, drooling crazy person on the ride home, but I must not have gotten the good stuff as I was completely lucid not 10 minutes after waking up. What a bummer.
In any case, if you’re in the Los Angeles area and need cheap dental services, I highly recommend the good folks at the University of Southern California’s Dental School. The students, residents and faculty there will take great care of you for a fraction of the price that a regular dentist will charge you. In my case, it cost me even less to seek treatment there than what I would’ve paid if I had gone through my insurance when I was still working. And for me, I like the idea that the money I’m spending on dental care funds the clinic, which (aside from being my alma mater) also serves the elderly and the uninsured.
On the store-front (pun intended), here’s a sneak peek at our new line of scarves, as modeled by a very Harry Potter-esque Michael:
Turquoise micro-corduroy scarflet
The scarves will be making their debut at Bloomfest LA, so if you’re in the area, be sure to stop by to check them out!
Orderly Civilians 
The final push
19 JulPreparations and making products for the upcoming Bloomfest has been consuming our apartment and our lives for the past month, and although I’m really really super excited for our first ever physical store/booth, I can’t help but be just as excited for when it’s all over. I’m so worried that I won’t have enough items to fill the 10’x10′ booth and that it’ll look so boring…a lot of the layout and design will have to be done the day of, as we’d like to do some sort of radial string display with the canopy and I’m not sure if that’s possible at all. I really need to make a SketchUp mockup of the tent…
Anyway, here’s where you can find our booth on July 23rd, from 2pm to 10pm:
There we are!
I’ve only been thinking about the booth design with a middle booth in mind and so the news that we have a corner booth has thrown me off. I hear that corner booths are usually the most desirable booth location as you will receive maximum exposure, but I’m a bit anxious about how to present such a space and how to fill it. Whereas a booth in between two others only has one side to face, a corner booth has two that need to be addressed and is not quite as controlled. So, back to the drawing board…
But it’s slowly and surely coming together. Here’s a few camera phone pictures of our works in progress:
Apple rings display
Globe rings display
Minions hard at work
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Tags: Arts District, Bloomfest LA, booths, craft fairs, Los Angeles, minions, Orderly Civilians, preparations, workshop