Taboo Territory

Well, now that Tiki Kon V is all done and wildly successful, Here are the Official Drinks for release into the wild:

Dead Reckoning by Martin Cate of Forbidden Island

2 oz Cockspur 12 year
½ oz Navan Vanilla Liqueur
½ oz pure maple syrup
½ oz tawny port
1 oz fresh lemon juice
1 oz pineapple juice
dash angostura bitters

Shake and strain into a hiball glass over fresh ice and top with 1 oz soda water. Garnish with pineapple wedge, mint sprig, and lemon spiral.

Dark Magic by Craig Hermann

½ oz coffee syrup
½ oz Licor 43
½ oz passion fruit syrup
¾ oz fresh lime juice
1 oz Appleton V/X
1 oz Coruba
dash Herbsaint

Add all and 8oz of ice into blender. Blend by 5 one second pulses. Pour into double rocks glass. Garnish with maraschino cherry and lime wheel. With compliments to Jeff “beachbum’ Berry and The Mai-Kai’s Black Magic.

Happy Hoti by Blair Reynolds

2 oz Pyrat XO Reserve
¾ oz fresh lemon juice
½ oz falernum
½ oz rock candy syrup
dash Fee Bros. bitters

Shake with crushed ice. Serve in small tiki mug filled with ice. Garnish with mint, cherry.

Sandy Warner by Heather Gregg

1½ oz Cockspur
1½ oz sweet vermouth
½ oz orange curaçao
dash Fee Bros. orange bitters

Shake with ice and strain into chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with maraschino cherry.

Fighting Gamecock by Craig Hermann

2 oz Cockspur
½ oz fresh lemon juice
½ oz Fee Bros. falernum
dash Fee Bros. orange bitters
dash Herbsaint

Stir with ice in mixing glass. Strain into chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with orange spiral.

Luaahi by Craig Hermann

1 oz Pyrat Blanco
1 oz fresh lime juice
1 oz pineapple juice
¾ oz maraschino liqueur
¾ oz Velvet Falernum
dash Fee Bros. bitters
dash Herbsaint

Blend with 8 oz ice by 5 one second pulses. Pour into TIKI KON 2007 signature Luaahi mug. Garnish with pineapple wedge, maraschino cherry and cocktail umbrella.

Hey folks! No time today for much text, so here are more photos of the slip casting process:

Georgie’s Slip, ready to become Tiki mugs

Pouring the slip into the bucket

The interior of the plaster mold

Moving slip from bucket to pitcher for pouring

Pouring slip

Slow going pour

Drying slip

Starting to pour out the non-dried slip

Slip dripping upside down

Right side up, sprue has been scored to aid in drying

Starting to pull of top after slip drying process

Top is off!

Drying after top removed

Removing from mold the wrong way (turn mold upside down and have gravity help you)

Out of the mold

Craig cleaning

Heather cleaning

More Heather cleaning

Hello, gorgeous!

Drying on the rack

Drying on the rack 2

See you in the funny papers!

Dry, little molds. Dry!

Here’s what happens to the sculpt after I get it.

I make a negative mold of the sculpt with which to make multiple sculpt copies. These Will be used to make plaster slip molds. The plaster slip molds will go to our ceramicist for mug creation.

Here’s the first batch of pictures:

After creating a mold box ¾” larger than the sculpt (in each direction) out of art board and hot glue. I’ll pour each half of the mold separately. To masque out 3-d areas for where I don’t want the polyurethane to go, I use modeling clay:

To help keep the two halves of the mold together, I make impressions for use as a key to align. Here you can see a closeup of one in the clay masque.

So, how to find out how much of the casting material you’ll need? I use rice to approximate the volume.

Now it’s full.

And now it’s measured.

After the rice is removed the whole thing gets sprayed with Tap Plastics Mold Release.

The Materials: Polyurethane Casting Resin system from Tap Plastics.

I mix half the measure of each of the 2-part polyurethane and mix like ‘taint no mixing been done.

The trick is to scrape the sides and the bottom of the container with something square. I use chopsticks. Next, I pour evenly and slowly into a corner of the box. I let the material slowly seep around and up the sculpt. As it’s pouring I notice how like a chocolate bar it looks. Here see it filling in the keys - caramel spilling into chocolate caverns surrounded by creamy white nougat:

Delicious caramel will be the last breath of this tiki mug!

Almost there:

The complete pour.

Once a day has passed, it is safe to attempt the other half. It takes a couple more than a few days to fully cure. I take off the bottom of the mold and flip ‘er over. All that clay we put in has to come out.

