Making Things Happen, Day 1

Today was a great start to the Making Things Happen (For a Week Straight) show. We got the gallery basically put together, showing some of our existing projects and making it into a big studio of sorts. The major projects of the day were painting the title wall, getting a new adapter for our LED sign, and starting on some wire + newspaper baskets for what’s casually been dubbed as hanging seed bombs.

The tools to start the title wall.

The camera setup for time-lapse … I think the time between shots was probably too long, still trying to figure out the best interval to go with, 3 minutes might be too much.

The wall ready for action.

The paint we got was mixed from a swatch printed off of my cheap colour laser printer. For some reason, it always seems to tint things fairly pink, so it was difficult to get the yellow/green the right colour.

Going back and forth between the two laptops to try to get everything working for the time-lapse before Michelle could start painting.

Michelle starting the paint job on the title wall.

Michelle ended up doing 3 coats to get this nice and greenyellowy.

We need to reposition the lights, as the top left corner has a really strong bright-spot on it.

The letters printed out for the title wall. BROKEN CITY LAB as one letter per 8.5 x 11, the subtitle, approximately two to three letters per page.

Michelle and Josh moved the central table in from the Green Corridor room.

They then flanked the big table with two other tables from the lecture room. It’s a good sized work space now.

The morning was pretty slow, cutting out the letters for the title wall took a while, Steve and Immony dropped by for a while.

The letters cut out and ready to be stenciled. We decided against using the mylar and ending up with the positive stencil in the grey colour Michelle picked out. Instead, we decided to paint over these letters once they were stuck up on the wall.

I went about trying to make the perfect strange angle for the text.

I think this was pretty close to where we ended up with. There was a moment we considered not painting over them, but I would have preferred to get some vinyl cut if we went this way with it.

Michelle and Josh organize the letters to prepare them for spray-adhesive.

Michelle sprays the back of HAPPEN.

I place the subtitle, MAKING THINGS HAPPEN, on another weird angle.

Michelle spray paints the letters with a solid grey.

Around noon, and after the wall was painted, Immony and I moved some stuff into the gallery from my studio.

This is the sticker-board from the wheat paste demo.

This is the 2009 strategic plan and a map of Windsor we bought this morning.

Talitha and Billie watched as we lit up the LED sign after hanging in on the wall.

It was really bright in the dark space, we ended up hanging it with 4 nails, and all the soldering stayed in place from the last time we worked on it.

Strangely though, the adapter we were used, pictured on the plinth near the basket, burnt itself out. It would heat up, then make the LEDs dim, then flash really fast. We always pulled the plug after that, but eventually, I guess, it killed itself. I went to The Source to get a variable adapter and instead of 9v (like the original), I set the new one to 7.5v. The LEDs are a little dimmer, but better that than some destroyed LEDs or another dead adapter. If anyone has any idea why this happened, put it in the comments, please.

The flagging tape leftovers from the tests.

The can of paint.

A better shot of the strategic plan.

Later in the afternoon, Immony, Danielle, and I worked with some wire Mike found to start making some small hanging baskets to eventually install on fences, poles, parking meters, and other places otherwise not attended to by Windsor’s Park and Rec.

Here’s the new adapter for the LED sign, so far so good—it lasted the rest of the afternoon.

Danielle wore some protective gloves to work with the wire. Her basket was the sturdiest, but also took the longest to assemble.

Immony’s basket was the largest, but really complex.

My basket was really small, pictured hanging above the origami boxes from the seed bomb demo.

Here’s a closer look. I think design is pretty close to what we need. Something fairly small, flat-backed, and then lined with some of the newspaper we recently received.

The wall as we left it for the better part of the day, seeing which letters would fall first.

Eventually, we just took them all off, but also a bit of the green undercoat with it. The spray adhesive had prevented some of that paint to dry, so we need to probably touch it up a bit tomorrow.

I also dragged in the wooden chalkboard for our message board / collective sketchbook / guestbook.

Leesa pointed this out — Making Things Happy !

Tomorrow there will be lots more, stay tuned.