This is a general question for everyone, so I'm asking the smartest bunch I know! It may not apply as much to flute making as to the workshop in general. I'm talking about patterns. Like I said, not so much a problem for small things like most flutes or fetishes. If you're anything like me, though, you do a lot more in your shop than flutes. My partner and I share a shop. She creates stained glass and wooden Intarsia art. We both tackle other woodworking projects as well. Much of this requires full-sized patterns in paper or something similar. It has become more and more a problem to file patterns so that they can be found easily for next time. I guess I should mention that we generally design our own patterns as well, usually starting with sketches on paper, proceeding to a final pattern sketch.
Scanning them into the computer works pretty well. Since many are larger than 8 1/2 x 11, I use a panorama program to stitch several scans together into one .jpg or .pdf file. It takes some time to do this, but once it's done it's great. Often I then copy the .jpg file into my CAD program as it gives me a lot more control and flexibility in scaling and printing. Once I have done this, then it becomes easy to print a new pattern as needed. (Would be so much nicer if we had access to large format printer!) Needless to say, the computer can store a whole lot more patterns than a house full of special drawers or files!
Many patterns just don't lend themselves to scanning. We still have the problem of filing the paper originals for future use. Does anyone else have a system for doing this? Anything I can think of takes valuable room in the house, and the shop just isn't an environment suitable for paper storage.
I've been asked to give an Intro to Permaculture talk at Bastrop's First Heart of Texas Green Expo on June 8 and 9, 2012. Got to the website and check it out. My talk is currently scheduled for Saturday, June 9 at 11 A.M., but check the schedule and make sure. It should be a good weekend, lots of exhibitors and entertainment! Cat Dancing and I will also be vending with our art, flutes, and bee hives.
Cat Dancing Creations set up a booth at the Austin Celtic Festival last weekend. There were a lot of people out both days for the music and events. Business was only so - so. We had plenty of lookers, but not too many people seemed to be buying anything. Cat finally put out her Tarot Reading sign on Sunday and that brought in enough money to make it almost worthwhile.
The music was great, though. I particularly enjoyed Ed Miller and The Silver Thistle pipe band.
It was cloudy and windy all weekend.
In the pic above you can see our booth.
As well as a really alert young man behind my right elbow.
Not mentioning any names.
One of our new pieces we featured for the Celtic Festival.
A triskelion from three woods. It's a new design and pretty cool!
This weekend we're setting up at the Vortex Theater on Manor Rd. in Austin for the East Austin Studio Tour. See you there!
A few weeks back we had the first annual Celtic Festival at Sherwood Forest. What a great time! The folks at Sherwood Forest Faire decided to have this Celtic festival to fill in a bit of the off season. Our third season of the actual Renaissance Festival starts next February 11, 2012 and runs through April 1. I'll be posting more, no doubt about it. You can also see pictures posted in my past blogs here.
We had many people coming through who were there for the first time. I'm afraid a few were disappointed. It did look a bit underwhelming. I mean, the grounds are great, but only a few of the usual vendors set up for this one weekend event. Many are busy at other faires or getting ready for the Texas Renaissance Festival starting soon.
Everyone was surprised by the turnout. I don't have the final numbers, but there were already 3,000 people there by 2 pm on Saturday. The food and drink vendors were running out of supplies already by then. Cat Dancing Creations, our booth #309, had our best sales day ever.
I just had to share a picture we received from artist Chuck Bryan featuring our Sherwood Forest Faire booth. He did a great job! You can see Cat Dancing dancing in the center, (and another cat dancing on the roof). I'm on the left porch playing my flute, and Sir Silvanus is on the right side sitting down. I love all the detail. Well done, Sir Chuck!
Building stem walls and filling the floors continued, actually has hardly stopped even now. Silas continued with that process with Michael's help and Cat, Michael, and I continued to haul scrounged rocks for the process.
However, we also were getting pressed for time to get at least some of the booth ready for the opening of the Faire in February. Michael and I pushed on to get the roof on. The roof was also needed to protect the new dirt in the floor from rains.
We went ahead with metal roofing for the high roof, as that roof slopes away from the "on stage" area, I felt we could camouflage whatever metal was left showing there and have the benefits of metal.
Here, most of the high metal roofing is on. You can see one of the two translucent fiberglass panels we included to provide light. We plan to conceal the underside of the steel roofing with burlap.
