open for business!
an art shanty adventure!
we are a team of graphic designers, landscape architects, educators, book-makers, woodworkers, architects, computer programmers, project managers, financial planners, students and grant writers, and we're gonna rock a 2010 art shanty!
Contributors
welcome to the suitcase
patrick putting on the finishing touches yesterday afternoon....come on out and visit us!
Posted by jaime wascalus
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the final countdown
wowzers, is it really already january the 14th of the year 2010?! just two days before the grande debut of the staycation shanty in shantytown on medicine lake! last weekend, the team got together to take the shanty to medicine lake and rebuild her in her new spot. after a few snafus and a lot of fun, the shanty was successfully built up. throughout the week, we've been putting finishing touches on the interior, and we're just about ready for opening day on saturday. come on down! we hope to see you there.
Posted by jaime wascalus
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up!
we put together the shanty today! it went pretty well, except for the time we tried to put a section of the roof on and no one was tall enough and it almost came crashing down. see pics below. i guess i shoulda been helping with the actual work instead of documenting.
we still have a bit of interior work to do (like, where are we going to put our beers?), and we need a handle and travel stickers for the outside, but we're getting super close to being done!
one thing we did learn today is that if you're going to build your shanty outside, prep your build area before it snows 6 inches. we had landscaping plastic underneath the floor that made it super slippery and slidey, so we had to move everything first and ripped out the plastic. and we're pretty sure there was some semi-frozen barf/poop/pee on there, so um, make sure someone cleans it up before everyone comes over and almost barfs from the smell.
Posted by jaime wascalus
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FUNdraiser
a few weeks back we had a super duper fun fundraiser for our shanty team at the west bank social center (thanks troy & colin!). beer is expensive and we needed money to keep ourselves fueled, ya know? just kidding. although we had initially wanted to get all our suitcase materials from recycled/used/reused/old sources, we couldn't find enough materials quickly enough and decided to buy new stuff, this being our first shanty and all. so we held a clothing swap + dance party to raise money! it was a super fun night, and we raised just over the amount of money that we have spent so far, which is great because we still need to buy a few things for the interior and to create the travel stickers that'll be on the outside of the shanty.
for a quick update on the actual building process...it's almost done! a bunch of kids got together last weekend to build the roof, finish putting in the windows, and stain the suitcase. tomorrow we're going to put the whole thing together, since it's just in pieces in our garage right now, to make sure that everything fits, and from there we just need to finish the interior, get a heat source (likely a propane stove), and put a handle on the top. can't wait until january 16th! if you don't live in minnesota, book your plane tix for opening weekend now - it's gonna be the most frozen fun you've ever had!
Posted by jaime wascalus
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an update from danjo
After spending weeks designing and over structuring the shanty, it was time to build the largest suitcase the world has ever seen. This suitcase is going to be so big that not even the most illogical person would try to use it as a carry-on bag. In fact, the estimated price of checking this suitcase with Northwest Airlines is about $1,440.
Since the construction of this shanty was pretty simple, we used the free on-line product, Google SketchUp, to design the basic structural elements. From these drawings, we were able to get estimated material quantities of 2x4s, 2x6s and 1/2” and 5/8” plywood.
We would have loved to get our building materials from a place like Siwek Lumber in Northeast Minneapolis, since they carry a lot of salvaged materials, but they were unable to provide us with all the materials we needed. And as it turns out, Menard's has the best lumber prices and on our limited budget, it’s where we had to go.
All we needed from there was a plan, a bunch of nails, and a group of people, all looking to hammer out their frustration. Also a necessity are some understanding neighbors. We decided to forgo the opportunity of building in the Soap Factory for the opportunity to make a lot of noise in South Minneapolis. If you build in a residential neighborhood, just be aware of your surroundings.
The rest of our construction process was just a lot of man power: we made the floor, we moved the floor outside, we covered and protected the floor. Then we made the walls, we moved the walls outside and we covered and protected the walls. Then we made the roof, we moved the roof outside and we covered and protected the roof. After that, we stained everything to get a leather suitcase look. We stained the walls, the roof for some weather protection, the garage floor, the outside of the garage, our pants, our gloves, our faces and even our spirits were stained with the sweet smell of chemical goodness (note: always wear crappy clothes, lay newspapers down, and work in a ventilated space.
The next steps for the team will be putting all the panels together. We’re still undecided if we are going to move the shanty already constructed or in panels. We do know that we are going to screw the panels together once, so we know it’s buildable and to limit the work we will have to do outside on the lake. Now the building crew passes the hat back to the interior/accessory crew for some serious suitcase accessorizing. We're like God, on Day 3 of creation.
Posted by jaime wascalus
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Scavengers
A few weekends ago we spent a morning cleaning out the basement of the
Soap Factory where all of the Art Shanties were stored this year.
