A small group of us have been working on the organisation of the pop up shop. Today we finished screen printing most of the posters and flyers! The design of the 12 1/12 symbols came from Hyun-ho, then addapted by Nuria and I thought it would work better if we highlighted one of the 1/12 and the date in red to help aid the hierarchy. 

Just a quick idea of how I would like the lamps to be displayed in the shop at the moment. Im going to play around with some ideas but this is where I am at the moment. Not sure why but the lamp seemed to look really nice on my desk among the plants and random bits of metal I had so thought that actually having a really nicely textured plant would help emphasise the naturalness of the product. The old wooden crate from an old Diesel display adds another level to the industrial and manufactured vibe. It's material and texture may also be an influence as to why I thought  the plant might look nice in there. 

This bush is also pretty easy to look after as well. It doesn't need a lot of sun light and the label says "keep moist". I can do that. 

Finally, you can see on the top there is a burnt piece of paper. If you look down there is another square piece of paper. I have one open and one closed and you get one with every lamp. This is my label to help add a personal touch to the artefact. Bellow is the template so you can see what it actually says. I print and cut these out, but as I do it I round the corners by eye. I then fold them up and lightly singe them. The thought process behind this choice was to help further visualise the process of heat and baking through production. 

TA DAH!!!! All done! FINALLY!!


All of my lamps. Done. Finished. Baked. Toasted. Rotated. Cooled. Re-heated. Wired. Earthed. Tested. Complete. 

This next part is really annoying. When I bake the these shapes in the oven the solder in the open end melts and resets in a new shape, blocking the entrance to that hole which stops you connecting the second half of the frame.

My way around it is to heat it up again on the stove in a very specific spot and try to extract the excess solder. Without destroying my cooker. I tried to put foil down to protect the hob but it completely blocked the heat.

In my last picture of a lamp in its entirety, the bulb was sagging down a little. I didn't actually mind it doing that and i predicted it may well do that, but i feared over time it would worsen, and it may be quite difficult to keep the bulb from falling too much in the future. Josh also pointed out concerns of the bulb being close to the metal frame work and that it may get hot very quickly. I put it on in my room and left it on for about 4-5 hours and then checked how the pipe felt. The bulbs are warm but you can still touch the actual bulb itself with no danger of hurting your self and the pipe was completely fine. STILL, I thought this would be a concern to the public as well and as I'm selling something that is electrical, I feel i should do my best to make it look as professional as possible, to reassure people of its reliability, quality and safety.


Soooooo, I found the strongest super glue I could find. It has a picture of a car on it?? So I guess its good for putting a car together. I placed a small amount around the edge of the lamp holder and held it in place for 20 minutes whilst it set. During this time I was anticipating how wonderful it was going to be to have to do this for the next 12 lamps I needed to make... Perhaps I could solve world hunger and then tell no one.


The finished product I think looks far more professional and soundly made. I hope you do too :) 

Next batch of lamps. To cut out an extra process, I discovered that if i prop up the pipe from the tee joints, I can actually join the elbow joints that act as the feet at the same time. Also on this design, because the elbow joints are facing down, the solder in much more likely to fall out on to the oven so i'm extra careful.

Time to bake! I have all my equipment with me and its ready to be made. I don't want it to take for ever and to run a huge electricity bill so i'm trying to cram as many pieces of pipe on the tray at once. I'm also putting some tin foil on the tray to protect the oven from any solder that may unexpectedly drip out.

Before!! 

 

AND AFTER!

You can see that the colour has changed quite a lot from the super shinny in to this dark and richer colour. The colours that you get from baking are very different to when I treated them on the stove. Not entirely sure why that is. Maybe the oven is a dryer heat?? But then again my stove isn't exactly wet :/ I think it looks pretty cool though when you have the two types of treated metal next to each other in the same lamp though.