We're at Coventry Transport Museum

We will be taking a stall at Coventry Transport Museum for their craft fair on November 14 & 15. We've never visited before but it sounds like a fun event and we have a bit of a penchant for transport related imagery.

We did visit an amazing transport museum on the North Island of New Zealand, just in case you happen to be passing. It's the Southward Car Museum fairly near Wellington.


We called in and fell in love with it. A vehicle we that particularly stuck in the mind was this gangster vehicle (below), imported from the states with reinforced bullet proof glass (ie glass about an inch thick) and authentic bullet holes.

Making pictures

This week we needed to update the website with some new Wax Cag pictures as we've just finished our first batch of 38" chest Cags. Taking photos of accessories is fairly straightforward, we just get out a white light cube, plonk them on the table, light them and more or less get shooting. Clothes are far more problematic, they really need to be modelled to be shown off to best effect. Not typically having a model or photographic studio on hand we always end up making do, normally using each other and a random space.

This time Ed was the model. We have a fairly low success rate for the photos and all of them need touching up. So I spent the afternoon doing that.
I was amazed by how much like Ed the image of his face in blue lines looked, I knew he wouldn 't appreciate being identifiable so had fun totally erasing his face.

Reduce, Reuse, and Remember to post a blog

In the spirit of regular blogging we posted our first blog about 2 months ago and have done nothing since. I think our problem was that we wanted to avoid posting blogs about the day to day minutiae of our work, unfortunately that left us with nothing to write about. Anyway my new Resolution is to Remember to post blogs and bang on about anything.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle the mantra of all keen environmentalists, or in our case when you decide to consolidate all the leather scraps you have been saving for the previous three years you realise quite how much you have collected. This in turn encourages you to seriously focus on Reducing the amount of space the scraps are occupying ideally by Reusing them and finding a new product to make from them. Preferably something small which only uses scraps and doesn't create further waste. Hence the recent inclusion of circular screen printed pin badges, shaped brooches and key fobs into the Stabo repertoire.

So be assured that whenever you buy one of these products you are doing something great for the environment albeit our environment as every badge sold gives us a little bit more room in our workshop.

The pictures show Ed using our press to cut out the badges at the end of the process. As you can see from the image to the right 'One of our dinosaurs is missing' where Ed got a bit over enthusiastic and threw the finished product in with the waste, our intention to use up rather than create waste hasn't entirely succeeded but we've made a start.
R