Here's an angle showing the whole high roof on with both skylights.
Here's another shot with all the roofing on. Also showing some of the bracing and the Flintstone roller.
As the porch roof is totally visible from the Faire grounds, I decided to go with cedar shake shingles on that to be durable, and period.
Here is the porch roof nearly finished. We had already purchased metal roofing for the high roof. I was surprised to find that the square footage cost was roughly the same.
With Faire opening rapidly approaching we needed to find a way to acceptably vend out of our unfinished space. Theater friends we knew loaned us several theater flats made of plywood which we painted and closed off the front of our building. The square opening here will be one of our front windows, but for 2010 Faire we displayed art in it as you'll see later. Here you can also see the initial uprights for the wattle and daub walls. These were saplings I harvested from trimmings on site. These were various types of tree limbs, reasonably straight, a few are juniper. It wound up looking nice in front of the plywood, didn't it?
Here is the same area in the above picture, as it was when we opened. Some of Cat Dancing's stained glass is in the foreground, the Intarsia wood art is in the window space.
Here is the whole booth as it looked when the faire opened. You can see the rest of the flats. We covered the exposed front of the metal roof with a wood soffit of salvaged wood. The rest of the art is visible here, and you can see Cat standing on the ramp. More saplings were used to make railings around the porch, as there was easily a two foot drop off of the right side! The front doors are again made of salvaged wood and are fixed partly open here. We kept the sales accounting stuff in back. Exposed roofing on the ends was covered here with white fabric for the faire.
Another shot of the porch with the lovely proprietress, Lady Cat Dancing, in faire garb. The open doors with curtain are visible here, as well as the verticals over the door.
For the sake of balance, here's a shot of the right side of the porch, the rest of the art.
Sir Silas all garbed up in the plaid of his sept.
Sir William of RainCrow. Yours truly. Holding up a post, or vice-versa. Too much mead perhaps? I'm also in a family plaid. The 3M family, I think!
And, of course, Sir Michael.
All in all, the first year of Sherwood Forest Faire was a huge success!
We took a couple of months off afterward and then began the work to finish the booth for real!
Next: More floor dirt, and design change! Stay tuned!
A friend asked me to talk a little about the decks we've collected and my favorites. As I mentioned before, I'd strongly suggest either following the links I have to Amazon on this page to look over the decks that may interest you, or else go to Aeclectic Tarot for a really diverse library of decks. Of course, since I might possibly earn a few pennies, I always appreciate someone using my Amazon links!
A further disclaimer, as such. My lady love Cat Dancing has a much more in depth Tarot blog. She is the pro, after all. I'm learning from her, but I am only the grasshopper!
When Cat and I first met, I had already collected twenty seven tarot decks, I love the art, and I could get them rather cheaply, some at Half Price Books, some at garage sales and Goodwill. When we started talking, this is one of the things that intrigued Cat about me. I loved the cards, but really knew nothing about them metaphysically, whereas she had been a student and reader of Tarot for some time already.
As of today, combined, we have fifty decks of tarot and divination cards. This only includes two duplicate sets that Cat and I both already had. The list follows, in no particular order.
The list:
Tarot of the Cat People
Robin Wood Tarot
Halloween Tarot
Thoth Tarot (2 sets)
Shapeshifter Tarot
Llewellyn Tarot
Pearls of Wisdom Tarot
Shadowscapes Tarot
Gilded Tarot
Arthurian Legend Tarot
Sensual Wicca Tarot
Witchy Tarot (miniature deck)
White Cats Tarot (miniature deck)
Ancient Tarots of Bologna
Rock Art Tarot
Barbara Walker Tarot
Gendron Tarot
Native American Tarot
Witches Tarot
Rider - Waite - Smith Tarot
Don Clemente Tradicional (Spanish deck, minors only)
Tarot of Dreams
Legacy of the Tarot
Tarot of the Imagination
Tapestry Tarot
Medieval Scapini Tarot
Silicon Valley Tarot
Medieval Enchantment Tarot
Da Vinci Enigma Tarot
Cosmic Tribe Tarot
Merlin Tarot
Quest Tarot
Lord of the Rings Tarot
Cosmic Tarot
Flash Card Tarot
Robert M. Place Vampire Tarot
Druid Craft Tarot
Gypsy Witch Fortune Telling Playing Cards
Sacred Path (Oracle type deck)
Brian Froud: Faerie Oracle
Goddess Oracle (2 sets)
Animal Medicine (oracle)
Mermaids and Dolphins Oracle
Caroline Myss Archetype Cards (oracle, somewhat)
Love Cards (oracle)
Buckland Domino Divination Deck (not tarot)
Russian Gypsy Fortune Telling Cards (kind of tarot, kind of not)
Box of Dreams (dream symbol cards)
There they are! That doesn't include several sets of standard playing cards, also sometimes used for divination.
