Here’s the video:

Hopper & Dish Network @ CES

Holy Cow! AvantGarb made it into the UPS blog – Small Business makes Big Mascots. With big, custom mascots, good, reliable shipping is crucial. The mascot has to be at the game or at the product promotion or at the play-offs or cheering the runners at a marathon. We play a very tight game with logistics. I have faith in our shipping sources. So, when UPS called, I answered. I am, after all, a wee bit of a shipping nerd or possibly a shipping obsessive.

Being featured in the UPS blog is an example of the power of accidental marketing. This is how it happened.

I tweeted @UPS to complain about a minor billing issue – the UPS people took the complaint seriously & they made my billing smoother – 1 bill a month rather than many. I tweeted something nice about shipping & UPS’s PR people gave us a call.

UPS is a classy company. Not only do they get mascots where they need to be when they need to be there, they respond calmly and efficiently to a complaint.

Turns out we’re mascot mavens &  shipping savants here at AvantGarb.

….& we’re dressed in holiday garb!

Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la. It’s Christmas at AvantGarb!

Let’s deck the halls and have some fun!!!!

xoxo the Jolly Gang at the Garb

Thanksgiving’s the best

About this I don’t jest.

We cook and we laugh and we drink some fine wine.

Then gather round the the table and prepare to dine.

With the turkey in place, the gathering is blest.

We’re all here and we’re glad.

Family, friends and guest!

…so KNS came to AvantGarb. They wanted to talk about different kinds of foams and adhesives. These are things I find endlessly fascinating. So we talked foam adhesives and where to buy fur.

A couple of days later, I got in touch with KNS because we needed some hands at AvantGarb to finish a mascot, Matt & Mike came by to help us.

Turns out they took some pix and wrote a blog. Here’s what they thought – KNS at AvantGarb.

We had a blast!

….and ohmygoodness, the things we saw. It was there that I had my first encounter with Claus Oldenburg. When I saw all of his soft sculptures, I knew I had just fallen in love with fabric and foam. Oldenburg’s soft sculptures from the 60′s and early 70′s still make me swoon. The soft-sculpture hamburger is big, familiar, funny and American. Really not that different from a mascot. Put some googlie eyes on the burger and the pickle becomes a beret!

….and, of course – it being MoMA – there was Picasso. There was a huge, Picasso show at the MoMA when I was a kid. His costumes for the Ballet Russe performance, “Parade” were in that show. These were enormous costumes – really more like wearable, cubist sculptures. I felt like those costumes were there just for me. Thank you Picasso

I’m pretty sure the curators at MoMA never thought they were providing some sort of job training program for a future mascot maker.

In the ’60′s, a young teens w/ a dollar or 2 in allowance could afford to hang out at MoMA for the day. We had fun skittering up and down the stairs. We saw art in the galleries, art films in the theater and nibbled on sandwiches in the sculpture garden. We weren’t especially precocious. Hanging out at the Museum was what NYC kids did then.

Robert Fulghum claims, everything he needed to know, he learned in kindergarden…and, really, his are great rules to live by —basically hold hands, be nice and flush.

As a teenager, growing up in Queens, the Museum of Modern Art taught me to open my eyes and my mind. Could I possibly say, “Everything I Needed to Know, I Learned at the Museum of Modern Art?”

I’ll be the Queen of Ceremonies (that’s QC, not MC) for Dressing Indianapolis. It’s part of the Spirit & Place Festival and Indy Talks – a kind of twofer – on Tuesday November 1st at 7:00 at the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA) in the Toby. I’ll be wearing pearls and maybe a tiara.

When I think of dressing Indianapolis, I think about how I’d like to make big, pillbox hats for street lamps, put a top hat and a bow tie on Hilbert Circle Theater building and maybe some nice summer dresses on the stanchions around the monument. I’m a literal kinda gal. For me, all things animate and inanimate have mascot potential.

The people at Spirit & Place have a wider and more embracing vision. Dressing Indianapolis is, indeed, about style. Style of buildings, architecture, cityscape and lighting. It is about the personalities of different neighborhoods, the interaction and community that happens in public spaces. It is also about culture, streetwear, businesses, schools, do-good organizations —-and yes, its about clothes and fashion and the riffing that goes on between and amongst all of those elements.

Come join us.  There will be talk, there will be picture, there will be new ideas, there will be people wearing cool clothes and there will be cocktails. We’ll have a blast!

Sean got in touch with AvantGarb. We made the Griff new feet. Sean was very happy with the feet.

More than most performers, professional mascot performers rely on having all of the parts of the mascot costume work for them. The feet are especially important. Athletic mascot performers run up and down the stands in big feet (sometimes w/ big claws). The performer needs to have their foot firmly secured into the mascot shoe.

At our mascot studio, we have spent hours fine-tuning the inner structure of the mascot foot. Next to sculpting and building the head, making feet/shoe/boots for a mascot is the most complex and time consuming. The small details take time and—-well, engineering.There are buckles and straps and foam and leather and soles that have to be cut and there are doohickies and various types of elastic and webbing and something called “cloud”,

Soon we were building the whole Griff mascot from the wispy head feathers down to the soles of the feet.

The Griffin is a mythological character. He is part eagle, part lion. This means we got to make wonderful silver wings put hints of feathers on the Griff’s head and give the guy really furry leg and feet. The Griff is the King of the Beast and the King of the birds, so we muscled him up a bit too.

For us, muscles are foam, foam, foam, foam. All of that foam is covered in athletic mesh. We use a foam that is designed to have water flow through it —-so its washable and it tough.

The Griffins were our first introduction to the world of hockey. We’re big fans!

• Rex/1998 nose – CF
• Rex/2003 & 2007 side head  – cut 2
• Rex/2003 front leg – really short
• Rex 1998, 2003, 2007, 2011 eyelid

This is mascot evolution. All of the patterns are drafted at our studio out of heavy, brown Kraft paper. Apparently the eyelid for Rex – the smallest pattern piece of all – is the one pattern piece that has remained the same! 

We have been creating and re-creating and re-imagining Rex , the mascot for the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis since the early 1990′s. We can trace the evolution of Rex through the patterns. 

What has changed on Rex over the years?  

The size of the head has changed, the size and curve of the tail, the color of the tongue, the placement of the nostrils, Many of the changes have been for the comfort of the performer. Some have been carefully considered and planned, some have just happened in the constructing – when a hint of sparkle seemed just right.

The 3 toed foot looks the same from year to year, but the inner mechanism of the shoe have changed considerably. 

As in all things – it’s not just what you see on the outside. The inner engineering and workings of a mascot are just as important as the outside appearance.

Pattern pieces migrate, and don’t always get back to where they belong. So we may have a Dinosaur sleeve from 1998 that looks wrong for a mascot is 2011, yet none of the sleeves after 1998 can be found.

Through all of the changes and manipulations in patterns & engineering, the essence of Rex remains the same.Rex requires yards and yards and yards of custom-dyed Muppet Fleece – dyed to a special “RexGreen” by our dynamite dyer, Robbie Stanton.  

Rex is a big, rainbow bellied & tailed, loving, welcoming Dinosaur with a lovely Dino smile. Rex – End of the Day parade

• Mascots have a very busy social calendar.
• The same mascot must be on the east & west coast at the same time.
• A mascot is making several appearances with multiple performers
• Each region needs it’s own mascot for all of the appearances and fabulous events that mascots get to go to —-this gets back to the busy social calendar

Racing beer cans – Portland Beavers Baseball

J.J. Jumper – the official mascot of the NCAA @ mascot training