Where's my workbench?

The apple loving demon from 'Deathnote' with friend! Note the girl with an axe strolling past in the background!

Well once again the MCM Expo at the Excel centre was mad, busy, slightly crazy, hard work, stressful, but fun! There were a few more problems this time than May, not helped by it being so packed, but I'm not going to dwell on those because it still remains one of the events we enjoy doing the most! It was ultra packed on Saturday, and I didn't really get a chance to take many pictures, but here are a few to give you a flavour of the event. The Expo's video team were around and about, they even filmed my aliens, so they might appear on the next Expo Youtube trailer! A big thank you to everyone who came and saw us, and thank you to all the lovely comments on facebook, emails and Twitter. I haven't hesitated to book already for the next one in May so we can come and see you all again!

My next problem now is trying to get equipment back to Greenwich, and getting back to normal, along with making new stuff ready for the run up to Xmas! And before the Expo I didn't think I had enough hours in the day!



Getting Aliens ready for the show

I'm slowly running through the lists of things to do as well, so this all means my Etsy shop might have to stay closed a little longer whilst I catch up with myself. However I made many more alien specimens than planned, so I think some of these might be in the shop very soon, and maybe even one or two at Greenwich as well.



Shakey picture of the Aliens, the top picture of 5 Martians shortly afterwards found a new home

Metaloides space lobster framed

Safe here from 'The Walking Dead' This was taken in a nearby bar on Sunday night where we stopped to grab dinner!

Along with all this I have come away wanting to re-visit some ideas I'd not had a chance to play with, and to make some very new products ready for next May and to go into my Etsy shop. One in particular I'd started on a few weeks ago, which got put on hold as I had to put together new stands, organise supplies and so on, I am really keen to get back to. The first trials worked really well, but along with lack of time I have another problem. I can't find my workbench! It's buried under the debris of weeks of pre-event chaos!

When I grow up, I want to be a Mad Scientist

Blue Lobster-Octopus thing.....

As I try to get ready for the next big sci-fi Expo, with one eye on getting ready for xmas too, panic is setting in that I'm not making enough. So as I work later, the music is getting louder and faster! Amongst this I'm playing alot of 'Rob Zombie' and many of the songs have lots of sound dubs from old horror films, all of which takes me back to when I was young, and was allowed to stay up on Friday or Saturday nights to watch horror films - of which I thought at the time the Hammer horrors were the best!

This also reminded me of the great school playground debate of  'what do you want to be when you grow up?' I thought I wanted to be a scientist, but part of me knew that still wasn't quite right.

Different angle of 'Blue Thing'

Modern scientists wear white coats, work in big bright clean laboratories, and work in big teams on complex little bits of science written up in learned publications no-one can understand. I couldn't quite put my finger on it at the time, but I knew that wasn't the type of scientist that I wanted to be. I wanted to be more like my hero's at the time; Peter Cushing or one of the 50's black and white scientists dashing around in the dead of night. I wanted to be the sort of scientist that works in a tweed waistcoat and cravat, whose laboratory is a dark dusty basement of a castle, whose colleague is called 'Igor' and helps dig up supplies from the graveyard next door, and communicates discoveries by wildly shouting 'It's alive! It's aliiiiivvvee!!!!' Yes, I wanted to be a mad scientist.

Body parts or the blue lobster before being grafted onto the body



seroastrumare duotripodes, which means 'two legged star-seaweed' all mounted up ready to go to the Expo

Of course most people don't then grow up to be firemen, policemen etc, and certainly not to be a mad Victorian scientist, and so I went and did more (mostly) sensible things. I guess this is what drew me originally to the SteamPunk genre, but it's only now that I am starting to really fulfil my childhood ambitions of creating insane creatures.



A new Red Star Spiral
 

 I do indeed have frock coat, cravat, waistcoat etc, but tend not to wear them whilst working as they are rather hot to work in! However if I was in a draughty farmhouse, castle, lighthouse, windmill etc, then it might well be worth me taking that up as work attire. Of course, what I really lack right now, is an abandoned castle/lighthouse/farmhouse/windmill to continue my experiments creating life from glass, re-creating creatures that may have swum alien seas or ancient Martian canals.

Queue mad laughter.... a sneak preview of some new limbs I have made for an even larger, even madder creation...
 

