Cold Chinese had a farm, E-I-E-I-O

  Well a farm may be a stretch but (this is the only farm we can have living in the city) we have made our fair share of farm animals, and I'm sure there are more to come.  Farm animals can have special connections to people or they may just be that cute animal.

 

 I would really like to sing to you the Cold Chinese had a farm song, but my wife does not suggest that I sing, (not unless you like hearing fingernails on a calk board) plus I don't think YouTube would appreciate me uploading a video of me singing either.  But if you would like to buy my single on CD that could be arranged (CD's our currently back ordered forever)

 

Now that's covered lets take a small tour of our farm, 

 

 

    Are first stop is the turkey field,  Gobbler is out for his daily feeding.  We tend to feed gobbler quite a bit, getting him nice and plump for shhh.... thanksgiving.... you have to be carful with that word around him,  he tends to get pretty upset.  Oh no I think he heard me, lets move on to the next field before Gobbler gets here....

  Buster has a great since of smell, he often licks his nose to clean it and keep his sense of smell at its best.  He is protective, we offend find him in with the small animals defending them from predators,  the ducks love him.

  Speaking of ducks, here is Roaster Duck.  He is a very friendly duck always greeting people.  He used to spend his days near the mail box waiting for the mailperson.  He also tends to follow people around, just say hello to him and pat him on the head, and he should let us be and we can move on to the next part of the farm.

   If your nose is sensitive, you may need to close it, we have arrived at the pig pen.  Albert has came out to see what the ruckus is.  He enjoys his piece and quiet and likes to spend his days laying around, and he especially doesn't like to be disturbed in his sleep.   Albert likes mushrooms, I always bring a pack with me to feed him just incase we wake him from his sleep. That will keep him calm and he will be back to sleep in no time....

  Horses make great pets to have on the farm, we use our horses for recreation and work.  When something on the farm needs done, well get a horse with a small wagon to help move our supplies to work area.  After the work is done for the day,  we can enjoy a peaceful horse back ride.... (this might not be to peaceful with the pointy screws as the mane)

  Co2 Rooster is one of our most important animals on the farm.  He is in charge of waking everyone up at sunrise, sometimes I wish I made him with a snooze button. He is very protective of the whole farm.  As long as your with me he wont feel threatened by you.  It can get pretty interesting when Roaster duck and Co2 Rooster try to meet the same person at the same time.

  Well that's all we have time for today, sun is setting and the animals are getting ready for rest.  Hope you stop back and see what other animals have joined our Cold Chinese Farm, E-I-E-I-OOOOO........

Inside the mind of Cold Chinese..

 

Scary thought huh?? I'm sure it could be, we wont go that far yet...

 

We have been asked several times how do we come up with our creations.. there are a few answers to this question..

 

 

The making of the peacock.. Well I came up with this idea starting with the tail pieces, as I lifted those metal wall hanging up I saw a tail of a bird.. Then you find yourself looking for a body.. The bodies can be hardest part to come up with in many creations as you see here I found a rim. Looking at that and a few random pieces we had gotten from the 100 mile yard sale a few days before the peacock was born. Her name is Betsy.

 

 

With Royal Anttie the thought process was a little different.. I had been thinking about something different and big that could be put into someone's yard and a little unexpected.. Well a large ant came to mind.. Then I was on the search to create one..

 

We have a bunch of odds and ends, cut off bits of other pieces here is a pieces that inspired this.. Wanting to use some of those pieces that are just left aside.. Left overs of left overs... Meet Sam and his pet rat, ready to enjoy the sun set...

 

 

For this piece my thought was use now or never, I just brought home a bunch of metal strips someone had thrown in our metal scrap bin at work.  When I looked at metal when I got home, I first thought to myself, why did I bring these home, what could I possible use them for.... Well I decided now was better then ever to work with them or they would just end up buried in the bottom of pile of metal.  With my mind on Halloween, nothing could be more perfect for this metal with a few cuts and bends a spider web was ready for Harold to move in to catch some dinner and scare some kids on Halloween night.

 

 As you see sometimes one pieces of metal can inspire you and on the other hand you can already have an idea in your head going just need the metal to finish it.

 

You might be thinking right now wow they have some really strange things in there basement... Yeah your right we do and it doesn't help when you husband is a mechanic, works at a surplus store and is a  hoarder... I think metal art now is a way of him hoarding without me yelling at him and its a bonus because now I do the same thing..