After the returning shantiers stockpiled their walls, floors and skis,
they let the rest of us loose on the materials. We found a range of
chunks, items and pieces that hopefully will be of use to us in our
construction process - including rescued insulation, plywood and even
an old door. We spent a while disassembling in the adjacent parking
lot (that's us in the pictures) and hoping that we didn't take
anything that belonged to another shanty.
At our first build night a few days later, we then finally came to
terms with all of the materials that we DON'T have and went out and
spent $500 on 2x6s and plywood. Let's hope the fundraiser coming up
this weekend helps lighten the load! Please come!
Oh and on another note, we were checking out Tory's dad's fish house
this weekend in Iowa, and had the feeling that maybe we are
overbuilding our art shanty. He doesn't have a single 2x6 on the
entire house, including the skis on the bottom. And we are using a ton
of 2x6s and even some 2x10s for the skis! Too late to rethink that
now, but take note, future art shantiers of the world.
And finally, is anyone else getting nervous that we may actually not
have the ice part of the equation by mid January? Tomorrow is the 1st
of December and we are still hovering in the 30s. I'm not complaining,
I'm just sayin.
(this post was written by ms. carrie christensen)
Posted by jaime wascalus
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clothing swap + dance party this friday!
Please join us for a fun-filled night of swapping clothing, followed by a dance party!
$5 if you bring a bag of clothes for the swap / $7 if you don't. But wait, what is a clothing swap? A clothing swap is a chance for you to get rid of a few used items of clothing that you're no longer enamored with but know that someone else will be, and at the same time for you to pick up some new duds that someone is getting rid of! Sure, you could try to sell your clothes elsewhere, but this is a great opportunity to pick up a few outfits for free***!! (***um, besides the cost of the entrance fee, which will help us buy materials to build our shanty.) Here's how the clothing exchange will work:1. bring a bag of used clothing that is still in good condition
2. we'll empty the bag for you, then give you the empty bag
3. you peruse the tables of used clothing and fill your bag up with your new favorite items! We are fundraising for our Staycation Art Shanty which will reside on Medicine Lake in January and February. Come support public art! Any clothing leftover from the swap will be donated.
| Date: | Friday, December 4, 2009 |
| Time: | 7:00pm - 11:55pm |
| Location: | West Bank Social Center |
Posted by jaime wascalus
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da second build night
the double d's rocked the garage last tuesday, building the floor of our shanty in less than an hour, and with no injuries! good job, kids. it was really fun to see some of our teammate's skillz in action. danjo and troy teamed up to create the architectural documents via sketch up, and along with patrick's construction skills (and nail gun), tory's brains and brawn, showed us how to build a floor. they made it seem super easy, and when we were done, we all got pretty cocky about how easy this was going to be. or maybe that was just me.
we ended up buying most of our wood from menard's; we still hope to use the reclaimed materials for the interior, but decided that for our first shanty, it would be good to build something that is going to be sturdy and might be able to be reused in the future. for part of the night, a few of us worked on the plans for our fundraiser, which is THIS FRIDAY, DECEMBER 4!, AT THE WEST BANK SOCIAL CENTER! it's going to be super fun, and we hope that you will attend.
a few pictures below:
1) a view of our design. i played around with it and took off two walls so the interior is viewable. pretty, huh?
2) building a floor. it takes a village.
3) patrick & danjo working the nail gun.
4) patrick & danjo with more nail gun action, and jacob acting as a...clamp? vice grip? level?
Posted by jaime wascalus
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our first build night
yay! we've had our first shanty build night, and it went swimmingly. um, i guess we didn't actually build anything, but we got to draft our design, thanks to troy's sketch up skills, and we got to talk about our fundraiser. as you can see from the pics, it was all work and no play; really, that's what this team is all about. wanna join? ha ha. we're going to be meeting each tuesday evening, and we're really hoping that we can get the floor built during our next session. i mean, how hard can a floor be?
one reason that we're keeping this blog is to help other newbie shanty artists in the coming years, as there isn't much information out there for first-timers. hopefully our stumbles (few?) & successes (many!) will help others. or it will at least convince people not to do this, as it's not going to be any fun at all. jk!
last saturday a bunch of us went to the soap factory to help lug all of last year's shanties into gallery 1, where artists from last year reclaimed their materials, and us newbies got to claim the leftovers. we definitely got a lot of stuff, like pieces of plywood in varying sizes (from 2ft x 2ft to 4ft x 8ft) and screws and nails and boards (from 6in to 12 ft). i have a feeling it's going to be hard to use a lot of these smaller pieces, unless we want our suitcase on ice to look like a patchwork quilt, but we'll see. we'll post later on with advice on that, depending on how many of those scraps are left in our garage. actually, we can use the scraps to build fires in our backyard to warm up! so yeah, maybe reclaiming as much as you can *is* a good idea.
Posted by jaime wascalus
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