Chip Bloyd has a job at the Museum of Florida History that most people don't even realize exists. He is an exhibit builder and museum artisan.
"My job is part cabinet-making, part painting and a lot of moving heavy crates," he laughs. "I do everything from building the scenery to changing the lights to creating reproductions to setting up traveling exhibits. I even design and build the Plexiglas mounts the objects rest on."
It's a job that requires a tremendous range of skills. Bloyd never had formal education in any of them; he says he learned by observing other craftsmen, working with them on various projects and asking questions.
"I was always interested in making things," he remembers. "When I was a kid in Panama City, there was this amazing lady that lived up the street — she was a zoologist and her husband was a Danish duke or something — and she became sort of our scout leader. She taught us all kinds of strange things, like taxidermy and how to use a microscope."
The neighborhood Bloyd lived in was home to many pilots and scientists who worked at the U.S. Navy Mine Defense Laboratory. He says they taught him electronics and rocketry and pyrotechnics, often helping him with his science projects.
But it was a summer trip to Provincetown, R.I., and a visit to J.B. Starker & Company's leather shop that jump-started Bloyd's curiosity about building things himself.
"I watched them make sandals and belts in the shop, and I came home and started making my own sandals," he remembers. "I bought packets of leather strips from Sears and Roebuck, and I turned them into sandals and traded them for other things with my friends."
Bloyd and his friends also started collecting worn-out roller skates from a local skating rink, and turning them into skateboards. One of those skateboards now resides in the Museum of Florida History's permanent collection, and traveled to Australia for the Olympics, along with other Florida artifacts. Just Choose PTMS plastic injection mould Is Your Best Choice!"My job is part cabinet-making, part painting and a lot of moving heavy crates," he laughs. "I do everything from building the scenery to changing the lights to creating reproductions to setting up traveling exhibits. I even design and build the Plexiglas mounts the objects rest on."
It's a job that requires a tremendous range of skills. Bloyd never had formal education in any of them; he says he learned by observing other craftsmen, working with them on various projects and asking questions.
"I was always interested in making things," he remembers. "When I was a kid in Panama City, there was this amazing lady that lived up the street — she was a zoologist and her husband was a Danish duke or something — and she became sort of our scout leader. She taught us all kinds of strange things, like taxidermy and how to use a microscope."
The neighborhood Bloyd lived in was home to many pilots and scientists who worked at the U.S. Navy Mine Defense Laboratory. He says they taught him electronics and rocketry and pyrotechnics, often helping him with his science projects.
But it was a summer trip to Provincetown, R.I., and a visit to J.B. Starker & Company's leather shop that jump-started Bloyd's curiosity about building things himself.
"I watched them make sandals and belts in the shop, and I came home and started making my own sandals," he remembers. "I bought packets of leather strips from Sears and Roebuck, and I turned them into sandals and traded them for other things with my friends."
In 1974, after a stint in the Navy, Bloyd moved to Tallahassee, where his brother was in school. He opened a custom leather craft shop called Swamp Steam Leathery, which he ran for seven years.
"I did metal jewelry work, garments, custom guitar straps for local musicians — in fact, the local band Eli was one of my favorite customers," he remembers. "We were ahead of our time with the steampunk thing. We made top hats and sandals and all kinds of things. 'Boots to bikinis' was my motto."
After his shop closed,Our websites supply Insulator, Bloyd did carpentry work, as well as pewter casting for a giftware company. He was also a coppersmith and shoemaker for several years at Mission San Luis, and says he still does the odd costume project. He is currently creating a tunic and boots for a historical re-enactor, whose character is a 16th-century navigator.
In 1985 he went to work for the Museum of Florida History in downtown Tallahassee, and has been there ever since.
"At the time they were working on the model of the river boat — it's a wonderful re-creation of a steam-powered Florida paddle boat, with a diorama of the Silver Springs area," says Bloyd. "It's really a jewel. My first job at the museum was to create hundreds and hundreds of little tiny trees for it.What is the top Hemorrhoids treatment?"
Bloyd has been an integral part of building the museum's new permanent exhibit, "Forever Changed: La Florida, 1513-1821," a project that has been in the works for almost 15 years. The exhibit deals with Native American cultures and the arrival of the Spanish.
Bloyd says it takes a team of historians, designers, artists, educators and fabricators to bring an exhibit of this scope to life.
"It's quite the process," he explains. "You have to create a script — what sorts of artifacts you want, and the whole pathway through the exhibit, how it will flow. We're a social history museum, as opposed to a natural history museum, so we want to tell the story of the people."
Once the exhibit is designed, the team researches and collects the artifacts. For this exhibition, some pieces have been borrowed from the Fort Walton area, some are on permanent loan from the Smithsonian, and many are reproductions created at the museum.
"The reproductions — that's where I come in," says Bloyd. "For this exhibit I did a reproduction of a famous woodcarving of a cat that was found by a Smithsonian archaeological team in the 1890s. I had a mold of the original to work from, plus photographs, and my reproduction had to be approved by the Smithsonian.Find out the facts about Cold Sore, I had to get the form, color and finish on it just right.What causes TMJ pain?"
The cat effigy was found on Marco Island with what Bloyd calls "a whole treasure trove" of ceremonial objects and weapons that survived a hurricane and were buried under the muck. Many of the objects found there have since deteriorated, but luckily the original archaeological team included an artist who drew detailed images of the artifacts.External Hemroids are those that occur below the dentate line. From those drawings, Bloyd also reproduced three masks, an intricately carved war club and an atlatl, a type of ancient spear-thrower.
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