Deland Tiki - Custom Tiki Artistry |

Sneak Peeks!

We are putting the finishing touches on everything and starting to load our precious cargo into suitcases, but I took some time from the happy chaos to take some pictures of our newest work. These are just the new ones that currently have handles, we can’t wait to show off everything new in San Diego!

Hanalei Hotel Purse...celebrate the hotel that Tiki Oasis calls home

The Camp Fizzy- now in red. Loving it in this color!

Our Skullie Flower purse- the original was a custom order, so the first time we have had one for sale at a show.

Latest in our Tiki Tribute series...our TIKI GARDENS purse. A lost Florida gem

Back of the TIki Gardens one, and yes, both tikis are based off ones that were in the gardens.

Tiki Modern now in all wood toned. Looks even richer in person.

Our first Mermaid Purse! Happy as a clam next to an oyster.

We will have several bar cases and some new lamps too. Now just to get all this stuff packed up and get ourselves to Tiki Oasis!

Introducing our Online Store!

We are always pleasantly surprised by how many people have seen our online listings on our Etsy and Ebay pages, but our goal for a very long time was to have a fully functional online store for direct ordering. We are still expanding it daily, but we are proud to announce that you can now find many of our purses and some of our tikis in our catalog page on this site. Click on the Online Store button and it will take you right too it.

Each listing is different, with many purses having the option to choose different colors than what is pictured. It will take you through every step including checkout nice and easy. We will still be making most of them custom at time of purchase so expect an email from us to finalize all details (since you should always be able to get exactly what you want!) but any ease of navigation is a plus in my book! There will be tons of new listings in the next few weeks too. If you don’t see what you want, always contact us directly at DeTiki@yahoo.com. We have never gotten a request we haven’t been able to pull off, and we love doing them!!

To celebrate this new feature we are offering the same special we are giving our Tiki Oasis customers that we get to see in a few short days. Place any purse or bar case order  today through 8/22/2011 and we will send along a t-shirt with your order! We would love to come home to a list of new work to do that will keep us going through the next month or two- so we are ready to sweeten the deal. Choose from the new store or contact us direct!

Today purses are getting their hardware and almost ready for their pictures and sneak peeks. Looking forward to some wicked new things  to show off in Cali!

Our newest wheeled addition

After months of searching and craigslist failures Justin has finally scored the latest project of his dreams. It is not only old car lust around here, and after two of his other club brothers scored Scwhinns and spent several car shows tooling around on them, Justin started his vintage bicycle search in earnest. Vintage Muscle Bikes can score big dollars, so we knew it was going to be a while before we found something that was even close to our meager budget, but we were willing to get a fixer-upper.

Meet our fixer upper! We have been moments too late on a couple candidates on Craigslist so when this dropped in our lap because of our awesome friends that think of us…well we are both choosing to believe this was supposed to find us. It is a early 70′s Western Auto Buzz Bike Eliminator, and not only is it mostly original it is even the color of our Birdie! We need a tire and some elbow grease but it is going to be hitting the car show pavement in time for the Rumblers Show in September! For now we are just going to shine and clean it, but here is what one that is perfect looks like-

Here are some more shots of our new beauty, and we will be sure to update the progress along the way. We are in the full hustle bustle getting ready for Tiki Oasis, and will have previews of some amazing new work and a special for our online customers!

Custom Goodness!

We have been diligently working for the last couple weeks on a very special order that we have just been dying to tell everyone about, and now we can! After meeting us both at Viva Las Vegas and Ohana: Luau at the Lake, the lovely couple behind Cats Like Us took the plunge and placed a wholesale order from us, including a exclusive design that they came up with that will only be available on their website. We love being able to do that for our clients, and we are IN LOVE with what we ended up with.

Check out the Cats Like Us Kitty Purse!

They also have some of our other designs, including the Camp Fizzy and our KU Vs. Volcano purse. They have a huge assortment of awesome products, and their whole website is worth a look through. Cats Like Us.

