Another New Project

And... it's all over now.

Talk about a spoiler, eh?  But it was quick, from need, to flash of an idea, to implementation, and now just the wait for the final result, made by somebody else. My part, aside from picking it up and paying the second half, is over. 

The club needs a banner to identify us for special events. Two stand out. First, the Fall Festival, held Thanksgiving Friday and Saturday, where all the craft clubs in Sun City bring what their members made to sell to a single location and invite everybody they can reach in to buy buy buy.  The other is held in January, welcoming new residents to Sun City. The head organization puts it on, gives a program introducing people to all the good things  (clubs, pools, golf) one can do here, with a selection of the  clubs having just single tables this time showing the variety of what we make or do, with a couple people sitting there to chat with anybody who wants information about our club.

Last year that second one was embarrassing. We had no identifying banner, nor were we well prepared in other ways. Every other table put us to shame in their presentation. So the Board decided to do something about it last spring. Somebody volunteered. I checked in with a "what ever happened to...?" to the person in question, and wound up with the task myself.

Uh, OK, sure. Uhhhhhh......

I was told to visit our nearest neighboring craft club in the building, Woodworking. Several of our members are members there too, knew they'd made a new banner recently, were pleased with the work, and would  happily pass on information on logistics. So I did. Their banner was hanging from a high spot on their back wall, easy to see. I got the information including vague directions of where to find the printing company which did the work, though they didn't remember the name exactly. Or more precisely, not even at all. But I'd know it when I saw it because their windows were plastered with samples of their printing work.

The best advice Woodworking gave me was to go with an 8 foot tablecloth since banners are impossible to keep in place hanging from the front of a table. The way the company does them is with it hanging off the table down to the floor on the front and sides, but coming down just a little ways in the back so stuff can be stored under the table discretely. Including your legs if you're sitting talking to customers and/or potential members. The long front side becomes what gets printed for your banner. The table and whatever is on it holds it in place.

So, what to put on it. Woodworking had their name on the left side, a wooden plaque on the right side, and small letters across the bottom with their address and club phone number. Think of it as an oversized business card, where the potential customer/member gets to write it down or shoot it with their smart phone. OK, got it all. Now how to make it work for our club?

The easy part is the bottom border info. Next the club name, but how to make it stand out and say something about us? We are Fairway Sterling & Stones. Fairway tells which rec center we are in. How to distinguish that?  Sterling is only one of the metals we work in, something which distinguishes us from another jewelry club which only does silver. We do lots in copper, with some brass and bronze thrown in.  The Stones part is for lapidary, but we also do lots of glass fusion work, and how do we throw that in? Can we even find a way to show glass that looks like glass in something printed on fabric? Since I was coming up completely blank with how to show glass when we're not talking about glass in any kind of a way that doesn't just confuse folks, I decided to set that aside. If inspiration struck in the middle of the process, fine. Deal with it then. Sometimes less is more.

But inspiration had already struck in a slightly different direction, and it carried me right along with it. Let the letters tell their own story. Meanwhile, it was time to hit the road and hunt for this printer, ask questions, get answers, find out what was possible. That resulted in two separate stops there, once I located them, to figure out what the questions actually were! Always a good starting place, I firmly believe. And since my inspiration was going to be complicated and time consuming, both for me and the printer, I better get it right from the start. If it's not possible, why waste time? However, I was already heavily invested in my idea and making it possible. It would so set us apart.

I settled for just letters, no plaque, no business card type decoration, no jewelry even, though an early idea involved spelling the words out in jewelry chains. That was quickly abandoned as too much effort for too little reward. I found out that they can print in metalic finishes, not just choices from your basic color wheel. The other important piece was that they can print from photo images. My brainstorm was good to go.

Layout, aside from the bottom information line, was two lines of text, centered, block letters but fat. The top line will have "FAIRWAY" in shiny bright copper letters, just because we do copper. "STERLING" will be next to it done in shiny silver letters, because what else? 