The same process is repeated (It usually happens that the rest of the containers are the perfect amount of material) on the back. Mold release, mix half of each, pouring into the corner:

Slowly to the top it pours.

This is the End product. 2 Halves which allows us to make copies of the scupt to use and not have to suffer a meltdown if it becomes damaged. We can just make another. And another. And another.

Next update coming when I get the pics prepared!

Whew!

Site is live, so Store needed to be ready. Store is almost ready. I have to work on some imagery for each ticket - Heather and I and Sara talked about where we want to go with the tickets, so I’ll give a sample of the style of the 2d handouts and on-site literature theme. We’re all frustrated Drama / Art types, aren’t we? We are doing a fund-raising night with Robert at Thatch next week so we also got a flyer done for that today.

The Mug’s first Master negative mold will be casted soon, perhaps this weekend. We got a bunch of glazes with which to play with soon, so we can get a new treatment for this year’s mug - It is our favourite so far - even the artist is satisfied with his work.

We took some snaps of the master in our front yard for the store (mug pre-order goes on sale soon) and Heather took an amazing shot that I’m sure you’ll all see sooner or later. I’m hoping for the album cover.

Look, the site’s live! Finally! I know you’ve all been waiting…

Tickets will go on sale on Thursday, May 31. All the info will be up at the Bazaar, keep a weather eye out!

Remember to book your hotel rooms early - Jupiter Hotel - as the prices may go up as it gets into summertime here (it was 87F today, this bodes well for a very hot summer).

Now that this show is rolling, I really need to focus on getting my wardrobe in order.

Hi everybody!

This is Craig, “Melintur” as you know me. My main role in NW Tiki is to do all the behind-the scenes IT work with the emailings and the websitings and such: the bit-pushing as I like to call it.

Every year I mean to get a working store-front up for all the financial transactions we do for the Crawl, and every year it seems I revert to hand-coding specific pages just for the event.

This year, I succeeded in the storefront. We now have a persistant area to sell our Mugs and Event Tickets and any other bits and pieces that you may want to purchase (I’m thinking Posters, knick-knacks, carvings, etc.).

All proceeds of sales go directly into the budget for Tiki Kon, and since we just got our bill for last year’s tax preparation (LLC was in the red for the year): $300.00.

So It’s time to announce our store: The NW Tiki Bazaar! Currently we have a limited amount of previous year’s Mugs for sale.

We still are using PayPal for our Credit Card transactions, but don’t worry: You needn’t have or use your Pay-pal account. You can enter your CC info without ‘logging in’ to pay-pal or even having a pay-pal account.

We are also accepting personal checks should you so wish.

We will soon be making more announcements regarding this Years event, and Tickets will be going on sale soon. Once again, we’ll be offering Tiki Central members first shots at the tickets. We are likely looking at a total of about 50 people again for the full deal.

Mahalo!

-=C

Every year, we have this same debate: should we do NEW and DIFFERENT things at TK, or was last year perfect and we should repeat it? The problem with giving an event based largely on drinking and socializing is that, well, that’s always pretty fun and not much can be done to improve it. Of course the drinks could be better (visiting the Mai Kai during Hukilau sure taught us that!) and the company expanded, but at the heart it is the same event.

Offering something different from last year is not only appealing to those of us who are easily bored (that’s me) but hopefully might intrigue some new potential attendees. So this year we are trying several new things, which I will be able to talk about very soon and hopefully you will love.

Somehow February slipped into March which slipped into the middle of March…Argh!

Things have been brewing along behind the scenes - emails, networking, contacts…tragically I can’t really speak about much of it yet, since it is all up in the air maybe stuff.

We will have the delightful Selector Lopaka on board again this year. He has been a vital part of every NW Tiki event we’ve done, so that is a relief. I’m always worried in that people will say “Eh, last year was too much work, forget it!” but no one ever does!

Like all of us, NW Tiki, LLC has to get its taxes done. Because Tiki Kon is a collaborative event (run by our fine anarchist collective of 6 people) and it involves drinking, we decided a couple of years ago to form an Limited Liability Company to protect ourselves from any Issues. We haven’t had any problems so far - knock bamboo - but it is there in any case. Since we lost money last year (yes, I’m sorry to tell you none of us is Gettin’ Rich on this) I don’t think taxes will be a problem, but it is just one more thing to remember.

I don’t know that people necessarily think about the business aspects of the event - not that they should, I hope everything runs smoothly so that no one thinks about it - but I thought it might be an interesting behind the scenes peek.