Fashion

A new online magazine VivaLaModa has a nice little write up on Steampunk fashion in their current issue. VivaLaModa is a magazine that focuses on Fashion, handmade goods, and green products, from their website:

VivaLaModa is a bi-monthly magazine created to show the greatest and coolest fashionable and hand made things that we can find. But we don’t want to talk only about fashion or beautiful stuff we find. This magazine will also host articles about green products, toys, decoration, product reviews and many more things.

We want to support indie designers and crafters who make things with their own hands (not to forget we also love vintage!), and give readers information about the handmade world.

Last year at Maker Faire I met so many amazing people! The experience was overwhelming. In fact, on the plane ride back from San Francisco I told the big Aussie sitting next to me that my sniffling was all just due to allergies and not the fact that I was flying at 500 miles per hour away from my new friends!

One of the people I met was an artist named Suzanne Forbes. Suzanne had created a work to be auctioned to benefit the Electronic Frontier Foundation called Defending the Electronic Frontier it was a painting that included representations of some of my work as well as that of Datamancer and others. She and her wonderful painting joined us in the Contraptor's Lounge.

Suzanne is a portrait artist and illustrator living and working in the Bay area.  She will come to your home and paint you and make you look fabulous! She also has a selection of drawings and prints of her work available in her Etsy store.

For more information about her portraiture, click through to her website here.

Blanket Magazine has a short piece of Steampunk on the web this month, but that is mainly just the excuse I used to post.  Blanket magazine is:

. . . is a free PDF online magazine that is aimed at uncovering art + design + photography from the talented people who create it.

The name blanket came from the simple idea that we wanted to ‘cover’ all the areas of art, design and photography and bring them together in one magazine.

I've only skimmed the rest of the content so far but the images and graphics are absolutely gorgeous!  Download the PDF by clicking on the image above.  (Found via Mechanis)

Hi Everyone!  I'm in Seattle now hang'n with rockstars and anarchists for a couple of days of decompression post SteampoweredCon in San Jose.  Steampowered turned out to be a really great event with lots of fascinating people of an even broader spectrum then the already broad spectrum I expected.

My flight was delayed and as a result I was exhausted and a bit shaky when I arrived to give my keynote with only minutes to spare.  The room was at capacity and the crowd quickly made me feel at home. I gave my prepared speech and then unveiled the Wimshurst Machine which I built for an article that will appear in Make Magazine early next year.

Then I brought Jeff VanderMeer up and we announced the fact that on Monday we signed with Artisan Books to write a book on Steampunk!  The book will be highly visual and project oriented and will draw from and highlight all corners of the community.  I'm really excited about this project and really, really happy to be working with Jeff who is a consummate professional and really nice guy.  It was also kind of neat that we shared the announcement, and in fact our first meeting in the flesh, with a thousand or so attendees at the Con!

The following is the complete text of my keynote - it's un-copyedited or proofed so please ignore the typos!

You should also have a look at Alex Soojung-Kim Pang's Reflection on Tinkering from which I borrowed liberally for the speech as it was incredibly relevant to the ideas I wanted to convey that night.

Steampunk Keynote

What sort of future were you promised? When I was young they told me I'd have robotic servants to tend to my every need, cars that would drive themselves while I read the newspaper and vacations in orbiting space hotels. When I was a bit older they promised me ecologically friendly communities where we would all live together in geodesic domes in our white jump suits.

Captain Robert  of the band Abney Park talks to Rebecca Firth about their music and Steampunk in an Interview at YouFINDit.

[For some reason they've chosen to stream the mp3 with the horrible Micro$oft Media Server so if you can't listen from the above page, gank the mp3 from Here ]

Abney Park are true DIYers in every sense of the word and are all great friends of the Steampunk Workshop. We wish we were able to see them tonight at DragonCon!