We are in the full hustly bustle of getting ready for Tiki Oasis, so lots more sneak peeks of new product this week. No sleep till San Diego!!

We have the coolest customers!

One of the best things about having a tiki business is that you know most of your customers are going to be as weirdly obsessed with Polynesian Pop as you are. We always ask our clients to send us pictures of our items in situ, partially because it is good for business, but more because we are just morbidly curious to see what everyone else is up to. Time and time again we are blown away by the places that our work is going in to, but this one from Bryan and Anne and their Boom Boom room have set a new bar. I don’t think I have ever seen a room so filled with not only tons of vintage goodies, but also all the heavy weights in the modern tiki scene.

Above is the picture of the tiki that we did for them last summer, a 3 foot high tiki that we sloped the headdress and cut-outs for back lighting, in order to really get the mysterious goin-on (because all good tiki rooms have to have tons of dim light highlighting the treasures from other lands) and we just couldn’t be more honored to see him in such an amazing Tiki room. I have gone through these photos at least a dozen times and find a new artist or piece I covet in each one. I will point out a couple, but otherwise enjoy this spectacular tiki tour.

We are working on a new piece for them and can’t wait to show it off. Many many thanks for letting us and our readers see your fabulous space- and consider this a call to some of our other customers to get some pictures to us, we just love seeing them!

This week we are in full work mode banging out orders and new product that we can’t wait to debut. Then it will be off to Tiki Oasis, but not before we give you almost a full month of sneak peeks of our new designs!

Tiki Revelry in the face of a Mountain Monsoon

While we had envisioned slightly cooler but sunny days high up in the mountains, what we really got in Lake George was a serious summer drenching that followed us from Pennsylvania all the way up state, and then continuing all the way into Saturday afternoon. It was gloomy. It was cold. It was un relenting. But no amount of rain was going to keep a hotel full of Tiki freaks from putting on a hell of a party.

Thursday night after bowling people carried on through the night with tents and room parties, that lasted well into the morning. The next day it was still pouring, and people were getting a very late start. We went and got our goodie bags and Ohana badges, then headed about town looking for drink ingredients for the cocktail contest the next day. Friday is room crawl night and Justin hit every one it seemed, wandering in and out of highly decorated hotel rooms. The next day it was time for the most action, including the relay race, silent auction, vending, and the luau poolside that evening. The sky finally cleared up and that is when we got the most photos- finally no drops on the camera lens!

My collection of pictures seems so woefully inadequate to really capture this amazing event. It is kept small but really, a full hotel is a lot of people, so there was always a ton of action, lots of conversations, fun activities to keep people busy and in the moment. Out of all the events we have done we feel like this one we were really able to immerse ourselves in while working at the same time. If you haven’t been to this event then I would try to make it to 2012. We will not be missing another one.

There are so many more pictures and information on their facebook page (including some that I used for this post) http://www.facebook.com/OhanaLuau. The resort is like a tiki time capsule and they are only doing more to play up their heritage. Justin and I put visiting this place on the same level as our time at the Mai Kai or at the Bali Hai. It is that neat.

Next up will be some pictures of our recent souvenirs, product that was made and sold in the weeks we were on the road, and the continued expansion of our online shop. Everything that you see on the site can be duplicated or customized, so if you are thinking about a piece don’t be afraid to contact us directly. We love making all sorts of stuff and would never be able to keep up an online shop with all the options we are capable of.

The giveaway is still on! Make sure to visit our Facebook page!

Next Stop- Lake George NY!

The reason why family roadtrip was even on the table was because we were making the long trek up north to Ohana- Luau by the Lake. It is held at the Tiki Resort in Lake George NY, so 1500 miles away from home and a stop in Pennsylvania to drop off the kiddos, and we were finally able to make the Element full o’ tiki all the way up into the mountains.

