It was quite a busy couple of days at Chez Polymath. We kicked things off with a WOMP at the Bassnectar concert at the Crystal Ballroom on Friday night. Can I just say that the Crystal’s floating floor is a lot of fun in a giant crowd of people bouncing and dancing their butts off? Actually, I can do just slightly better than that… here’s a very short video that includes some footage of the show. In fact, if you look closely you can even see Sean and I in the Portland segment!

I finished sewing everything together on the motion-responsive light-up skirt an hour or two before the concert started. Turns out that this particular iteration has some bugs – the first LED lights up SUPER-BRIGHT while the rest go between being either dim or off entirely. I was having trouble with the conductive thread shorting right at the LEDs (the leads are very close together) and with the level of resistance I was getting from the thread, so I actually set the skirt I had been working on aside and made another using ribbon cable (gained by cutting up an old floppy-drive cable) to make the connections. I think that this caused the problems… there were some issues with the stability of the conductive-thread-to-ribbon-cable connection (since I still used the conductive thread between the various boards and between the board and first LED), and not enough resistance in the re-done version. However, it worked well enough for me to wear, and I had a lot of fun with it. I consider this one to be a proof of concept, and will be refining from here. I just ordered a handful of the actual lilypad RGB LEDs to see if the connection placement works better for me than it did on the standard RGB LEDs I have been working with.

Saturday mostly consisted of sleeping in and getting all of the finishing touches done for Crafty Wonderland on Sunday. Even with the time I took off work last week to get ready I hadn’t gotten my sign done, so I changed the plans for that too. I had been planning to use the laser to cut my logo out of some fabric with fusible (iron-on) backing, and then apply it to another piece of fabric, but that seems a bit complex for a last minute thing – especially dealing with getting everything lined up right, so I ended up just printing it on 11×17 paper at Kinkos and backing it with some larger black mat board, and it looked fab. Wouldn’t hold up for anything outdoors, but it was great for an inside show. And now I’m thinking that I may actually try Spoonflower (the print on demand fabric service) when the time comes to put together a more permanent and outdoor-friendly booth sign.

Crafty Wonderland on Sunday was a lot of fun.  I meant to get pictures of my table and displays, but sadly I kept forgetting until highly inconvenient times, so that will have to wait for the next show. Anyway, everyone was very friendly and I got a lot of really great response to both my items and my displays. I ended up in a booth between Barbara of B. Hive Designs and Cate of Bee’s Knees Industries, both of whom were great neighbors. I even ended up trading with Barbara for a gorgeous new shirt, lucky me! And, it looks like I’ll have some more news to share soon that came out of Crafty Wonderland, but I don’t want to say anything until everything’s finalized, so you’ll just have to sit tight on that one until next week.

Oh, and I wanted to mention the photo on this entry – it’s one of my new set of laser cut acrylic bowls, heat formed by hand – this one is based on one form of diatom, a type of tiny algae with intricate, porous silicate cell walls.  It was my entry into the Mad Scientists of Etsy April challenge (theme: Cretaceous) because diatoms first appear in the fossil record when the developed their characteristic cell walls in the early Cretaceous period. MSOE is now running a contest for each monthly challenge, and I’d love if you’d stop by the blog and vote for my entry! Of course, you can also buy the bowl – available through both Etsy and Ponoko.

I heard today that Techshop Portland has now received their laser cutter – woo-hoo! It’ll probably be another week or two before they have the first SBU (Safety and Basic Use) class, which I’ll need to take to get access to it… but it’s in sight, and that has me very excited.

One of the reasons I’m so excited: pictured here, a tower of acrylic bracelets that are part of some really special jewelry sets I’ll be unveiling very soon. They just got here today, after being shipped out by Ponoko more than three weeks ago. It’s not Ponoko’s fault at all – my shipment was held up in US customs. Not really sure what was so threatening about a handful of sheets of plastic cut into little pieces, but apparently it warranted a thorough inspection (in which they also managed to remove and/or lose a handful of those pieces.)

I love Ponoko… they’re a great company, they provide an awesomely personalized level of service, and without them I wouldn’t be doing or making what I am right now. Even once I have access to the Techshop laser cutter, I know that I’ll still use them for some services (like metal cutting).  However, all that said, it’s going to be incredibly nice to be able to shorten my turn around time and my design/revise cycle so drastically, not to have to worry about things like shipments getting held up at the border, and to be able to bring in all sorts of other materials that I wasn’t able to source with Ponoko – like recycled materials!

It’s going to be another couple of days before the items from today’s arrival hit the shop – I have to polish and assemble and photograph and the like. But before I do that, I’m off to work on the project that I already had slated for this evening. It’s time for some LEDs to be introduced to some fabric!

Hooray! I just got my application in to be a strolling vendor at this year’s High Sierra Music Festival. I’m super excited about it – we went to the festival last year and had a great time, and to have the opportunity to go back and enjoy the music and the festival while also promoting my business is just awesome. I’m particularly excited about the roaming aspect… I won’t be tied to a booth, I’ll be able to catch the shows I want to see, and I’ll get to mod the wagon I made for the festival last year to be my little mobile ‘shoppe’.

If you’ve never vended at High Sierra before they ask you to include some promotional material with your application. As I’ve been focused on building up my product offerings and improving the quality of my photos, I didn’t yet have any printed promotional material. So, I used the quick and easy collage feature at Picnik to put together a couple of postcards – the one above that focuses on the laser cut goodies, and another focusing on my electronics work (more on that in another post). I’m really pleased with how it turned out.

