Dearest Bretheren and Sisteren:

Dr. Ding courteously invites you to gaze upon the many fine and mystical offerings of Madame Talbot’s Victorian Lowbrow™. It is a decidedy bizarre place, not for the feeble of constitution, containing many gruesome and spectral offerings for your consumption. No, not the tubercular kind of consumption. My but you are rather a literal creature, aren’t you? No mind, gentle reader. Read on.

Suffering from phantasms due to sudden limb loss? Madame Talbot has wrought only the finest cure known to medical science!

Perhaps you merely require a slightly macabre dental daguerrotype to display in your medical chirurgery? Look no further.

Or perchance one of your loved ones is much aggrieved with melancholy humor and is in dire need of one of Madame Talbot’s handmade Mourning Dolls? Dr. Ding finds their visages quite agreeable, in a most distinctive and singularly dreadful way.

I must confess although I have no actual need for the occult curious featured by the good Madame, I find myself inexplicably drawn to them, as if by some unseen hand. You don’t suppose this supernatural phenomenon is borne qua the mighty aetheric powers of something like this do you? I must summon my Evil Manservant Jeebes at once and have him bring me the chequebook anon. Forthwith and posthaste!

Mr Art Donovan is a most talented inventor who has been building lovely steampunk lamps for quite some time now, and clocks lately too!

This photograph depicts the crown of the “Thin White Duke,” a steampunk table lamp standing 50″ tall and measuring 21″ wide at its lampshade. It is entirely hand-made of solid mahogany, brass, bronze mesh and steel–and the bulbs operate independently by brass control sticks on the base!

Mr Donovan maintains a wonderful collection of some of his finest creations at a Website we definitely recommend you check out!

The great and random patrickwilsonmusic.com has just done us all a great favor. He took his father’s aviation goggles and has made a wonderful tutorial on how to reproduce them, including scale pattens that can be printed from the web site. Easy! & Free!

I’m sure you could have a great deal of fun making your own.

Look here for how to make your own Aviation Goggles.

My loved people who dwell in the wonderful areas of NY and my favorite city across the pond, London.

Let’s have an Event shall we? Let’s wave at each other across those thousands of miles dressed as best as we can, thus in a small way talking over that time and space.

I propose to you The International Telectroscope wave!

On June 7th

NYC area people meet up at the telectroscope at 2pm.

London area people meet up the telectroscope at 7pm your time.

Then in an odd way via the telectoscope we are all meeting up at once and can wave at one another!

For any NY area people who come there will be more stuff to do after this.

London people perhaps you should go to Around The World In 80 Days, from White Mischief afterward, this can be your pre-event before the event.

This could be the first of its kind. An email already has been sent to the site about it and so far they seem to love the idea.

Bring your cameras this could be a great deal of fun.

So who’s in?

(Tinkergirl: Thanks to Kai, Scott, Gothamist, Shawn, John, IceSixxx, David, Rory, Jawdy, Steve, Julian, Novelgazer and Ed for suggesting the Telectroscope as a subject for a post!)

Spats are, as any good Victorianist (or neo-Victorianist) knows, an lovely addition to one’s wardrobe, for reasons beginning with “rows of buttons” and ending with “style and panache.” A few tutorials on how to make your own are floating around the æther, including one in Steampunk Magazine Issue 3, page 38, which has a pattern, which is ever-so-helpful. Of course, each set of spats should be made for the individual legs, so if you do venture cutting out your own, measure, make a mock-up, and fit it to you.

However, if you don’t feel up to creating them yourself, I cannot recommend a pair more covet-worthy than this leather pair with delicate cut-outs by Les Frivolites. Simply stunning just to look at, let alone wear, and they have lovely detailing like ribbons lacing up the back, which you can see here. Excuse me while I sit and stare…

[youtube]http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=ILfE4hfYrdU[/youtube]

JingleJoe of our Steampunk Forum has come up with this rather whimsicle “dohicky” that converts audio waves into light. He created it using a circuit that he also made that makes the LEDs in the valves light up. I particularly like the fact that it turns on via a wind-up key. This would be perfect for any nocturnal steampunk-themed party!

More images of this device can be found in JingleJoe’s post to the Steampunk Forum here.

Though Mr Alex C.F. dislikes his work being labeled “steampunk,” his creations are definitely of interest to the steampunk enthusiast, especially when they were supposedly devised during the nineteenth century.

His latest invention is this “Chrono Displacement Device”, i.e.: time machine, which apparently sat unused in the halls of the Temporal Council for nearly half a century until in 1880, the Royal Academy Science Fair demanded something rather auspicious for their grand opening. Probably having been amused with the Lost World tales of the late Professor Challenger recently, the fine gentlemen of the Royal Academy decided that some large prehistoric creature ought to be brought forth from the past and revealed to a horrified and excitable crowd. In spite of protests from the Temporal Council as well as various animals’ rights groups, a young male Allosaur was revealed to the public on the morning of July 5th. Terrified and high on miscalculated doses of sedatives, the dinosaur broke free of its shackles and prompty killed half a dozen spectators before being tranquilized and sent back to the late Jurassic. Her Majesty, Queen Victoria, who naturally attended the opening, was quoted remarking, “What a marvelous opening to the proceedings.”

That is, according to the imagination of Mr C.F., whose contraption, in spite of its modest size, is evidently able to teleport large objects through time! Read more about his wonderful invention over at his Blog.

I love hand-made Steampunk-ery that still manages to look great on display – it’s one of the reason I love cruising Etsy‘s Steampunk categories. Ergo, I offer up another craft, but this one is a bit more twisted.

In a similar vein as the Lycanthropy Remedy Kit and Alex CF‘s specimen & exploration kits, these mutated (6 legs!) mammalian fœtuses sealed in specimen jars have been lovingly created by Baron Andrew von Fogel. Deliciously creepy! If you’re interested in more, do find your way here, which contains more pictures, including ones of the fœtuses sans jars, where they look (amusingly) like tiny crustaceans, and pricing, should you be so inclined to purchase one.

It would look perfectly at home one’s Cabinet of Curiosities, no?

Doktor A’s official art showcase kicks off in St. Columbus, Ohio on June the 7th, as you can see in the beautifully designed leaflet above. The show will act as an initial primer for the upcoming mini series “Mechtorians”, released by Doktor A in partnership with MindStyle, the previews of which were seen at New York ComicCon with a selection of rare paint masters being made available. However, for all you British fans out there, you can meet and greet the good Doktor this Saturday (May 17th) at the Richard Goodhall Gallery in Manchester from 12 till 5 PM. Signings will also be taking place at the gallery as well as a variety of customs and prints also being available from an array of artists. Yet it gets better! Although not directly a Steampunk artist, Kathie Olivas will also be in attendance, her fans including Doktor A and Doctor Steel to name a few.

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Seeing as how this will be my first post, I figured I’d start off with something so spectacular that it would be an offense to the very aether itself. After a disappointing couple of minutes, I realized that that wouldn’t be as easy as I had initially hoped so I’ll have to settle for this instead.

If you’re anything like me, you read the first couple of pages of The Five Fists of Science and were instantly envious of Nikola Tesla and his plasma guns. Well, my dear comrades, envy no more for RMC Cybernetics has come to your aid with instructions for a DIY Plasma Gun! They estimate the cost to fall anywhere between $150-$200 depending on whether or not you use new or used parts but I think for another $50 it can be cleaned up to look like something presentable. At the low voltage they provide instructions for, your body acts as the ground so there’s little to worry about in terms of danger.

I’ve already started to buy parts and I’ll post images as soon as it’s done. There should be a video after the jump, I’m pretty sure there is…

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