So, if you have a property that matches this description, ideally in Suffolk or North Essex, and it's at a very, very, very low rent, then I'd be delighted to hear from you! Of course if it's not too close to any villages with pitchfork totting locals who could rally into a lynch mob that would be even better.....

Isolated lighthouse at Orford Ness, an ideal location?

56 Hours a Week?

I am, apparently, no good at relaxing. Case in point; here I am typing up my blog rather than the soak in the bath I'd planned for this evening!

Gold and Silver Fumed Dip Pen

Here at HQ, and with some of the other traders at Greenwich, I've some interesting conversations about how many hours a week that I work. For me, I don't feel that I do enough hours, and if I stop to watch something on TV my brain niggles at me reminding me of jobs that need to be done, even when I've done all that I can that day. This all started with a random OH comment when I complained how tired I was, 'but you only work two days a week!'

That had me counting up how many hours I might be working, the Greenwich days are certainly some of the longest, mostly I'll be there at 8am to set up and won't finish packing up till about 6.30pm, so a long 10 1/2hour day of which I'd do two or three a week depending on if I add in an extra Friday. (I am currently shuffling around my days, missing the odd Sunday and doing Fridays instead.) This also doesn't include the two or three hour traveling to and from there each day.

Now of course the rest of the time is back at HQ making things to sell, of which can be a more interesting and relaxed schedule. There are a few long breaks in the day, so I can understand why she thinks I'm a slacker! I might work from 9.30 till 12 and take a break for lunch, then a short burst till about 2 for a tea break; OH works nights so this is often when she's up and a chance for a quick catch up then back to the torch until 4.30-5ish. Then after 6 when OH goes off to work it's back to the torch for another two or three hours, followed by some admin, putting things together etc which can take up up to anywhere between 9.30 and 11.30. Admittedly there are a few stops to make tea, and Monday tends to be a late start if I've done a three day weekend, but it wasn't till I stopped to total up my hours that I realised how much I was doing. Even on my more 'slacking days' I might do 4 1/2 hour on a weekday, but more likely up to 7 or 9! Estimating it conservatively at 7 hours a weekday makes 35hours, plus a 21 on top from the weekend and it's up to 56 hours. This puts my guesstimate of 54-60 hours a week not too far wrong.

Now I did originally make Monday mornings an easier day, and I used to have Wednesday nights from 9 as my night off, but post Olympics that schedule seemed to evaporate. This probably explains why I woke up this morning feeling so rubbish, and spent a larger part of the morning slumped on the sofa. So, I've decided I need to re-institute my Wednesday nights off, so I can at least time my downtime rather than having my body decide when to stop.

Green swirl dip pen

So, it's time for a long soak.... although I still have some Etsy photos I really must do....... and I did want to get some more torch work done......  I can see this taking break thing being really hard to schedule in! But then if I didn't enjoy it, I wouldn't do it. Maybe there's a lesson here for company bosses; if more 'real' jobs were done by people that enjoyed doing them (or made more enjoyable and less 'arghh!') then no one would mind putting the extra work in.

Tiny Marbles, Big Horizons

In the midst of getting my Etsy shop back and alive with new glass in it, I've had a lot of interest in very small galaxy marbles. These days I try to avoid making really big or really little marbles; it doesn't matter how big I make a marble I always get people asking if I can make them even bigger. I not sure if they even want to buy them, I think people just want to see football sized marbles! I used to try and pump them up as much as I could, often loosing some of the nice optical illusions and depth because I pushed them too far. Not to mention the hours twirling a hot heavy marble trying to get it into shape!

I've also try to avoid doing small ones, unless it's a quick test of a new colour or technique, when they start getting under about 20mm they become really tricky to hold and shape well. And to be blunt, despite the work involved, because of the small size people expect them to be sold for pennies. So these days I try to go for a comfortable balance between sizes, going often for the size the marble wants to be.

Then about a month ago I had an interesting enquiry from a chap who was re-creating the 'Men In Black' Orion's Belt prop. For those few people who haven't seen the movie, it's a little metal pendant that hangs from a cat's (a cat called Orion) collar, inside which is a little marble which contains an entire miniature galaxy. Well, it is a sci-fi/fantasy film!

I've had a few requests like this in the past, but what has made this different is that he's been using 3D printing techniques to produce it. As yet I've not seen the kit or bits, but I've had several enquires asking for marbles 18mm or smaller!

