SteamCon, vicariously.

I didn’t get to SteamCon, but blog reader and friend Bennie did*. He’s the one who made me aware of Steam Punk in the first place.

Anyway, he said he’d send me a few things from SteamCon, to which I said he didn’t have to, but he said he would, to which I was very happy. Steam Punk stuff is neato. In the mail, then, arrived a box filled with excessively cool and fabulous stuff, enough so that I took a piece to work as show-and-tell.

For one thing, the square “Zombie Eliminator” patch would have been enough of a gift; I was all but ready to staple it to my forehead in an effort to find a way to wear the thing in daily life. But Bennie threw in a T-shirt from the band Abney Park, which featured a graphic with a fin-tailed zeppelin on it. That was way more than enough.

But no!

There was a cool signed art print by Sarah Dungan entitled “The Naturalist” (he said it reminded him of these photos of mine, where I’m holding insects and such). There was a brass-looking winged zeppelin pin from Girl Genius. There was a pile of ephemera, from business cards to small posters for upcoming Steam Punk books. There was a SteamCon “newspaper” (which made me want to have such a newspaper, with those kinds of fonts and articles and graphics and general fabulousness, arrive each week for real). There was a postcard. There was a hilarious sample from Wondermark.com, which is now my new favorite source for cartoons. There was a postcard advertising the game Guns of Icarus. There was a postcard featuring the book Boneshaker, by Cherie Priest (see TheClockworkCentury.com). The visual imagery on all of this was like art cocaine to an artist.

And, the pièce de résistance?

The necklace.

Oh. Wow.

It is amazing, a copper bit of gorgeousness with an alarmingly delicate watch mechanism in the middle of a Victorian shield, from Velvet Garden.

I’m dying to wear it. If I go to the symphony this Saturday night, I’m wearing it. It is fabulous. I’ve never seen anything like it. This is the piece I took to work to show my co-workers. It really is something.

I sat there with this huge haul of stuff and could hardly believe it. T-shirt. Jewelery. Pins. Papers.

I just love paper and postcards and stuff like this. Whenever I go places, I get this stuff and glue and tape it into my travel journal. Thanks to my friend Bennie, I may have to create a first for me: a vicarious travel journal. I didn’t go to SteamCon, but I came pretty close.

(Thanks, Bennie. You went above and beyond.)

*Read his blog posts: Prelude, Day 1, Day 2,