Steampunkery?

The long-awaited photos of the Steampunk ray guns brandished at the April 25 meeting. Kudos to Dianne for finding ornate squirt gun bodies and prepping them for our adornment!

This model comes with a
 decorative ammo purse

It was still a bit sticky

King Albert's Angels

Good-bye cruel 19th century

Glamour shot!

Toilet Roll Sculptures

A good time was had by all tonight - pics of the various Steampunkery will be, I hope, forthcoming. Dianne was well-prepared for our arrival, had gotten some great water pistols and pre-sprayed them black in anticipation of our steamin' & punkin'. Also great metal paintery and assembled gew-gaws. Good job, Dianne!

Here are some better examples of the toilet roll sculptures, a poor copy of which I brought to the meeting tonight: http://www.thebrowncorporation.com/blogs/blog/1143632-toilet-roll-sculptures

The fact that it appears on a cardboard toilet site is just, really, gravy. We might consider this for next month's meeting. Next month's meeting? I hear you ask. Yes, the next scheduled meeting is: Tuesday (the Wednesday experiment is over!), 22 May 2012

LobstaWorld is coming up - a tenative date is being floated: Saturday, 28 July. What say ye? Mmmm, Lobsta! If the rain stays away persistently, we might have only ankle-high water to swim in, lest we trundle down to the salty stuff at the other end of the rocks. SANEsters are urged to commune with their favorite moisture deities.

SANE Wednesday, April 25 @ Dianne's Steampunk Emporium

Reminder: SANE Meeting WEDNESDAY, 25 April 2012 @ 7:00pm

Brave Dianne has graciously offered to hostess for this week's once-in-a-sometime-on-Wednesday meeting, so we'll be meeting just down the road from Mapela. Dianne writes: "keep driving down Pam's street until you get to the stop sign. My house is directly across the street from the sign. Park and come on in (#80)."

We're Steampunkin' it; glasses/goggles or weaponry, tho apparel is another opportunity for Steampunkery - hats, chaps, mechanized chronographs, etc. Bring mechanical items, gears, widgets, stuff to enhance, motorize, embellish whatever item you intend to Steampunkerize. Gloppy gel superglue, metallic paint, leather, naugahyde, feathers, fur, gears, wheels, pipes, extra fingers (to replace the ones you glue to your project. Dianne (below) mentions polymer clay, pearl-ex powders, and gum of arabic, which strike me as baking ingredients, but I bet she knows what she's talking about.

Betsey sent along this link:

"Steampunk" Startles at Antiques Show

"Steampunk" is a new "style" that combines old items and new technology into fantasy objects like clocks, bracelets, office furniture, and bicycles. At the Antique City Fun Fair in Bethlehem, Pa., on April 14 and 15, we saw a special exhibit of this "art." I liked the clock made of an old working clock embellished with gauges, wheels, knobs and other 20th-century machine parts. The price was close to $1,000. See our YouTube video.

and Dianne sent this:

As the mother of teenaged girls, I am thinking a steam punk ray gun would be useful.

http://www.cutoutandkeep.net/projects/tag/steampunk

There are also a lot of great blogs out there too. You can seriously waste a lot of time looking at this stuff but it's all really interesting.

I will bring some pleather samples I have (if I can find them). Also, we all decided we were all too old to be sniffing glue so I will bring a few bottles of the loctite gel superglue for us to adhere our various gears, sprockets and fingers together. The jewelry seems to use a polymer clay base. Many of them then embellish the base by painting it with pearl-ex powders mixed with gum of arabic. I'll bring mine along in case someone wants to try it. If you prefer not to destroy family heirlooms in the quest for gears and sprockets, Tim Holz has a line of craft supplies that have that steampunk vibe. Anything you have that reeks of Victoriana will also come in handy.

See y'all there!

SANE Meeting Wednesday April 25 - Steampunk glazzies

Wednesdays in SANE History
A week from several hours ago (or longer, if you already went to bed before I sent this out), we'll be meeting for the FIRST TIME EVER on a Wednesday... in almost a year... I thought this no-meeting-on-a-Wednesday thing was a no-brainer until I tripped lightly through my emails and found that we met on Wednesday, 25 May 2011... At the April 2011 meeting, we must've been stoned on Duct Tape glue and watching Marcel the Shell and Hank the Cave Peanut, and decided it would be a good idea, so on May 25 we did suminagashi or onomatopoeia or something with many syllables and lots of ink.
This Wednesday we're going to make Steampunk accessories. Goggles, if you got an extra pair of glasses or swim goggles that you want to donate to the cause. Or something else, if you've got one of those.

What's Steampunk? I hear Lysander ask. Well, you know, the whole Steampunk conceit is that high-tech stuff, like computers, and engines, and lots of other techie functionality that we take for granted, got invented hundreds of years before they did in our timeline, so you have a lot of 20th-century technology presented in Victorian era styling. Perhaps Materials Engineering isn't as advanced, so rather than a lot of sleek plastic stuff, the Steampunk equivalent is clunkier and metallic, or even wooden. Still neatly put together, and clever as heck, but encumbered by exterior wires or pipes or gears and details that would be largely hidden today. Heck, them Steampunkers were probably proud of all those visible underpinnings of technology, and decorated it up to draw attention to themselves. Solar-steam-heat powered wristwatches the size of baseballs? Sure. Here are a few examples stolen brashly from the Web:

What should I bring? asks Giselle. Well, something to serve as a basis for your accessory. Glasses or swim goggles were mentioned above, but other ideas include a hat, or an aviator's chinstrap-tightened headcover, or an old recorder, or an old Fender guitar body, or a small handweapon, or that old pair of spats that have been gathering dust at the bottom of the closet. Then to enhance your accessory, some tubing or gears or dials or expansion bladders or transparent globes or cardiac stents or whoopee cushions or pipe cleaners or shoelaces or grommets or other "similar" stuff. Glue is good - there is a new thicker superglue out there that comes in tiny tubes (since once you open it it'll dry like a bastid in a week anyway, or tape or carpenter's glue or noxious plastic dope cement or solder or an acetylene torch set-up. And then paint and/or stain or marker or dyes.

The object wouldn't be to just past gears on willy-nilly. I mean, how many gears can Willy wear, for crying out loud? But a glimpse of gears, a section of pipe, hinting at some truly functional mechanism beneath, that would be good. Are you enhancing your goggles to see in infra-red and ultraviolet, at the twirl of a dial, or take snapshots every time you squeezed the perfume bulb? Or enhance the audio pickup of your aviator hat thingie, so it could pick up a whisper 5 miles away, using a small parabolic antenna and giant earpieces, with knobs and dials to limit frequencies and volumes and such. Think exposed functionality, more than empty decoration, coupled with the fashion sense of Queen Victoria or Charles Dickens.

That's it for now. We'll announce where we'll meet closer to Wednesday. Chances are it will be near where we live, even in the home or workplace of one of our membership, for a change...