Now for the favorites. Cat Dancing really likes the Gilded Tarot for most of her professional reading. So much so, that she has recently ordered a replacement deck of the Gilded. She has literally worn out her previous deck. Ciro Marchetti is the artist of the Gilded Tarot, as well as the Legacy, and Dream Tarots listed above. His artwork is incredible! For some of her personal work, Cat uses the Pearls of Wisdom Tarot, and has started working some with her new Shadowscapes deck. She often pulls out the Robin Wood deck and others to use in her classes.
For myself, my longest running favorite has been the Sensual Wicca Tarot. I like the images, and there is an "inner" story happening in the cards that is always intriguing.
I find myself often referring back to the basic Rider - Waite - Smith deck. This deck has been the basis for most other decks out there since it first came out in 1909. I love the art in all the other decks, but the illustrations in the RWS deck are literally in the "one picture equals a thousand words" category. If I am puzzled on a card in another deck, I will go to the RWS deck and it straightens me out!
Another "study help" deck that both of us often find ourselves looking at is the Flash Card Tarot, by Linda Nadeau. It has simple, but evocative illustrations, and the back of each card also has a concise description of what the card represents, a mnemonic, and questions often related to the card. Most tarot decks come with some sort of book, the Flash Card Tarot is its own book! One more deck I work with occasionally is the Cosmic Tarot. The art is visually interesting, but sometimes it gets in the way of study. As interesting as it is, some of the illustrations don't, to me, really work with the more traditional meanings of the cards. If, however, I'm working with a "storytelling" spread, it works very well sometimes. See my previous posts about using the Tarot in writing!
As I've stated in other posts, my two newest decks have occupied much of my attention lately. The Vampire Tarot by Robert M. Place, and the Druid Craft Tarot by Philip and Stephanie Carr-Gomm. It's too early to tell if I will use them actively in classes or elsewhere, or simply enjoy the art.
Oftentimes in various Tarot Classes or Workshops we will take several different decks. We'll work with one principally, and lay out the corresponding cards from other decks just to compare the various artist visions. Different scenes evoke different responses from people. As it is, a class of eight students will often have eight different types of decks. It is always interesting to compare.
The other "basic" tarot deck is the Thoth deck. Aleister Crowley conceived the deck, the pictures were painted by Lady Frieda Harris between 1938 and 1943. The deck is similar, but a bit different from the RWS deck. There are the same number of cards, 78, but many have different names and a slightly different order. Many readers use the Thoth deck, I've had trouble getting used to it. The art work is wonderful, but a bit on the abstract side.
The "non tarot" decks we have are mostly some sort of "oracle" deck. Oracle cards have the same concept of tarot, but don't usually have the same number of cards, nor are they usually divided up into suits.
One of the more interesting of the "sort of not-tarot" decks is the Russian Gypsy Fortune Telling Cards. I haven't spent as much time as I'd like to with this intriguing deck. The 25 cards are quartered diagonally with different colorful patterns, not unlike quilt blocks. As they are laid out, they match, or don't, the cards next to them, and that shapes the reading. If you want to do your divining differently, it might be worth a try.
I can't say enough about taking Tarot Classes. We are blessed to have several really good teachers here in Austin, Texas. Being Teacher's Pet, I go to all of Cat Dancing's classes, of course. She has a regular one on the fourth Monday of each month. Suzanne McAnna is another teacher here both Cat and I learn from. She and Cat also teach classes and workshops together quite often.
Books are also great. As I've mentioned in the past, some of the best books on Tarot to go to are written by Rachel Pollack, Corinne Kenner, and most especially Mary K. Greer. A.E. Waite's book "Pictorial Key to the Tarot" also has a permanent place in my library. I even have a PDF version available constantly. I admit the original copy seemed a bit hard to understand when I first attempted it as a teen, but now I find it very handy. (Of course, back then I wasn't as interested in the "reading" aspects of the cards.)
See you in class!
