I have moved my studio to a new location! I am no longer at the Milwaukee Fortress, I have moved just a few miles north to a building called the Nut Factory. My new address is 3720 North Fratney Street, Studio 3D, Milwaukee, WI 53212.
Actually I’m still in the process of moving so I can’t really take the time to do a proper post here, but will soon.
It looks like I will not be forced to move the studio as quickly as I first feared. The building’s owner has changed his plan for developing this building into apartments. This change of plans may have something to do with the 1,000+ new apartment units already being built within a mile of my location.
Meanwhile I’ve turned a tree a client had taken down in his yard into a dining table. I never did get any good photos of this project but I do have a screen grab of the design showing some of the complex joinery from below.
I have also completed a series of 3 legged stools made from wood I have been setting aside for stools. I figured I may as well get them made so I won’t have to move the wood when I do eventually move the shop.
Last but not least I have been working on several art projects and have just completed a major piece.
First Stand
This piece is 50.5″ x 35.5″. It was made with pine, plywood and latex house paint.
I haven’t written much about my art work on this blog, I hope to be adding some work soon.
I have learned in the last few weeks that the building that my studio is in will be converted to apartments soon. I have been in this building for 25 years now. I am currently focused on finding a new location.
The Milwaukee Fortress, about to be converted to apartments.
Somehow I missed this nice piece about my work. Cream City and Sugar
…the summer has slipped by so quickly.
I found the inspiration for these salad tongs while perusing old magazines. They are a perfect way to use pieces of cherry veneer that are too small for tables and cabinets. They are finished with a light coat of a food safe oil. All they need after tossing your salad is a gentle wipe with a damp cloth. Your salad oil will further enhance the finish. These are not dishwasher safe. Click on any of the images to go to my Etsy shop where it is easy to place an order.
Oh btw, a set would also make a very nice house warming gift.
I’ve changed my wordpress theme to a much lighter look (DePo Masthead by Derek Powazek) and thought I’d post a few links to some earlier, favorite pieces I’ve posted about in the past. Click on an image for links to the posts.
Armoire base by Todd Fillingham
Wisconsin Historical Society
I’ve started a new blog that will carry my posts about Milwaukee’s 3 rivers and my scheme to introduce small boats to folks who live along it. I transferred my earlier post that I originally posted on this blog and have a new post up. Here’s the link (click on the image below)-
I’ll still be posting about lots of other things on this blog so don’t go away.
I’ve never been happy with the results of scanning slides on my Microtek ScanMaker 4850 with the slide attachment. Some of the slides came out fantastic while others were horrible. So I started doing a little research into buying a new slide scanner and read quite a few online reviews and comments by others. While some seemed pretty good they were quite expensive and I wasn’t about to plunk down several hundred dollars for a scanner I wasn’t sure would really do the job for me. The lower end ones seemed to be no better than the set up I had already, however the least expensive scanner intrigued me. It was an attachment to your digital camera that held the slide. You would then point your camera with the attachment towards an appropriate light source and take a picture of your slide.
As I thought about this I decided I needed to do a little proof of principle research to see if this could really work. As I got into it I realized that I could put together something that worked on this principle myself. Here’s is the set up so far:
The set up starts with my light table, something I put together years ago from an old studio lamp and some sand blasted glass. I found that it really helped to eliminate extraneous light and to have the slide well away from the glass so that the camera could focus on the slide and not on the texture of the sand blasted (not really “ground”) glass. To accomplish this quickly, again I’m still in the proof of principle mode here, I taped together some card stock as shown.
It also was helpful to have the slide line up in the same place every time as my light table did not uniformly distribute light over the glass. The center was brighter than the edges. At this point I taped the box onto the glass and tilted the “light table” so that I could use my camera on a tripod to try a few shots. Those initial test images were promising but there was too much light coming in from the studio as incident light on to the slide.
I took a plastic container that once held yogurt, cut a hole in the bottom of it and painted it black and then set that on top of the slide holder. I placed my camera on top of that container and had my scanner.
When I get a little more time I’ll work on getting the camera settings fined tune. Here’s one of my test shots after a little doctoring with my Paint Shop Pro application.
I have got tons of slides, I can’t wait to scan some of the best and put them up in my portfolio of my new web site.
Today I have to refine the design of how I’ll present the images and information in the portfolio section of my site, my new site, the one I’m working to get up soon.
Right now I have someone who is doing the actual html coding. I’m creating mock-ups of the pages in Paint Shop Pro-5. I add a layer with notes and comments about how I want the page to look and where the links should go.
Something like this. I send Nate, my computer wiz, the file and associated image files and creates the page in html.
To work out how I want the site to be organized I am using FreeMind, a mind mapping app. to map out the links, write notes about content and to keep a focus on my goals for the site.
You can learn more about FreeMind at SourceForge.
One of the things I’m trying very hard to do for this site is to focus on specific goals for the site. First of all this site is a site for my business and should contribute to adding to my bottom line. I polled past customers about what they would like to have seen on my current website when they visited it and got some eye opening answers. One that stood out was that it wasn’t immediately clear what I do. Another comment was that they were not sure where I was located and since they wanted to do business locally that was very important to them. Those were great comments and I am doing what I can to address them on my new site.
It is very tempting to try and create a really slick, very cool, very hip site. My focus on this site however is to be as clear as possible to potential clients how I can benefit them. My prime benefit to 90% of my clients is that I can design and make for them something that they have not been able to find anywhere else. There is a lot more that I offer and once someone has done business with me they often soon realize that. They begin to get a sense of some of the wealth of non-tangible value that I can offer, part of what I hope to communicate on my new site is exactly that. More on that later.
Now I have to work out a clear way of presenting work I have done in the past in such a way that someone will get the message that I can do their project as well. I also want to show some designs that I will be selling on a made-to-order basis that will not only be practical pieces but also give much of intangible value custom work can give. I also want to put up some rough designs and sketches that may spark an interest in someone. Maybe someone is looking for something but they can’t quite articulate exactly what it is. If they see some of my rougher ideas they may interpret that image in a way that allows them to form a clear idea of just what they had been looking for. OK, that’s a little inarticulate on my part but this is something I hope to be writing more about.
Fillingham Art Furniture Design 