It's the second line where all the fun came in. "& STONES" will have each individual character done as if cut out of a slab of a different rock, i.e., one rock, one letter. A closet hunt began. My closet, that is. I  originally thought I'd be more interested in the lapidary than in the metal side of what the club does. I spent about a year on eBay ordering cut slabs from a few select sellers of whatever appealed to me at the times my budget had its openings. There are three FedEx boxes stacked on the floor packed with them. Yep, still sitting there. I pulled each out, singly since those boxes are hefty, separated out the contents looking for good representations of a wide variety of great stones, plugging along in the search though occasionally offered the opportunity to wonder what on earth made this or that rock appealing. I made sure to wet down each choice to show the best color before choosing, seeing greys turn into greens, purples, blues, browns, golds, reds.

Out came the camera, the chosen stones plus a water source hauled onto the patio for bright light, and shooting began. Dump files into the laptop. Edit. Reject several, reshoot others, fiddle some more, dig through different rocks, rinse, repeat. Wake up the next morning, dig out some polished rocks and find ways to shoot them for best results without glare from the polishing, shoot, fiddle, reject, reshoot, rinse repeat. And yes, the rocks all went back in the boxes or wherever they came from, and those boxes were returned to the closet floor! Uff Da!

The ultimate result was eleven jpeg files to take to the nearest processing store, and later in the morning of the second (calendar) day on this project, take to the club. I explained to all there that I needed all their input if they wished to do so. Come look at the rock photos, knowing each one potentially could be a letter on the banner, and choose which you thought were the best. It happened all our officers were in the club that morning, and several others stopped by to like/reject their choices. We got rid of three photos easily, having too much white in the stones to stand out clearly on a white background. One other was a toss up, but finally rejected because it didn't have the color depth to stand out with the others. One member who also is a painter did the initial lineup of them in contrast to their neighbors, and I made the final cuts and arrangement based on how each letter would make the best of the beauty of each stone. One I absolutely insisted on with my executive authority. The polished green oval of malachite, bought last winter for its beautiful pattern across the rock, rather than just a dab of pattern like so many being sold, was to retain its oval shape and remain whole. It would be the "O", but would have no center cutout.

Then there was figuring out how each letter would best show off the beauty of the stone from the photo. A triangular agate with a druzy center would be the "T" but tilted relative to the photo's axis, for example. When the graphic artist at the printer translates my wobbly lines into the border for the letter, the letter's axis would rule, not how the picture was first taken. She got each marked up photo, written comments on each photo where needed, and a page full of instructions this morning. She also got all seven jpeg files to work with to match - only better formed than my pen scratching once she got done. I'd made a sample of the layout and text and instructions from my laptop, printed two copies, let their questions be asked and left name and phone number for anything that got missed.

The detail needed to make the letters raised the price from the quote due to more labor than the usual order. It still came in under the quoted budget for the project, so I approved, paid half, and other than picking it up, consider it completed. All in just under 48 hours, from getting tasked with the project, through the planning, and delivering it to the manufacturer. I ate, breathed, talked, worked, slept in thrall to it, basking in the glory of making something imagined become real.

The irony is those two days were the busiest of my fall, but not from this project. There was a medical visit, some shopping, an oil change, some yard work, several other tasks and many conversations in the club, and a very needy dog demanding lots of cuddling and about double the usual number of walks out in the yard, some phone calls, bills to be paid, and even a bit of time for TV to get watched. 

For comic relief, while I was at the printer, I received a phone call from my insurance agent about my settlement payment. Last week she promised it would be directly deposited to my credit union in about three days. It had been. So why the call? Had something changed? She informed me that the payment had bounced back to them, so could they try again? I had just looked at it this morning, and informed her that not only was the money received without any issues, it had already been partly spent and that also was accounted for in the online account records. Her response was to throw a few seemingly random words together, sort of a homina - homina to keep the conversation going, before reading further down her notice to the "no further action needed at this point" text. I didn't choose to suggest that she could send it again if she absolutely needed to. I'm sure they would have clawed it back as soon as somebody noticed the double payment.