It’s really simple to make “1 Million Bucks” in metal embossing. Start with a 1 1/2″ circle of metal, on which you make an outer circle about four to five millimeters from the edge, then a close-by inner circle to create a thin one to two millimeter “barrier strip” between the outer band and the inner band, which become your “capture bands” for the interior illustration.
Then in the inside circle, draw “1 Million Bucks”, with the standard Gorby Balloon Lettering you learned from my book, “The Art of Fine-Art Scrapbooking”, which is now available as a full-color electronic version you can download and print out for your lettering and compositional guidance.
In spite of all the shortcomings of an electronic book — no “feel” of paper, no sensation of turning the page, actually turning a paper page, no weight of the book in hand, and no smell of musty dusty age — there are some serious advantages, not the least of which are color and sound, and even motion, captured in the electronics of the book, as you’ll note in “BardoTown”, a CD Rom that has rich, beautiful color photos of BardoTown, along with dozens of “bells and whistles”, meaning the sound and action additions that Wayne Hoyle added into the mix.
The real secret behind my interest in Metal Embossing is the Metal Embossing Club, which offers classes, workshops, and most fun of all, some “group gift shows” such as “Back to School”, Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas are good target times for selling your products AS A TEAM, including going to craft fairs, trunk shows, coin shows, antique shows if you include antiques in your offerings as I do, and of course the usual yard sales and online trades.
You can go to fairs or organize your own backyard fair in a yard or at a local park, with permission and, if necessary, permits and other paperwork requirements.
Even if you are able and willing to get out there and sell something in public, which most people are not, and I don’t blame them one bit, you will want to ALSO sell your productions online.
There are hundreds of places you might try to sell your products online, but if you work as a group, you can take advantage of the very real possibility that one or more of the group members actually knows how to market online, and can give some serious help.
Working with a larger community such as our Worldwide Work Circle, you have an even better chance, because we do have electronic selling skills as a harmoniously cooperative spiritual village — the odds are that someone in the group will have a good solution to your marketing problems which, if I calculate correctly, will soon overshadow your personal worries and concerns.
Back at Cosmo Street in 1969, I introduced classes in copper engraving, which was done on thick industrial copper disks that had to be cut with a power-punch at a local metal workshop. I paid a dollar a pop for them puppies, an expensive gift in those days when a candy bar could be bought for just pennies, and you could fill a gas tank for under three dollars.
Today, we have so many more things available to us; we have coin “flips” into which we can safely place our metal embossing creations. They resemble coins and can be about the same size as many coins, but they are much thinner.
Even just a few years ago, you couldn’t buy acrylic capsules or foam rings, and coin lockets were hard to find and the findings companies difficult to deal with in quantities of fewer than a thousand of one item, just as you had to publish a minimum run of 5,000 paperbacks to justify turning on the press at all — today they run them off “per-demand”, meaning as-needed, from one to one million copies.
Of course, one copy run off all by itself costs a bit more than one copy out of millions. The costs go down per unit as the numbers of copies goes up, the cost being absorbed by the sheer numbers, to a limit known as “Gorby’s Limit”, which is the maximum discount you can expect to get regardless of the numbers ordered.
It’s possible to “fill out” the interior of a coin-style metal embossing mounting, such as a coin key-chain or a locket, with blank disks, making a solid metal “coin” shape and feel inside the sterling silver mountings or other coin findings you might dig up from the various findings companies, or on eBay under “jewelry findings”.
How do you actually organize a crafts club? The answer is, you don’t. It organizes itself, and I’ll tell you how it’s done:
Have you ever hosted a party?
If you haven’t ever hosted a party, you won’t have a clue how to begin, and you probably shouldn’t. This is not the time to sharpen those teenage and young adult social skills. Locate a friend who HAS hosted parties, plenty of them, and ask them for help.
Now make a list of people you wouldn’t mind having at your house, people to whom you would open your kitchen, your living room and your guest bathroom. That list won’t typically be very long — maybe three or four people, maybe as many as twenty if you get around a lot.
Okay, so prepare a bunch of disks in the designer metal. That will add up to less than the drinks and finger-food by a long shot.
You’ll need a large table or several small folding TV tables and enough comfortable chairs for every guest. Metal embossing is not very demanding, and just about any circumstance can be used for the purpose.
Having enough light can be an issue, and you’ll be on your own in trying to figure out how to provide enough illumination for every participant but, again, remember that you have many allies in your Worldwide Work Circle who can help you with solutions.
It starts out with simple informal metal embossing PARTIES. The parties are free, as they always are, so you’ll have the expense of throwing a party, and there’s nothing to prevent you from selling a few books, embossing kits and CDs and DVDs related or unrelated to metal embossing, and that’s the key to getting them past the craft phase into the higher ideas phase, a slow process that requires patience on your part.
See You At The Top!!!
gorby