This weekend I’ll also be heading out to Crafty Wonderland, an indie craft show that happens one Sunday a month in Portland. I’ve heard really great things about it, and assuming I like what I see I’ll probably apply to vend in the April or May show. I think it would be a great way to dip my toe into the waters of vending… a bit on the smaller side, not too high of a table fee, and with a solid following.

I’ll leave you with a slideshow of images from previous High Sierra festivals:

Last week was a pretty big one for Polymath Design Lab. First, I ran across a promotion that Quicken’s MyCorp was running through December 5th to waive their standard $149 fee and register new corporations or limited liability companies for just filing costs plus postage and handling fees. (By the way, for anyone else who may be starting their own business or thinking about changing to one of these structures – I just saw that they’ve extended the deal through the end of December.)

I had been planning to stick with the sole proprietorship structure, but after reading a bit more, including an entry over at PDXindie from Bread and Badger suggesting that anyone starting a new business go straight to LLC based on her difficulties with converting from one structure to the other, I decided to take advantage of this opportunity and get Polymath Design Lab set up as an LLC. Fortunately, it costs the same in Oregon to register an LLC as it does to just register a business name for a sole proprietorship – the biggest difference is in the amount and intensity of paperwork, and after filling out a few fairly quick web forms, MyCorp will be taking care of that for me!

I also made my first two sales through my etsy shop – including one that came along with a really wonderful convo (conversations, or convos, are the means for people to contact each other through etsy) talking about how the buyer had been looking for a necklace like my golden spiral pendant for months! I can tell you I was pretty well floating after that…

As far as the projects I mentioned in the last post: the vinegar is still infusing, I need to get different fabric for the light tent because what I picked up is a bit too thick, the ponoko order is en route, and I hope to have the projector finished by the end of the week. More soon…

It’s official! I posted my first item on my etsy shop this weekend – and I have a few more that are just awaiting a second coat of sealant and some good photos before they can be added. I’ve been holding off on really directing anyone to this site until I got all of the sections up and put some items up for sale – now that both of those milestones have been reached, it’s time to start getting my name out there. I’m still figuring out where and how to do that, but at very least I’m ready to pass the address out to friends…

I’ve also been busily working away on my second Ponoko order – Though I’ll be waiting until they launch their new Prime service and metal options before I submit it. This time I’ll also be making my first attempt at a 3-D design, a trinket box that should hopefully hold together sturdily with no glue or fastening hardware.

Really, it’s kind of amazing how I’ve been bubbling over with ideas since I decided to start Polymath… too many to reasonably focus on at once. I keep having to just add things to my sketchbook and decide which ones should wait until later. At the moment, anything involving electronics is likely to stay on the back burner until after the holidays unless it comes in as a custom work request. Thank goodness for Moleskines and Maker’s Notebooks! I keep a soft-sided graph paper moleskine in my purse to capture and rough out the ideas that strike when I’m out and about, and the larger, hardback Maker’s Notebook at home for the things that require further planning. (For anyone interested, I got my Maker’s Notebook free with my subscription to MAKE: magazine, and the offer is still going, though I’m not sure for how long. Use code TGAWK on their subscription page.)

This week I received my first order back from Ponoko. If you are interested in making things and you haven’t heard of them, you should really check them out – it’s a company based in New Zealand that allows you to upload either a vector graphic file or a photo of something you’ve designed and have it laser-cut and etched into any one of a number of possible materials.

I was prototyping a number of jewelry items and keychains, as well as some other things, largely to test out the service and see if it will work as well for Polymath Design Lab as I think it will. I created one file to be cut in wood (beech plywood) and one to be cut in acrylic. Just about everything I tried in wood worked beautifully. The acrylic was a bit more hit and miss, but I still ended up with some great pieces, and definitely learned about what I did and didn’t like on it, which was the primary goal.

One of my favorite things about the company was the transparency of their process. They update you on every step of the way – going so far as to provide an RSS feed you can subscribe to updating you on the status of your project. I also have checked out their forums and noticed that they are quick to help anyone who has a question or is running into difficulties with the process.

I’m already working on my next order from them, which will include more copies (some with slight tweaks) of a number of the designs I had created in the wood, and a test run with bamboo, a new material they just added to their catalog within the last week or so. You can expect to see some of the wood items from my second order (and possibly some of the bamboo as well, depending on how it turns out), up in my etsy shop in a few weeks.

I’ve always been more of a generalist than a specialist, my curiosity drawing me in many different directions. And, more than that, I am a synthesist – I love looking at different concepts or viewpoints and finding the parallels and the places where they overlap. I’ve chosen the name Polymath Design Lab because I want my business to reflect that same tendency towards synthesis – exploring the intersections of art and craft with science and technology. The design lab for me is a place to experiment artistically and play with involving all different kinds of influences – from historical photos to cellular models or electronic circuitry.

I looked up the term ‘synthesist’ before posting it, to verify that the term didn’t have some meaning wildly different than what I would expect, and found this post, nearly 2 years old, coining the same term for the same concept I was thinking of, and describing it beautifully.

So that’s my goal with Polymath Design Lab – to combine different subjects, media, and techniques and find the points of synthesis. I’m aiming to create items that might be just as at home on the shelves at Anthropologie or the OMSI store.