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!
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 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!
We’re super excited to announce that we’ve been selected to exhibit at the Bloomfest LA music + street art + food festival on July 23rd! It’ll run from 2pm until 10pm and it’s free to attend. The theme of the fair will be sustainable urban living, and will feature “live indie music, great brews, good food, and eco-friendly fun.”
It will be held in the Downtown Arts District area at 3rd St. & Traction Ave. near Wurstküche, Zip Fusion Sushi, K-Town BBQ, Angel City Brewing, just east of Little Tokyo and adjacent to SCI-Arc. I used to work in the area and I’m thrilled to be back on my old stomping grounds for our first ever physical selling opportunity. We’ve been kicking around great ideas for booth decor and I really CAN’T WAIT.
To pile on even more win, one of my favorite local bands, Love Grenades, will be playing. I’m not sure if I’ll have time to check them out (I sortfof hope I don’t, because that means that we’ll be busy), but they’ve got a quasi-retro bossa nova-ish lounge/dance pop sound and I can’t get enough.
There’s so much to do before then, though, and I’m hoping to have at least 100 rings and necklaces done by then. I’m also developing some new items, but I’m waiting on supplies to come. Oh! I caved and bought a Gocco printer to print labels and business cards! I hope that it comes soon and in good condition, since it’s coming all the way from Japan.
Also, brilliant Michael has set up our domain to reroute to the Orderly Civilians Etsy store for the time being, so I’m pleased to announce that www.orderlycivilians.com is now live! We’ll be working on a site that brings together our blog, store and catalog soon.
We haven’t lived together for very long at all, but Michael and I are constantly finding out that living with someone is both more and less challenging than we had thought. We both love that the other is creative, but creativity ends up taking A LOT of space, or at least, my version of creativity does. Michael’s apartment in Highland Park is pretty spacious, with a tiny upstairs bedroom, living room, and –luxuries of luxuries– a work room. During the school year, when I was in Cambridge and he lived alone, he was able to keep things pretty spartan and contained. But now, my apples and crafting supplies have taken over the entire place. I like to spread out and have everything I could need close at hand, which I imagine gets pretty annoying. I’m trying to contain it, but in spite of my best intentions, I end up buying EVEN MORE supplies and taking over EVEN MORE space.
Even the back yard is not immune from my space-hogging ways.
And there are soooo many dishes…
But it’s nice to have someone to work with and someone to come home to. Someone to go to Trader Joe’s with and go hiking with. Someone to curl up next to and be warmed by at night. Our living together has, besides my slovenly ways, been quite easy and civil. We agree on the more important decisions and it’s nice that our domestic bliss hasn’t erupted into a lava-spewing volcano of anger. It’s easy to forget that we are individuals and each need time to be alone, although I have the opportunity to be alone during most of the day (at least for the summer). I need to be more diligent about managing my sprawl and work harder at focusing on my own work. Poor Michael has been working on his personal website and is easily distracted and all I want to do is cuddle and do fun stuff and badger him to pay attention to me after a long day of solitude.
One of my oldest friends, Li-Ann of Ham & Pea Design Paperie posted a link to Pia Jane Bijkerk’s Giving Credit poster on Facebook recently, and it got me searching Google Images for images of our apple rings. I found the image (mostly of the Red Delicious ring) on a couple of blogs and instead of being affronted, I got really really giddy and happy. I mean, it’s amazing that the images are popping up here and there and that people actually like it enough to blog about it. A handful linked to our Etsy store, but some linked to a random Kaboodle-esque site or made zero mention of the image even being on the page.
Non-crediting use of apple ring image...er...wrongful crediting
For those, I wrote a simple comment asking them to link to our store and hopefully, they do. Any exposure, after all, is good exposure and if nothing else, at least my comment will provide sourcing information.
Permission and crediting is a hot topic these days, and my view is that you should always give credit where credit is due, and if it’s an image that will be reproduced later on or used in a non-personal setting (i.e. commercial page, magazine, etc.), do ask for permission. If it’s more of a “This is amazing, check this out!” then simply crediting will suffice.
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