Lantern Build

A great build yesterday by our Bay Area Gardeners!  Six of us got together in Concord to work on our color-changing lanterns.  It was slow going at first as we tried to remove the old paper from the lantern walls.  Even though the paper was always prone to ripping, getting it out of every corner of the latticework took hours.  We replaced it with a fiberglass fabric that should hold up much better against the elements.

We also put in our new, much brighter, LED lights.  After experimenting with several types of LEDs, we decided to go with flexible LED ribbons, wound around a wooden dowel.  Unlike the conventional LED bulbs we tried, which send most of their light straight down to the ground, the LED ribbons can be aimed outward at the lantern sides.  The result is a lantern that appears much brighter for the same amount of power.

 At the end of the day, we had all eight lanterns ready to go.  We think they’ll really look great in this year’s installation.

Fundraising for the 2012 Garden of Missed Connections Has Begun!

Today marks the beginning of our 4 week, $2000 target Kickstarter campaign! If you visited the Garden last year at Burning Man, have been following our progress over the past few weeks, or simply like what we're doing and want to help us out, consider heading over to our fundraising page and tossing us a few dollars. We wouldn't have been able to bring the Garden to the playa last year without the help of donors like you, and *every* little bit helps. Thanks!

Preview of the New, Brighter Lanterns

Among the many improvements and updates in this year's Garden are significantly brighter LEDs in our microcontroller-driven lanterns. Filip has kindly posted some comparison videos showing the old vs. new LED setups which you can take a peek at here:

led lantern build

Yes, we are very excited about what the Garden is going to look like at night on the open playa.

Post-Build Update

I went to Lance and Manuel's yesterday to help fix our 16-foot main gate spans.  With the sun beating down over the weekend, the boards had started to warp and pull away from each other at the edges.  We pulled them back together with clamps and added a ton of extra screws to stop it from happening again.

It would have a been a two-hour fix, but then somebody discovered Lance's electric planer.  Next thing we knew, the sun was setting, but we had (perhaps obsessively) smoothed out the long arcs to a perfect curve.

Thanks to Tanya and Eric, who came by to help move huge gates around the yard!

Our First Build of 2012

Well that was a tremendous weekend!  It was the first build for the 2012 Garden of Missed Connections, and we gathered our bay-area crew to start cutting and assembling our lumber together.  We had hoped to get a solid start on the project, and take some pressure off of our August schedule, but almost nobody expected us to make as much progress as we did in the end.

Nine people came out to spend their weekend building in Concord.  After an early morning search for a trailer hitch, we were off to buy lumber as the temperature steadily climbed to 90 degrees.  Lifting 16-foot lumber in the heat was harder than we expected, but with frequent breaks for Otter Pops, we managed to keep the work moving.  Three of our crewmembers had construction experience, and we often had three stations working on different tasks at the same time.  By the end of the first day, we had our first gate assembled.

The next day was even more productive.  We quickly put together seven more gates, and started building the central structure of the Garden.  The only low point came when Lance – our most experienced builder – injured his back working a router, and had to stop early.  We’re all hoping he heals quickly.  At the end of the day, we sat down for a barbeque prepared by Teri and Eric Swanson - who came to build even though he’s missing the burn.

With such a strong weekend showing, we’re all feeling really good about this year’s project. The first gates are turning out really nicely, and we think we’ll have something really special by burn week.  Thanks to everyone that came out, and see you at the next build!