An old mountain bike gets a new life

  We went to our local Goodwill store one evening and found two treasure to our eyes, two beat up rusted mountain bikes.   The price seemed a little high for the average shopper, I think they were listed for $10 each, since all the tires where flat, the chains were rusted fast and the controls one the handle bars didn't work,  but to us they were perfect.   When I told the store clerk I would like to purchase the two bikes he looked at me like I may have lost my mind, well he may be right but I lost that years ago, this was nothing new to me.  He sold them to us for $6 each.

  We paid for the bikes and the clerk asked how I was going to take them home, I said I would have to go get my trailer.  "Well the store closes in 20 minutes we will hold them for you so you can get them tomorrow" the clerk said.  I said ok and left the store, that wasn't good for me, I was excited to work with something new.  We went home ASAP and connected the trailer and raced back to Goodwill.
Pulling up outside Goodwill about 5 minutes before they closed, I was able to get the bikes loaded before they closed.  When I came home from work the next, we looked at the bikes and weren't  sure what to do with them, so they sat for a few weeks, so much for be excited to work with new material.

  Finally I got tired of looking at them and started taking one apart.  Once it was completely apart I went inside and got a drink and sat down on the step and stared at the bike frame turned upside down.  What can you do with a bike frame, that's when an idea struck.  A bunny made completely from those bike parts.

 

  Well this is it my bunny bike, it was a lot of fun to create. The blue bike in the background is the other bike from goodwill, we started to paint it blue for another project we had in mind that never was completed.

 

  A quick run down of all the parts used shall we; you can see I used the handle bars as the back legs and feet to give it the long legged look, the pedals for the front legs and feet,  the mouth is the combination of the front and rear brake assemblies, the whiskers are made from the brake cable (epoxied on, hard to weld such thin wire), the eyeballs are what held the pedals and bearings in place in the frame, and finally the nose and tail are the reflectors. 

 

  Unfortunately to this day the bunny bike hasn't sold,  but it certainly brings in a crowd of people talking about how its made using all the different bike parts.  Maybe its the color combo, might be time to give this bunny a new spray.  Any MN Vikings fans out there want the one and only Viking bunny?

 

  We have more  worn out bikes waiting to be giving a new life, and we have some ideas for them.

Follow us Facebook to see what color the bunny could be next and other creations to come.

     Special request... a term that can be a little overwhelming but yet also a term that is quite enjoyable. The thought that this person liked our work enough to ask for a special piece to be created is wonderful but also you sit there and think, but are they going to like it?? It also gives us a chance to make something we might not of thought about making in metal form. At the Blair County Arts Festival we were asked to if we could make a skunk.. I love skunks but I had never thought of

making one, this is what I came up with..

 

 

Trading art for art,
The next two pieces we traded with was a local wildlife artist, Matt Doyle Fine Art, check out his face book page.  I worked with Matt for a few years, he is actually the one who encouraged us to do metal art work.

 This is Bear, yeah this picture sucks.. We paint mostly past 9 o'clock when our little ones are in bed finding magical wonders with there eyes shut. Bear is actually a light blue and silver... ( I think ). He spends his days chilling with Puggie the penguin.

Puggie the penguin came in from the North pole to meet new friends,  he soon met Bear now the two of them are waiting for MATT to bring them home. Bring them home MATT!

 

A couple that has a few of our pieces already.. asked us to make the fish and scorpion to symbolize both of there zodiac signs. The funny thing is we were both thinking about making these pieces soon and kicking around the idea.. that next weekend they came up to us and asked us to.

 

Mickey, It took us a while to get Mickey started ( still needs paint ) some times when you get a request you don't have a idea yet of how its going to come together.. that's what we were stumbling on... either of us had an idea.. we really just need to wait till the inspiration came to us.. with a deadline of Christmas that was perfect.. with a few trips to goodwill and a couple of lamps inspiration has struck and tada says Mickey.

 

Seahorse and Dolphin, I previously  had made the seahorse and the guy wanted another pieces for his grandchildren. He was telling us that he see them every year at the beach and he wanted another sea creature made up to give one to each of them. I wanted them to have a similar look, or so I was at least hoping for it to.. They are both made from mostly the same parts just used in different ways..

 

 

 Chicken, We worked together on this piece..Well mainly because neither of us has that third arm coming out your you know... It is 3 foot high.. our biggest piece we have made to date. This past weekend it was in flight... Sideways.. to meet the couple that had wanted to give it as wedding gift.