The first night started with a Happy Hour in the Paradise Lounge, part of the gorgeous Tiki Resort, and after a quick dinner it was time for the first night of Ohana- Wacky Bowling! It was a 50′s Sockhop theme, so Justin wore a bowling shirt, and I wore a 50′s dress with a crinoline! We brought our own balls and shoes all the way with us in our very cramped car, because I am not going to be 1500 miles away from home and not have a left handed ball. And it’s pink. So it made the priority list for packing.

The wacky bowling forced everyone to act goofy and let their guard down on the very first night, which made for some great conversations with people you just met! After the trophies were given out everyone walked back to the Tiki Resort- in the rain- for all night room parties and strange Fraternal Order of the Moai happenings. Lots of conch blowing and people running around carrying torches. We stayed high and dry under tents and didn’t stay up too late- just late enough to know how much people were digging on this event.

Next posts will be more on the resort, event, and photos taken between the many rain storms. The giveaway is still on so keep checking out the Facebook Fan Page!

Blog Giveaway time!

We finally pushed over the 600 like mark on our Facebook page, fueled by our recent travels and meeting all sorts of new like minded tiki people. It has been a while since we have done any kind of giveaway, so we thought it would be a nice time to celebrate the milestone and reward our readers that are keeping the blog numbers growing! We will be making tons of updates to our online store in the next few weeks, and will be catching up on our many tiki travels too. It is a good time to start following us!

So here is the deal. We will give it one week from this posting, so till Midnite Wednesday July 13. Add a like to any of our Facebook posts and get an entry in the drawing, add a comment get another, and if you share our page on your page you will get another! So you can enter a bunch of times just by following and liking the tons of posting I will be adding there this week. We take those names, add them to a list, and then use a random number generator to determine the winners.

So what’s at stake?? Well everyone seemed to love the Certikicates last time, so we are doing another round- one $50  and two $25 , all redeemable towards any of our products including custom pieces. We send you these little guys too- ready to be hung up somewhere or saved to be the menacing figure poking out of your Christmas tree

So I will be counting all the likes from last nights Trader Vic’s post too! Good luck everyone!

Our Epic Journey- Part 1

Our kind of family portrait

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Fuzzy Hukilau Memories

In perhaps the greatest sin a blogger can make, we headed down to the Hukilau last week totally packed up and ready to go- without our camera! Weeks of planning and making all new things and a suitcase of our best Hawaiian vintage and we realized half way down there that our Iphone was going to have to take over photo duties, along with being our credit card machine, portal to Facebook, and actual reach the kiddos phone line all weekend. Knowing that in this day and age there would be a 1000 other cameras and plenty of photos of us making it on our friends Facebook feeds, I sucked down the panic attack and decided to roll with the Histamatic app for the weekend and see what random pictures ended up on the smart phone by the end of the weekend.

The Hukilau’s 10th anniversary ended up being a blur of neon barkcloth and giant pitchers filled with rum, but now that we know nearly everyone, it is much like the most awesome family reunion you will ever go to. This is just a few snippets of what was a beautiful weekend and possibly the best work place you could ask for.

This doesn’t even come close to capturing the spectacle that is a few hundred tiki freaks congregating for the weekend, but it makes me smile because it captures the few quiet moments in a weekend of crazy. Many thanks to Tiki Kiliki and her hard working staff for the  event, even more thanks to our customers that make us doing this possible, and Mahalo to all of our new friends and fans making it to the blog for the first time. I will compile another post of more of the shenanigans from Facebook and other sources that actually remembered their cameras. There is just too much fabulousness not to post as much as I can!

We are off this weekend to the Rockabilly Luau, and then will be making our way north to Ohana- Luau by the Lake. We will be hitting plenty of blog worth stops along the way, so we are going to give mobile blogging a crack too. Trader Vic’s Atlanta tomorrow night, or another tiki bar checked off the bucket list!