Lamps from Wanted Design, Q. Cassetti, 2012Wow. And it keeps coming. Gloria and I went down to Corning for an amazing opening of the GlassLab Show: “Making Ideas” at the Museum of Glass. It was tons of fun, the exhibit was fresh and inspiring with a lot of things that had a high “want” including the snake candlesticks, glass hearts, glass dunnies, and glass gummy bears. I had the amazing pleasure of meeting and seeing old friends, and making a few new ones…Sigga Heimis (Iceland headquartered remarkable designer, warm and amazing woman; Sigga’s designer husband David Sandahl who works on prothesis design; and spent time with Marshall and Caitlin Hyde —learning more about them as people and artists. I had a great time and was wow’ed by the show, the people, the beautiful staging of the event and the warmth of the Hot Glass Family at the museum. It was truly an honor to be included.
Saturday was a day of planning and projecting as Sunday and Monday were days out of the office. Sunday, Rob and I got off early (6 am) to arrive in NYC at 11. I then went to Surtex, the licensing show at the Javits Center and Rob went over to be in a panel at Wanted Design. Surtex and the National Stationery show were inspiring, intellectually challenging, and is having me think a bit more dimensionally about my work. Do I want to take this puppy on? Do I want a rep? How do I hit the high end marketplace I think my work syncs with? Or is my work more geared to the European market…and should I be seeking our a rep in the UK? It was patterns upon patterns with many hot points being topics I love and work with from flowers and gardens, Christmas to even folkloric stuff. I spied lots of stuff with themes around wine, coffee, tea and cupcakes. Lots of Santas and middle America “fun and funky”—Scrubbed textured backgrounds, twitchy lines with rubbed in color seems to be very popular. The stationery show was an eye opener and an amazing resource center for graphic designers. There were my favorite paper vendors there (Curious Paper, Mohawk, Crane & Co. and Reich). There were folks who did elegant foil stamping, rolls of “wax seals”, board edging and gilding, embossing, engraving and my new drool love, laser cutting. Heaven. Also, a ton of DIY stuff for stationery stores to get into making custom wedding and event materials were there from simple software/layout systems to hand cranked diecutting sets (I admit, I just bought one!!). And did I say everyone and their brother were selling letterpress stuff! Tons and Tons and Tons. It was a lot to process, so I am planning on reading a lot and talking to you and others to see where this goes. Steep educational trajectory to make this happen.
New resources include (more tomorrow):
Accucut: a home/small shop mechanical die cutting machine
Silhouette Cameo: a small cutter that is driven by your pc. or mac. Will cut from original drawings you can make. Additionally, many existing designs (many pretty tasty) available online for download at the whopping price of $0.99/
Stick with Print works: custom postit notes. small volumes. In Syracuse.
Wanted Design featured the RIT Metaproject that Rob, Steve Gibbs, Eric Meek and Tina Oldknow were involved in to collaborate with both product design students and glass students along with Josh Owen and Michael Rogers as faculty leads. Remarkable work with great ideas, great craftsmanship and students who are articulate, poised and jazzed by the experience. There were a ton of young designers (it felt like Brooklyn) on site— showing new ideas, new ideas they were manufacturing etc. The best of all was Raleigh Denim (a jeans company run in NC. by a husband and wife pair with 20 employees making outstanding jeans locally out of locally dyed, locally woven denim in NC). Raleigh Denim has the secret to success, two amazing women who were demonstrating quite happily, and chatting away about how happy they are in this endevor…and how terrific it is to have a new business in their town. Bless them.
There is much much more for me to chat with you about. But, it is time to jump in the shaggin’wagon (Kitty’s name) to go get the cowboy. Late night.