Setting to work to make some I soon realised why I try not to work at this scale, to start with I couldn't make anything smaller than 20mm, but a few more fails and I was starting to get the hang of the smaller ones. The next problem has been trying to get the detail into them. Many of the colours I use don't work when thinned down this small. Some of the colours just vanished, others just refused to play. I had this problem before with opaque reds in flower marbles which go from vibrant colour to a mud red when they thin out. Even the dichoric glass became a problem as it's really a very thin metal coating on sheets of 3-5mm glass. This needs to have another layer of glass locked over it, sometimes 2 or 3 layers in a sandwich, so suddenly there is 6-10mm of glass. It doesn't sound much, but throw in backing colours that add up to 3mm of glass at the base, and that it's only at the extreme equator of the marble that's the thickest part and suddenly every mm counts!

They are getting better, and more detailed, as I find tricks and colours that let me get around these problems. I don't think I am ever going to ever exactly copy the CGI created original, which I know it what the people making these props really want! In the meantime it's been quite interesting to make them at such extremes, and they've seemed to go down well with marble and glass collectors too.

 While all this has been going on I've had to drastically increase my shipping charges to USA & Canada, so that I can send parcels tracked and signed for, as I've had an awful run of packages not turning up. One of these was a commission for tiny marbles as well, which were even smaller and a nightmare to make. A compensation claim from Royal Mail can take months, (and I've had them wanting to prove how much it costs in materials to make) but it's letting down customers I hate most. I'm not using small envelopes anymore either, larger ones stops them being slipped into pockets, and gives more room for all the Post Office stickers! I once had a parcel from the USA with 14 USPS and PO stickers on it, so I've no idea how many end up on the ones I send to USA!

I'm going to try and add a few more, but I will have to stop adding to my Etsy shop for a while. Along with the run up to Xmas I have the MCM Expo at the end of October which I am frantically getting ready for, plus being at Greenwich! I may not be at Greenwich on some Sundays to give me chance to get ready, but I will try and make Saturdays (and possibly some Fridays too so I can avoid travelling to London during rail engineering works!)

Is Groundhog day over?

The workbench is more of a disaster area than usual! There's no time for tidying!

Yesterday was the end of a very long week for me. During the Olympic and Paralympic periods Greenwich market has been opening for longer hours, to help people stay longer in Greenwich to relieve congestion on the tubes and trains at the end of the events (more on that in my earlier posts.)

After a very quiet period between the end of the Olympics and start of the Paralympics I decided it would be good to try and do a few more days. Originally I'd intended on doing Friday to Sunday, or skip Sunday and come back on Monday for the day (an extra day added during the events,) but I ended up doing five days in a row! No sooner that I was up I was on my way to Greenwich (luckily I can stay over nearby to save such long train travel) to be there between 8-8.30, grabbing breakfast along the way. The hours were trimmed back during the Paralympics, to a 7pm finish, but even then it doesn't mean finishing packing away to gone 8-8.30pm, in time to grab a bite to eat if I hadn't managed to eat at the stall, before heading off for an early night! A few hours later and the alarm was off again; what day is it? Sunday, Friday? It started blurring by the time it got to Tuesday, the last day of the Paralympics in Greenwich.

I have been really surprised on how inconsistent the days have been, it's been really hard to plan for, days I expect it to be quiet have been busy, and vice versa, days when there have been lots of people I've hardly sold anything; it's been impossible to know what days to turn up and which ones to stay in the workshop! A lot of new stuff has had to be put on hold that I'd really like to work on.

The only thing I am sure of is that my feet still ache 24hrs later!

I really must sort out the debris, and empty those dump jars of grot glass!

Now that's over it's time to start again! It's only a few weeks to the end of October and the next big MCM Expo, I have lots of ideas for new alien specimens, a backlog of marbles I've been asked for, plus it's now barely two days before I need to be back for the next weekend in Greenwich. I'm also hoping to sneak an odd day off too, maybe a Sunday, which I am sure my feet will be very grateful for!

My (Cockney) Zombie Girlfriend

Other peoples ambitions and obsessions often seem strange. Climbing very cold, dangerous mountains, wanting to get a hole in one in golf, winning a chili-dog eating competition, or being a zombie extra in a film. I think you see where this is going!

Yes, my OH (Other Half) had an ambition to be in a zombie film, if not as a main character then as a walk-on (or should that be stumble along?) zombie. Last year she had the opportunity when along the zombie grapevine she heard they were asking for volunteers to shuffle along to docklands for a few days shooting the climax scene of 'Cockneys vs Zombies.'

