Recently had the opportunity for make some pins for Haiti, They will be on the road with some musicians and all the profits will be donated to Haiti.

Here’s the last batch of pins I made before returning the Pin Machine back to Find this morning!

Recently made a bunch of pins for local musician Brzowski, please check out his Myspace for some awesome music and go see him live, by the looks of his schedule he’s been a busy man!

Jan 27 2010 10:00P	LIKE WOE (cd release party) @ Big Easy	Portland, Maine
Jan 28 2010 9:00P	WCYY Spinout Show	Portland, Maine
Feb 5 2010 9:00P	The Big Easy (Ruckus Cup Battle) (showcase)	Portland, Maine
Feb 12 2010 9:00P	Asylum w/ ILL BILL + SLAINE (LCN)	Portland, Maine
Mar 5 2010 9:00P	Heirloom Arts Theater w/ HALO	Danbury, Connecticut
Mar 10 2010 8:00P	RIDDLORE+HOMELESS @ Big Easy (Brzo Hosting)	Portland, Maine
Mar 27 2010 9:30P	Geno’s Rock Club	Portland, Maine
Mar 28 2010 7:00P	Dover Brick House	Dover, New Hampshire
Apr 24 2010 10:00P	No. 9 Ale House	Malden, Massachusetts
Apr 25 2010 5:00P	TBA	Portsmouth, New Hampshire
Apr 26 2010 8:00P	The Big Easy (Early show–8pm!)	Portland, Maine

Brzowski’s album Blooddrive Vol.2 The Wreckage Between features local illustrator Ryan LaMunyon’s artwork on the cover, who has also designed some pins for us recently.

We’ll be at the PICNIC Holiday Sale today with a table, where we’ll have the pin machine, as well as our own photo and illustration prints and pins for sale. Come say hi!

We were excited to open up a few local papers and see our lovely pin machine featured front and center in the new ad for Find! The machine has been doing great there, only now that means we need to make a lot more pins. Keep them coming!

You can mail in your Portland Pins if you dont live in the Portland area, or cant get to one of our drop off boxes, located at SPACE Gallery, Eli-Phant and The Art Mart. You can download a template in our Contribute section. Please send finished templates to:

Portland Pins
536 Congress St. #303 Portland, ME 04101

We look forward to seeing your designs!

Portland Pins we be at Shop-A-Do! this year, which falls on Dec. 4th and 5th at SPACE Gallery (538 Congess St.) in Portland. Come say hi, there will be new buttons as well as prints, posters and clothes at our table. Which will be a collective table of Emblem Studio work and Portland Pins.
Lots of other folks will be there as well. Alicia Allen Jewelry, Alex Argo Jewelry Design, Bobbin Studio, Boom Chick-a-Boom, Ferdinand, Jennifer Judd-McGee, KINSELLAART, Mean & Wroughten, Olive’s Vintage, Pinecone+Chickadee, Rusty Petals, Salty Kiss Press, Selfish & Talking Painting, Small Victory Studios, SPACE Gallery, Spindleworks, and Strong Arm Bindery. With music by BAM BAM.
Times are 4pm-10pm on Friday and 10am-4pm on Saturday.

Go get your Portland Pins at Find, at 16 Free St. in Portland, Maine! Meet the owner of the store Laura Ker, pictured above holding a Bryan Bruchman original pin out of our machine.

Just in case you missed the issue of The Portland Daily Sun that came out a few months ago around Picnic time. Here it is!

Local music and art? It’s a Picnic in Portland

Anyone thinking that making art and music in Portland is no picnic has something to learn this weekend.

The second annual Picnic Music and Arts Festival will make its return to Portland’s Lincoln Park this Saturday, offering a full day of live music, crafts, local and regional artwork curated by some most established names in the city’s arts scene, as well as salvaged kitsch, clothing, and bicycles.

Last year’s event was such a hit with local and regional artists that Picnic organizer and Portland-based Peapod Records founder Ron Harrity, who organizes the music side of the event, said that they had to turn away prospective vendors due to a lack of space at the Franklin Arterial adjacent park on Congress Street.

On their website, organizers say the event began in 2008 “as a means to give talented emerging artists from the local DIY craft scene an opportunity to sell their wares while providing an alternative to traditional arts and craft fairs; as well as bring together some of the best indie musical acts from the area.”

