Taarna Welles

             Our final  stop on this week's trip was to a fashion designer with her own grid. From Indigo to Bubblesz, Taarna Welles' little grid. Taarna chatted in voice as Mal Burns asked her a number of questions on behalf of the group. 

Taarna explained that her grid began just a couple of years ago. She had been active on a number of grids, including OSgrid and Metropolis, before she started Bubblesz with her husband. She has been making sculpty objects for years, and with the advent of mesh she's been busy making even more stuff, notably the BEST footwear in opensim. 

There is however a lot more to Taarna than her gorgeous boots. She has always  made a lot of sculptures, inspired by the natural world, but also by images she sees online, and her sim Hidden Leaves is a creative archive going back over a long career. it was interesting to learn that when you import a sculpty it loses 75% of the detail. Wow. No wonder everyone loves mesh. 

Taarna is quite a perfectionist, she takes something like 30 to 40 hours to make an item, be it art or a wearable. The woodland of Hidden leaves is studded with sculptures, often hidden in the trunks of trees or nestling in the hillside. Of particular interest is  Patefatio Mens, this head. Does it have a brain? 
           Other lovely pieces include harps, hands, and her naughty-looking toadstools. 

Face in a harp

          We wandered for a long time before heading to sim Savvy where her beautiful shop La Baronnie can be found. Shoes, hats, furniture, goggles and more are available here. She is a huge fan of Steampunk - hooked on all that detail - and she shared with us her latest, not yet finished project, a Steampunk streetlamp. We also visited a little house full of grungy, delicate beds and dressers, and the darlingest rocking horse.

La Baronnie

            The high quality of Taarna's free, mostly full perm, creations was bound to bring to mind the  content-theft/permissions-angst/money-making debate. 
 Taarna Welles: I don't want to sell items. I want to share and make people happy. For me it's a learning curve, and if it makes people happy, why not. It's a free metaverse, so I contribute too! Sometimes people take my things, they can change the content owner on their own grid, I can't do anything about that, so I don't let it worry me. When I see people selling my items as their own, it is a very big compliment.

Aime the pirate studies the steampunk lamppost.

            May all thieves and opportunists be shamed into quitting, and may the rest of us be inspired to create and freely share all the more.

HG Addresses:

Taarna's art:                            bubblesz.nl:8002:Hidden Leaves
Taarna's mesh store:                bubblesz.nl:8002:Savvy