The Personal Site

When I started work on the new website, I did not know yet what I was getting into.  Many smart people advised me to just pick up a simple web page creator, use a readymade site template, and throw a site up in a few days of work.  But I wanted the site to be more of a personal creation than that - Not just some pics plugged into someone else's layout, but my own creation from start to finish, including all of the graphics therein. 

It didn't quite work out that way100% - There are a few small pieces of clip art used here and there for decoration, and the site code that runs some of the adjuncts such as the Facebook and Twitter boxes was certainly supplied by them, but overall I think I have achieved my goal.  As I write this, the new site is slowly uploading in entirety over our creaky semi-broadband connection, and should be operational by this evening. 

There is a lot of new content in the site - Lots of social networking add-ons to allow people to follow our activity on Facebook and the like, as well as easy links to enable sharing favorite pipe pics and purchases.  I had to fast-learn a lot of new stuff along the way....  The last time I wrote my website, there was no such thing as CSS, for instance!  So, it was a challenging learning experience.  I hope the new site will bring us a bit more into modern times, and hold us well for a few years to come.  It's a great personal satisfaction to know that I wrote my site code from scratch in a text editor, and can work with it in future in nuts & bolts fashion, with a firm understanding of just what underpins everything.

Aside from the dull bits like the code, the artwork and graphics are as personalized as one can get - A lot of our lives over the past few years is literally laid into the graphical foundations of the website.  The green background, for instance, is a photo montage - a multiple exposure of a collection of our photos from Brittany.  A friend came to see us one (very wet) Spring and we had a great visit, touring local sites near Herbignac and going as far as Carnac and the oceanscape nearby.  These photos are laid one over the other, merging into a fine misty unity that collects the dominant colors and imagery from all to create the wispy, foggy background wallpaper.  Look close and you can see hints of stone castle walls, overcast Breton grey skies, and stormy coasts.  It isn't just a random wallpaper thrown together in Photoshop - It's a collection of experiences that we have actually lived.  

The same goes for every aspect of background graphics on the site, from the pipe drawings I've sketched for fun to each of the catalog header images.  The spidery, reddish, dark-yet-colorful background of the Talbert Pipes header?  It's a photo montage of pics from our Autumn Davidson County fair, taken just after we returned to the USA.  The header background for Ligne Bretagne is a photo I took of the standing stones of Carnac, while standing among them (They let you do this in the off season), combined with an old Brittany map and seen through a thin haze of brown Breton sea cliff pictures (again, combined into a multiple exposure and lightened to barely a tint).  The Goblins header?  Multiple exposures of a walk through a Breton forest one damp May evening, combined with half-seen pictures of past Goblins. 

The personalized theme carries to even the smallest details - the "Join our Email List" image is a clip-art postcard lettered with text colored by another montage of green Brittany pics, just to create a texture for the type, and decorated with a stamp of a past Talbert Briar.  I even made our own 404 error page, which I hope not many people will see! 

In summary, our new site, like all our work, is my best attempt to create as personal and enjoyable and distinct an experience as possible.  I hope you will enjoy it.

A Preview of New Stuff

.....How's that for a highly sophisticated headline?  I haven't written much here lately because I've been busy round the clock in the new workshop, an activity that is divided equally between making new stock, customizing and modifying our shop setup, and running back and forth to the breaker box to reset tripped breakers (Must get that improved eventually, once we have money).  As the workshop goes, we're now in "Stage 2", where we actually use the setup and find all the things we don't like about it, or that seemed OK in theory but don't work very well in practice, and have to modify and tweak as we go.  The electrical load situation produces a very zen environment, where Em and I must constantly work in a state of careful balance - The mini lathe and the vac can be on, but not along with the sanding motors, or the bandsaw can be run, but not with the vac AND air cleaner, and the big lathe has the amusing habit of tripping its own breaker every time it is started, EXCEPT when its connected vacuum is switched on first.  Go figure. 

In any event, all electrical quirks aside, the new workshop is a very nice place to be.  I can't begin to describe how much more pleasant it is to work in than the Herbignac workshop, where looking out the windows usually presented us with a view of French teens starting in at us in fascination when they weren't loitering on the village pathway outside playing with their cell phones.  Here, it's just a nice enclosed back yard and the hundred birds that Emily is attracting thanks to her many feeders.  I've just finished my first audiobook in the shop while sanding the three new LBs pictured below (The book was "Into the Storm", a wonderfully cheesy SF/fantasy tale very much in the Edgar Rice Burroughs vein, about the crew of a US navy destroyer that accidentally slips dimensions and lands in a primitive alternate Earth.  I can recommend this if you grew up enjoying pulp entertainment of the "Land that Time Forgot" variety).  If progress seems slow, that's because a lot of this initial work is trial and error and tool adjustment.  But, we're accelerating already.  The first three Ligne Bretagnes took several days to get finished - the next three should take half that.  The pens are great fun to make, as well.  Most of the pens so far are hand-turned morta, with careful sandblasting to give them a nicely textured grip.  I wasn't sure I would like a non-smooth pen, but I've actually come to prefer these to my smooth ones, just for the way they feel.  In this work, our less-powerful US compressor is actually an advantage, because the one in Herbignac was strong enough to occasionally blast holes through the wood surface to the pen bodies, whereas this one's gentler output is more controllable. 

Here is a group photo of some of the newly-finished stock:

A few pens can be seen in the background - also, there is a morta tamper with a meerschaum tamping end, an idea I wish I'd had long ago.  The black and white materials go together nicely.  For this first set of LBs, I have sorted through all our stock to collect some of the best grained stummels I could find, so the majority will probably be smooth and pretty exceptional in grain.  These three could put many more expensive pipes to shame for their hundred dollar-ish pricetags.

Happily, the Oom-Paul will even pass a cleaner from bit to bowl!  Not always an easy or even possible task with this shape.  And I was quite happy to be able to work with these horn stems again, as well.

 

So, now it's on to work on more LBs - I plan to have at least six or eight available for the opening of the site, but may have a small show/sale at Pipe & Pint before then.  Outside of a possible P&P expo, these pipes are not for sale until the site opens, this is just for preview purposes.  As for when the site will be open, my only answer to that remains, "It will be open when it's open."  I want at least six LBs, six or more pens, some tampers, at least two or three Goblins, and I'd love to have five or six high-grade Talbert Briars to open the site with, so it's just a matter of time until I can get all those made. 

Back to the workshop....

A Talbert Christmas Carol

`Twas the night before Christmas, all snug in the house.
I left the cooking to Emily... Heh, what a louse!
I sat down to clean pipes with a feeling of dread,
unnerved by the sounds of strange footsteps o'erhead.
Two evenings with family, the gauntlet was thrown.
Would I have stayed in France, had I only known?
"Nah", I thought, "I'm better off here."
"Surrounded by casks of good winter beer!"
Christmas is fun, Christmas is shiny,
Christmas is even for those who are whiny.
Those who spend this time bitching and moaning.
can be easily replaced, with the help of good cloning.

This season is made for wishes and dreaming.

Just try to tune out the relatives' screaming.
So we'll have our big dinners, and we'll dance and we'll sing,
even if Santa doesn't bring us a thing!
Because at the end of the day, the thing that has meaning
is the warm family feeling....  and getting out of the cleaning!
So Merry Christmas to all!  We hope for the best,
and please don't get charged with resisting arrest.

Happy Holidays!