So it was with great excitement she spent three days trying to eat some British veteran actors, whilst covered in a lot of fake blood, while they in turn shot at her! I met her in our local Essex pub, she'd stayed covered in fake blood and zombie makeup on the train home, and certianly looked like she'd been in a car accident! Yeh, strange what some people have an ambition to do. She certainly enjoyed it, and has been eagerly awaiting the release so we can go play 'spot the zombie,' and last Thursday managed to swipe some of the very last tickets left for the premier in Empire Leicester Square as part of their 'Frightfest' season.

I won't give too many spoilers away, but I must admit I wasn't expecting too much but was pleasantly surprised. Certainly not a film that took itself seriously, and it was great fun because of that, at the Q&A the director and writer said they'd made it for a 'Frightfest' audience, putting in as much gore, jokes and bad taste as they could get away with. Mixed in with that was an impressive cast; to be honest you have to see it just to see Richard Briers playing a geriatric peeping tom machine gunning down the undead. Richard Briers, zimmerframe, machine gun; not three things you'd ever expect to see put together. However it was Alan Ford who played the action hero, (most people will remember him from 'Snatch' where he played the nasty villain who fed people to his pigs) who despite being 75(ish) was racing around sorting out zombies in a way that would put Bruce Willis to shame!

Of course the highlight for us was the dockland scene, where I tried picking Ellie out of the crowd, and she'd even managed to get a frame all to herself, of which she was quite chuffed! Blink and you might miss the lone female zombie shuffling along the dockside, but that was definitely her! I'd recognise that bunches hairstyle anywhere!

At the end there was time for a quick Q&A, and in the distance queueing to ask questions of the directors and actors I recognised a familiar hairstyle again. A sensible question then I suddenly heard 'Would Mr Ford prefer to be eaten by Zombies or Pigs?' She's found loads of reviews that have used her question, quoting it as 'the perfect Frightfest question.' They'll be no living with her now!

Oh, and apparently Alan Ford would prefer to be eaten by pigs.

Neil Armstrong, the last pioneer?

I was going to post about a recent trip, but in light of Neil Armstrong passing away this weekend I thought I'd share some thoughts, and some things that I've read in the press that have made me wonder if we've reached the pinnacle of our civilisation and are now on the slide down the other side?

On the Moon, photo courtesy of NASA

I was checking up on Twitter news on Sunday morning with my first coffee of the day when I learned that Mr Armstrong had passed away. I also learnt way too much about half baked sloppy press at the same time. Ed Yong (Edyong209) had collected together some rather appalling instances, I thing they've been corrected but if you plough through his twitter feed he's recorded photo's of the various pages and web articles. NBC, who as an American website should have know better, listed him as Neil Young; a Dutch paper claimed he was the first man to walk on Earth; and even the UK slipped up saying he was the first US woman in space. I believe the correct Internet hash tag here is #palmface.

I can't say any of my reading got any better when I found out there were people asking who he was, someone who decades before had the entire world gathered around TV sets to see grainy pictures of him stepping down onto the dusty moon surface. But then, as others pointed out, nobody born since 1935 has walked on the moon. Very soon there will be nobody alive who has been there, and there doesn't seem any real will to go back. 'We have enough problems down here to deal with,' is what most people will say.

I don't know if that's right or wrong, but these large scale projects do bring benefits that are unexpected, in this case Velcro, and seeing how small an isolated how vulnerable home really is. Today people wonder what's the point of the CERN collider, but I only recently learnt that off-shoots of this technology resulted in MIR scanners. The Earth is not flat, and neither is science; A sometimes takes mankind to K while on the way to B. Right now I'm reading Iain M. Banks sci-fi novels, who have civilisations which have 'Sublimed,' and have gone from technological zeniths and have withdrawn back into their own society and given up. Some days I do wonder if we're doing the same.



Despite the inventions, the real outcome of the space race was to prove what amazing things man can do if he really tries, if real will is put behind in. What is also impressive is the man who got to make that boot print was refreshingly dignified and down-to-earth, and not big headed about it. Maybe if he boasted and hyped himself as much as people-who-kick-a-football for a living people under 18 may well know his name, but despite the odd reprint I'd hope his name is being learnt in 200 years time.