Artists Farm

the move is finally complete, and everything in the workshop is almost back in place. It took a few days to get the network back in place, but the shopcam is back together, and I’ll be broadcasting again starting tomorrow.

The move was difficult, the heat unbearable. It took me 3 days to get everything out of my old apartment, and even then the new landlord deducted fifty bucks from my security deposit, convinced I had been dying leather in the kitchen sink.

The new house is great so far, I am finally getting comfortable in the new space. Soon I hope to start the search for the next couple of members to comprise a basic board of directors, in order to launch the not-for-profit business and get all the paperwork in place to begin Artists Farm in earnest.

July 1 I get to move into a two bedroom house in Monona WI. While packing up here, and cleaning up here, and moving there, I still have to keep production running smoothly along. Then its going to take days and days to get everything installed in the new place. My network isn’t fully wireless, I have lots of network cables and coax running all around my apartment. I am looking forward to getting the workshop set up on a concrete floor, it’ll be just like the old days back in South Florida where all the floors are confetti terrazzo.

The owner of the rental house I looked at the other day has contacted the references I provided and emailed me late last night that he would like to move forward on signing a lease with me for a year and then it goes to a monthly thing which is fine by me. My biggest worry right now is that having just signed a contract with DishNetwork, it may be difficult for a dish to get an unobstructed view of the southern sky. The house sits underneath a lot of trees, so not only will placing a satellite dish be dicey but at the same time I will lose a lot of the streaming sunlight I have enjoyed in my current flat of five years. I do love lots of sunlight!

I’ll be setting up my workshop in the house’s basement, which of course does not get a lot of sunlight. The only answer is lots of compact fluorescent lights. A lot of network and speaker wiring will have to go in, as well as coax cables. At the same time I get to pull out all the wiring I have installed in my current place and spackle all of holes I drilled over the years.

The new house is small, but it has two bedrooms, so after I get settled in the search for an apprentice goes into full operation.

for a small 2 bedroom house with a full (and fortunately, dry) basement in the Madison area. I hoped I would only have to move one last time, into a purchase, but that’s another year away at this point I guess. This house gives me an extra bedroom to try out potential leather apprentices maybe. Hopefully this first one to get his foot in the door will be the right candidate, and this project can take off. Housemates are automatically Board Members, at least at the beginning. Three people are required to make a not-for-profit.

George Zimmerman amasses $200,000 using Paypal but an HIV+ artist gets locked out in the cold.

After being disappointed by my new roll of sling canvas, I thought I’d cheer myself up perusing Craigslist for a rental house. I have found many “rentals” on Craigslist are actually homes listed for sale on a multi-listing site, and some bright bulbs somewhere in “West Africa” create Craigslist Rental ads from the pics & text they copy from the MLS. They actually expect people to FedEx money orders to Nigeria. I spoke with a person at the local UPS Store who said she knows of at least one person who sent cash to Africa expecting a house key in return.

Teh stupid, it burns!

So I have targeted ads that also have a local phone number, and I just found a place close by with hardwood floors, allows cats, and is less than $1000/month (by twenty bucks…)

I’ll go see it Wednesday. If things go as I expect, as soon as I sign a one year lease I will then find my piece of property without being able to actually move. I am stuck between a rock and a hard place except the rock is my comfy apartment of 5 years and the hard place is my Farm. The only bit that is frustrating is the “stuck” feeling.

If I sign a new lease, I am another year away from owning.

I let myself sleep in today, for no real reason. Got through the morning in the usual way until I started thinking about Paypal.

Today’s chore was cutting the 75 yard roll of canvas down to individual sling-sized pieces. I need to make 48 canvas slings for an order, so thats a good solid week of work right there. But I couldn’t bring myself to cut up the entire roll of canvas due to the number of knots and runs in the weave & weft. Nobody wants a canvas sling that has weird thread things like this:

There are more knots on this roll than I have ever seen before and I’ve seen a lot of canvas. This roll might be useful to someone making smaller items but I cut wide, long swathes for my canvas slings and I kind of expect the weave to look consistently unremarkable, not full of twists and skips and runs.

I decided I have to stop cutting and send the remainder of the roll back to the factory. This will not be the first massive roll of canvas I have returned; I can only imagine the person running the machine that day called it, and let the machine wreck its havoc as it will. I can’t imagine having a job but not making sure you do your job well. I suppose the mill that wove this canvas chair duck is not in the US, I buy the stuff from a middleman. When I sent the last roll back (in pieces) that company did agree that the stuff was crap.

I hate making crap

I just purchased an electronic API code to activate an anti-spam protection spell or program or whatever you call it. I am hoping this will allow me to open up the Comments without being flooded with garbage from East Europe.

Please consider this an Open Thread, and we’ll see what evolves.

Good luck to us!

Wish I could be in Chicago with you this weekend, maybe next year. Life has been somewhat hectic here, and I couldn’t pull myself away except for a trip to the dentist yesterday for a new crown. The new leather shipment arrived this morning, so the shopcam will be running pretty much all day. Time to make the donuts er slings….

My sincere hope is that someone stumbles across this website, likes what they see, and wants to be a part of it. Maybe you would like to support the project or know someone who would like to try their hand at leatherwork. This project is meant to outlive us all!

I have been going to craigslist looking for my next home since last February. Its getting very depressing. Either the place doesn’t take cats, or thinks I am going to “operate a commercial enterprise from their residence”, or the rent is so high I will never get any down payment saved up for my own home.

I hate seeing ads that say “New carpeting!” For someone with a commercial sewing machine, thats the last thing you want to read. My current flat’s wood floors were ruined by the previous tenant’s bulldog pissing on it for 13 years, so I couldn’t make it much worse.

I saw one ad that spoke of a nice work shop/garage, only a few miles from my hopyard, just what I need: but they only allow dogs. Which is odd because it was a farm house attached to a large working farm that someone bought to operate, but didn’t want to live in the original house.

My new landlord thought it would be a breeze, finding a new apartment on craigslist. When he handed me a 60-day notice maybe he figured I could be gone in a couple weeks (he wants to start re-habbing the flat). He didn’t know I’d been looking since February.  My failure of a case manager at ARCW also wondered why I am so distraught, as she also said ” there are hundreds of apartments on craigslist!” I told her it wasn’t her job to help me find a new place, rather to help make sure I don’t get illegally tossed out of my current home of 5 years. This little bump seems to have settled out for now, the 60 days is forgotten but in the end, I still need to find my next home. I was lucky the old owner even let me into this space, though he laughed at my slings, saying I should sell some to his proctologist. Of course that was when the first floor tenants actually had “day” jobs, that allowed me to make a little bit of noise upstairs.  The current couple below me sleep in till noon, right underneath my sewing machine. They kind of stretched my definition of “day jobs” when they answered my  craigslist ad for the flat.

I have been finding lots of really excellent looking houses on craigslist, but guess what I get back? Emails from West Africa. I’ve had several now.