Remember we are always looking for a unique challenges.. So if you can come up with the idea we will try to make it into metal form... Keep in mind we do not have a garage so when it starts to snow we are done till next spring with our welding pieces. Email us at coldchinese@atlanticbb.net  or you can leave us a message on Facebook. Thanks for reading!  

Sitting back and listening..

Yup that's me hiding behind our sign..

 

This is at the Blair County Arts Festival..

 

 

As the people starting to show up, we sat there a bit nerves not really knowing what to expect. People started walking by and they started stopping and looking around at everything naming the bits and pieces we have used to make our creations and what they were.. It was wonderful to hear that what we have spent months on people where understanding what we seen as well... Little kids stopped and loved all the color, other artist stopped by and love the uniqueness of our pieces. There were many people that stopped and said we had the most creative pieces in the festival.. They all seen what we did that a pile of junk that someone could just throw away could also be turned into some interesting.

 

To tell you the truth this was the first time since we moved to Altoona that we actually were part of  the local people.. ( I know that sounds pretty sad and if I told you how long we lived here it would even sound worse) We met a lot of great people from around here.. We met a local jewelry maker that has some of the most unique pieces I have seen. A guy that was walking around and playing a banjo, he actually stopped and played a few songs in our booth with us. A few people that just loved our work that lived in the area. We seen Pauly Shore (not really) from Son in Law. Heck I even seen a lady with a parrot on her shoulder walking around. It was a wonderful experience to say the least. By the end of the festival we felt relived that our hard work paid off and motivated us to keep working hard to create new and exciting pieces.

 

 

I guess we had a late start with only four months to create our work without much material or money.  We wanted to be in several festivals but with out a history of our work and many festivals were already full.   We took off to the local flea market, were we do a lot of our shopping for material. Thanks to many shoppers at the flea market who enjoyed our work and looking at how we took rusty and unwanted metal into unique pieces of art we were able to make what was looking like a slow year into a rather successfully first year.

The flea market brought a lot of special request which was something new and exciting for us...

Look for Fridays post for some of the requested creations.

Welding in a snow globe...

My mom took our kids for the night and Chris was going to teach me how to weld ( teach isn't a good word more like show me how to weld).. Well it was still winter but I was just so exited, It was pretty sunny outside even with trace of snow on the ground, we decide to go try it out. I had already had Jack Bot ready in a pile so we set up our welding table, which is not more then saw horses and a pieces of uneven metal top, grabbed everything and we started with a pieces of scrap and Chris showed me how to make a bead. Then handed me the helmet and left...so I made a bead then looked up didn't see Chris no where started welding Jack Bot together. I didn't get very far.. I was making his legs looked up and took of my helmet and I kid you not It felt like we were in a huge snow globe the wind picked up and snow was coming down in circles around us, which was pretty amazing to see but also not very handy to weld in... Looking at the sky and feeling the wind was getting a bit chilly out we decided to go inside the house. A few minute's later it was sunny again.. What the heck?? Since a day with out our kids doesn't happen to much ( and was pretty excited still) we adventured back outside.. grabbed everything out set it up put on my helmet and you know what going to happen yup that damn snow globe came outta no where. No this didn't happen just twice It happened 3 more times after that... yup after the 5th time we gave up... A week later it was nice enough to go back out and finish those two creations.

 



This is the first piece I had welded that was available for sale. The body is made of a gator jaw wrench I found at a local flea market, I have since made more
lizards using the same style wrench.  This lizard was painted orange with a light blue stripe down its back and tail.

 

I would like you to meet Archie the garden friend, he hales from Scotland and has traveled a long way to look over a beautiful garden in the states. We don't know where that kid came from.. He just came over and started smiling so we took a picture... haha oh at a second look that Zeth yup he's ours and we have another little one, Jazel she's not to into taking pictures anymore...

 

We are going to end our post with a few of our past welded pieces..



A flower for Amber...

This is were our journey started. Chris brought home a flower he had made me from old tractor parts for our anniversary last year. A friend of his told him we should start  making these types of things and trying to get into art and craft shows... Well the winter was upon us and we couldn't just go outside and weld with no garage.. We started soldering random things that were in the basement together.

 Sting Bob is the first thing Chris soldered using a tomato can.

 Skullete's wings are the first I had done.. I'm really wasn't into soldering much, made a few necklaces and things most of which I never finished.

Chris on the other hand made a lot of interesting soldered pieces.

 

 

 

Stop by Monday to see some of our welded pieces we have created as our journey continues....