“It has definitely grown pretty quickly,” said Harrity, who along with four other organizers reviewed the applications of hundreds of artists in an effort to pare down the event into a manageable size that would meet space constraints, and not overwhelm patrons.

“This is a juried craft fair,” said Picnic organizer Amy Teh of Pinecone + Chickadee, a local design and silk-screening studio, who emphasizes that while local art is sure to dominate the fair, the jury was careful to not be too Portland-centric in their selection process.

While many of Portland’s best-known studios and artists will once again be represented at Picnic

“New this year we have a company called Freakshow Effects,” said Teh. The Portland-based company catering to aesthetically inclined musicians with their unique, hand painted guitar effects pedals, with names like “Maharishi” and “The Brown Rabbit”.

Picnic is also a chance for local galleries and studios to exhibit the work of other artists as well as their own, exposing patrons to new and emerging artists from Maine and away.

Sally Struever, co-owner of Congress St design store Eli Phant, was quick to sign on to Picnic in it’s first year, hoping to gain exposure for the recently opened shop.This year, Struever plans on changing her approach to highlight more of her studios own work.

“Last year we choose four artists that we featured, and brought a lot of their work to Picnic,” said Struever. “This year, we made a lot more of our own,” including card sets, handmade books and kites for a little “something fun.”

Local photographer and USM art student Julia Wood pitched in with two friends last year to rent a table for the first annual event, where she sold Polaroid photos.

“It was a great experience, we’d never really tried to sell any of our photos before,” said Wood, who at the end of the day, had sold enough photos to cover her registration costs, with a little left over to pump back into the event.

“We just ended up spending our money at other booths,” said Wood, “I bought some awesome junk – an old tin box, a bright lime green shirt, my roommate even found a copy of Barbarella.”

But arts, crafts, and assorted “awesome junk” are just half of the event. Picnic will also feature live music throughout the day, with acts selected by Harrity, from local punk and indie bands like Marie Stella and Rutundo Sealeg, as well as national acts Lorelei and Cotton Candy.

Marie Stella guitarist, local artist and HillyTown blogger Bryan Bruchman thinks this carefully selected lineup might be a surprise to the casual art-fans who might be expecting a more ambient style of music. “There will be some pretty loud punk bands, which you might not expect to find at a free outdoor arts festival.”

Among these heavier acts is local punk/heavy rock outfit Bat Shelter, who Bruchman describes as “Kind of like Black Sabbath, really loud, really riffy.”

“This is some pretty heavy music, not just background,” said Bruchman “Hopefully people pay attention to the bands.”

Bruchman is also involved on the art side of Picnic, running a booth for Portland Pins, a collaborative project between himself and Kris Johnsen of Emblem Studios.

The ultra-affordable venture involves distributing pin templates at local galleries and businesses, encouraging locals to decorate the sheets with tiny, inch-and-a-half masterpieces, and then return the template to a drop-off spot, where it’s collected by the team, and pressed into pins which are sold at gumball-dispensers around town for 25 cents apiece.

“It’s been fun to see all sorts of local people coming up with creative ideas for tiny tiny art.” Said Bruchman.

“It’s really fun to see people get them…put a quarter in and be really excited about what they get.” He added.

Portland Pins and other affordable, local, and unique art, will be on sale this Saturday at Picnic from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. at Lincoln Park, corners of Congress and Franklin Arterial. This event will be held rain-or-shine.

Portland Daily Sun

A while ago myself and Bryan had a pin making session where we created packaging for a 4 pack of pins, these are all hand drawn and will be available for the first time since Picnic, at Shop-A-Do at SPACE Gallery. Which is on December 4th and 5th. Please stop by our table and pick some up! The Pin machine will also we back at SPACE for those 2 days only.

Have you been looking for the Portland Pins machine that’s been moving around town? It started out at Coast City Comics before moving on to SPACE Gallery (and a few other special events, including PICNIC and MECA events), and now it’s on to its 3rd official location! Stop in at Find at 16 Free Street to get your own Portland Pins for just 25 cents for the next month!

Find is a great vintage store (we’re not just saying that, we got the idea to bring the machine there because we kept going in to shop!) and not only can you find some great deals on clothes, but there’s a cozy lounge area with Ms. Pac-Man, magazines to read, and now our Portland Pins machine!

The debut issue of The Maine Magazine includes a nice mention of Portland Pins on page 34. Check it out in the online version (archived here) or pick it up and admire the shiny new publication in person (we like the nice large photos and the layout!) Thanks!

