The grand tour of Portland's hardware stores!

Phew! This was an action packed day. Started at 8:30am by heading out to my critique/collaboration group's working meeting. We were just going to each work on our own pieces (a place setting), so I brought some sculpey to see if I could make some blueberry game pieces. (My place setting is going to be a game board, although I haven't figured out the game yet.) It worked out well, but it was obvious that I needed some different colors than the ones I got.

From there, it was onto lunch with Horatio, an well established artist who's always been so encouraging and helpful with my work.

Then came the Grand Tour!

Subtitle: Wow, there are sure a lot of hardware stores in Portland...someone could start a blog reviewing them all!

I needed 720 itty bitty tiny screws, preferably brass, for the room divider screens. Naturally, I started at Winks Hardware. And yes, they had what I needed! But only 622 of them. I cleaned them out. They sent me onto Division Hardware. I got there just after 2pm, and sadly, the store was closed from 2 to 5pm for a memorial service...the owner had passed away.

As it happened, a cabinet maker arrived at the same time, and we struck up a conversation. He was very helpful, and sent me to NBH (or was that NHB?), back very close to where Winks is, and said, "they sell to the trade, but I bet if you told them you're an artist needing to do this project, they'd help you out."

Terrific. So I headed back towards the river. Nope, they didn't have what I needed, but they sent me 10 blocks south to General Threads. Don't bother looking them up, it's not the type of place that would have a website. In other words, it's just about the coolest place in town! Floor to ceiling of little tiny boxes, drawers, and trays. Many of them sitting precariously in mounds on the floor. The whole shebang is covered in dust, and there's the guy sitting right by the front door. You tell him what you want, and he gets it for you. And yup, they did have what I wanted. And there was a collection of ancient typewriters too. They still have brand new unopened boxes of screws from back when phillips heads were brand new. He proudly showed one to me, "see, here it says, introducing phillips screws..."

I just looked up phillips screws, and there's a Portland connection! And the patent dates to 1936.

One thing does make you wonder though—his glasses were missing a leg...didn't he have just the right screw to fix that?

The rest of the evening was a bit more uneventful. Stopped by at the house/studio of one of the artists in the Intersect/Parallel show to pick out the pieces for the show.

It was 7pm by the time I got home.

Procurement for senior #4's book

What a fancy word for shopping!

Shopping for work, of course, but still shopping.

After a couple of days of trying different things, and finally deciding on a direction for senior #4's book, I spent the day PROCURING. That's serious business. Of course, this being the weekend, I couldn't actually buy everything, but come Monday, I'm ready.

So I'm getting this corner rounder. I found them online, and also on ebay, but realized that this company (mybinding.com) was in Hillsboro. So if they have a storefront, I hope to just pick one up on Monday.

Then I'm getting some (actually, a lot, they come in 150 or 300 feet rolls) Duromount R, an archival dry mounting adhesive, to laminate each of her prints to a heavier backing (in this case, Rives BFK, 100 sheets from Daniel Smith just arrived).

And I did managed to buy some mah jongg tile beads. Although they were 2 short of the 20 large ones I needed, I did get 26 of the smaller ones. Then I found 2 more larger ones (but not quite as large as 25mm) at the Village Bead Shop, so I'm set on the mah jongg beads.

Started trimming paper for the book, but boy, when you make a mistake on those stack cutters, you screw up BIG! After I mis-cut (is that a word?) 20 sheets of paper, I gave up for the night. Good thing about paper is that, you can always use them for another project.