The Oxford Museum of History and Science is hosting a complete steampunk exhibition which launched yesterday on 10/13.

Right now the full list of artists and crafters featured is as follows:

Stephane Halleux- Belgium
Tom Banwell- U.S.
Molly “Porkshanks” Friedrich- U.S.
Datamancer- U.S.
Doctor Grymm- U.S.
Daniel Proulx- Canada
Eric Freitas- U.S.
Haruo Suekichi- Japan
Herr Doktor- U.K.
Thomas D. Willeford- U.S.
Amanda Scrivener- U.K.
James Richardson Brown- U.K.
Jesse Newhouse- U.S.
Jos De Vink- Netherlands
Kris Kuksi- U.S.
Mad Uncle Cliff- Australia
Vianney Halter- Switzerland
Art Donovan- U.S.

Really excited to see Molly Friedrich on there–I’ve had the pleasure of having several conversations with her in the past and she is a VERY talented artist.  There are a wide range of amazing works from 2d art to 3d sculpture and wearables so be sure to check out the offical exhibit site now and if you’re in the area, well, shame on you if you haven’t visited it yet!

As every crafter’s favorite holiday approaches, Halloween, its time to start planning your steampunk costume for this year. There are a lot of mainstream outlets selling “steampunk” style costumes, but most of them are awful mainstream crap.

If you really want an authentic steampunk costume, consider buying some wares online from actual merchants to specialize in this and you get a completely unique and low-cost costume that will look worlds better than anything you could buy in a costume store. But perhaps the biggest benefit is that you are helping out the skilled crafters who try to make a living creating beautiful wares.

I highly recommend you take a peek right now at our steampunk clothing section and see if anything on eBay catches your fancy. Crafters typically ramp up production this time of year and there are a LOT of very interesting steampunk-style clothes available right now, from corsets and pants to boots and cufflinks.

I just had the pleasure of meeting Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing fame. As anybody who is a regular reader of that blog is aware, Cory is a big fan of steampunk and the entire maker subculture that has erupted in the past couple of years.

He signed one of the bookmarks I made for the Steampunk Convention last October and mentioned that he’d even been to this site before–I’m honored!

Thanks for dropping by Chicago Cory!

Several kind readers have brought to my attention the bug that seems to be appearing on pages other than the homepage. Specifically, there seems to be an issue with the background image and some other images displaying correctly leaving a lot of white space. I’m looking into this and will hopefully have it resolved soon. If you have any suggestions as to what might be causing this, please email me at haltingpoint (at) gmail (dot) com. Thanks!

Those of you viewing the site in IE6 may have noticed some very ugly looking gray boxes around some of the images on the site since the redesign. This was caused by how IE6 handles transparent images…in short, it doesn’t play nicely with them. I had held off on posting new content to the site in fear that I might lose it while tinkering with things and trying to fix this issue, but I’ve finally done it!

Or rather, Chris Van Patten has done it. Chris is a kind soul who came across my plea for assistance and, being a kind person, helped me fix it (it took him all of two seconds). Chris is a WordPress wiz and has very affordable rates if any of you are in need of coding or design assistance and you can feel free to learn more about him on his website (and feel free to mention where you heard about him).

Note: This was not any sort of paid posting…I just really appreciate the help he has given me on this issue that has plagued the new design for some time and wanted to show him a little link love.

First, thank you for the mention and link on LiveJournal, its always interesting to see where my traffic is coming from.

Second, to address renireligion’s curiosity as to whether I will ever consider adding other auction site listings to BuySteampunk.com, well, that is a complicated question to answer. (more…)

Every now and then I receive an email from someone who has created something truly unique that they wish to share with the world.  Often times, I get a load of crap (hey, I call them like I see them).  This time, I got a submission that is meant for loads of crap.

Introducing the steampunk toilet, created by Patrick Brawley.  Despite my poor attempt at an opening joke, this is definitely in the upper end of the submissions I have received.  Of course, I couldn’t just blindly post this…I had to find out what possibly inspired Patrick to create such a thing.  Well, it turns out he was replacing his 1954 Standard toilet and couldn’t stand to part with it.  So, after some lots of scavening and hunting around on eBay (I wonder if he found any of the steampunk parts through my site) he came up with this glorious and, most importanly, FULLY FUNCTIONAL steampunk toilet.  And did I mention that it has freaking laser-aiming assist for night time use?  Toilets with freaking laser beams!

According to Patrick, the gorgeous wooden calculators of Andy Aaron served as the primary source of inspiration for this project, and I think they make a nice set.  Now you can crunch numbers while on the can to ensure your water pressure is right!

Well, I would be a big tease if I didn’t show you this baby in action.  The video below explains it all and there are a couple nice pictures below that as well.

CGSociety just ran a computer-generated art contest with the steampunk theme and the results are in!  Wow–there are few things more fascinating to me than when an artistic communitity dedicates their skill to a theme that I think is so cool and this is no exception.

Check out all the winners here.

If you are a regular visitor, you may have noticed things have changed around here over the last couple of days.  That is because I am currently in the process of releasing a COMPLETE redesign of the site.

Here’s what it means for you:

• Same main categories (clothing, goggles, jewelry, etc.) but now I have the ability to add sub-categories under each to let you get more specific in your search
• New Featured Listings section in the upper right that will house crafts of note from specific crafters and once things are running smoothly, I will open this section for paid listings as well so you can advertise your own wares
• Adding a forum
• Moving the blog portion of the site front and center–it used to be buried and this will help make you aware of the latest happenings
• AMAZING new visual design thanks to my incredibly talented designer Sam, plus its all in Wordpress now versus individual HTML pages
• A LOT more updates…I’ve been holding a lot of post ideas in reserve until the new site was live because I didn’t want to cause any issues with transferring the old posts but once things are finalized, expect a lot more content added on a regular basis

So, that’s all great stuff, however I need to ask you a favor.  Please be patient over the next few days as I get final tweaks in place.  There are several known bugs that are being fixed (such as the gray boxes in IE and the broken category pages) and I have a day job, so this can’t all be fixed overnight unfortunately.  Just be patient and don’t give up on things–they WILL be fixed!

Please be sure to leave any comments regarding the design in this post–thanks!

That crafty lot over at WETA (fine makers of such things as oh…I dunno, Lord of the Rings?) are at it again. They’ve recently expanded Dr. Grordbort’s product line to include a miniaturized version of the practically sold out Goliathon 83. The good news is that this one is actually within the realm of affordability by mere mortals at only $49!

Its a limited edition run of 900, with 400 signed versions that were sold out at Comic Con just recently.

If you are interested in purchasing this fine piece of craftsmanship, their order page is here. If you’re not already familiar with Dr. Grordbort’s “Infallible Aether Oscillators & Other Marvelous Contraptions”, then you’ve been living in a hole and need to get your introduction with their “commercials” that they created for these products–take my word for it, they’re hilarious and have have the production values of the crew that brought you some of the best CGI that has yet been seen in movies.

Keep up the great work WETA!