As you may have noticed, there’s been a stream of posts on here with scanned templates of pins that we’ve received through this project. The titles of the posts are the artists’ names, and when available, the image links to their website. We’ll be continuing to add these scans to the site over the next few weeks, so you can look for the pins you’ve gotten at random from the Portland Pins machines and identify the artists who made them. If you like their work, we recommend letting them know (you could comment on the post if you’d like) and checking out their other work. A big part of this project is supporting local artists and encouraging people to discover work that they may not otherwise see in a store or gallery. If you find something great, tell us about it! Of course, you don’t have to be an artist to join the project and make your own pins – everybody is welcome and in the end, all of the pins are mixed up and distributed at random.

Also, come say hi to us in person (and of course buys some pins and create some too!) on September 12 at the PICNIC Music and Arts Festival in Lincoln Park! We’ll have a table near the stage/Franklin Arterial side of the park.

We decided to change plans a bit. Please keep those location suggestions coming, as we’ll need to pick a new location eventually, but for now we’ve removed the Portland Pins machine from Coast City Comics / The Fun Box Monster Emporium (thanks for letting us put it there!). So where is it? Well, you can still find the original machine (which works all the time now, by the way) at Eli-Phant, but the second machine will be refilled with pins and brought out each Wednesday in August for the HillyTown OFFStage at SPACE Gallery concert series! The shows are free, all ages, and begin at 7pm every Wednesday (the first one is today!) Get the full schedule for this concert series here.

As we’re heading into the third month of this art experiment, we figured it was time to let the Portland community be even more involved. After all, it is a collaborative project. It’s also random. That said, we’re offering the opportunity to be the next local business to host the Portland Pins dispenser (ok, gumball machine) to someone out there that wants it. Why would you want to have this in your store/gallery/coffee shop? Well, it’s a fun way to be involved in sharing great local art, people love getting pins, and it’s likely that customers who haven’t been to your business before will stop in to check it out. We started at Eli-Phant in June, added a machine at Coast City Comics/The Fun Box Monster Emporium in July, and for August we will move one of the machines to a new location. Email us and tell us a bit about your local business. On July 29 we will randomly (there it is again) pick one of the submitted businesses to host the machine for the month of August, starting on First Friday, August 7th.

The only requirements we have for eligible businesses are that they are located on the peninsula (don’t worry Outer Forest Ave, we’ve got plans for you too) and that they are open to the public during the First Friday Art Walk. So, you want in? Let us know!

It’s First Friday! That means it’s time for a new location where you can get Portland Pins! We purchased a new machine for the occasion (this one works every time, no more wrestling to get your pin out) and will have it out and ready to go tonight in time for the Art Walk, beginning at 5pm. The new location is perfect – Coast City Comics and The Fun Box Monster Emporium at 656 Congress Street. Stop in tonight to check out the new machine, get some pins, and maybe pick up a couple comics or perhaps a scary monster toy! The original Portland Pins machine will also be returning to its location at Eli-Phant (253 Congress).

Maybe you’ve figured out where the second location for the Portland Pins machine will be (or maybe we told you, because we’re terrible at keeping secrets when we’re excited about something), but we’ll announce it officially tomorrow morning. Assuming the rain holds off for at least a couple hours during the First Friday Art Walk, you’ll be able to check out our brand new machine (which works every single time, yay!) and a whole crop of new pins. Check back tomorrow to see!

Welcome to the new Portland Pins website! This little project felt like it was outgrowing its former home on HillyTown.com, so we decided to give it a little more room to breathe! We’ll have the pin samples online soon, so you can look up your pin and find out more about the artist who made it! The machine is still at Eli-Phant (253 Congress St., Portland, Maine), so go get your own local art pin at random, and check out all the great stuff they have in the store!

Today marks the debut of our new drop boxes around town, where you can leave you completed design templates so we can turn them into 1″ pins and include them in our pin-dispensing machines! You can find the boxes at SPACE Gallery, Eli-Phant, and Coast City Comics/the Fun Box Monster Emporium. Thanks to these businesses for humoring helping us out!

Get your designs submitted in time for the unveiling of our second Portland Pins location during the July 3rd First Friday Art Walk! If you can, leave them at one of the aforementioned locations by Wednesday, July 1st! Thanks!