Deland Tiki - Custom Tiki Artistry |

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!

Atlanta bound!

We got a call this week asking us if we were available to do a live carving demonstration, and with about 5 seconds of thought we eagerly said yes! The event is the first Annual Rockabilly Luau, and all the proceeds go to benefit animal charities, so we are so glad to be a part of it.

We will be set up inside with a large space where Justin will be demo-ing palm carving and some smaller masks that will be donated to the cause, and we will also have our whole table set up with tons of new products that we have been working on for the summer season. We are so stoked to be in Atlanta not just for this, but for Trader Vic’s! We’ve never been to one even though Atlanta really isn’t that far from us, so now is our chance to cross one off the Dream Tiki Bar tour checklist.

We will be there on that Friday night for sure, so if you are local or in town for the show don’t be afraid to come up and say Mahalo! We will be the ones in the very loud looking vintage with the two little blondes running around. I promised the girlie an unleaded fruity drink, so we will be sure to include her 7 year old perspective of the drinks there. She has already declared the Mai-Kai’s the best ever, so it will be a hard act for Trader Vic’s to follow.

We are in the final push for The Hukilau this weekend, but we have lots to show off so expect some short but sweet photo blog posting over the next few days!

DeTiki out and about for a good cause

We took a time out from our crazy pre-Hukilau schedule to be involved in a great cause with good friends last Saturday at the B.F.F.A.R. in Holly Hill. It was for the Tracy Dillon Mammogram Foundation, and when the Draglinks became involved in helping out we also offered to donate a purse for the cause. After weeks of planning, the sweat of dozens of people all working their behinds off, and some late night purse staining on our small part of things, it all came together into a great event.

I don’t have the total of how much was raised to help women get mammograms (a worthy cause!) but it was quite and bit and we are so pleased to have been a part of it. There would be many more pictures of some of the other Draglinks and the wives except they were working all day in the first of the summer heat. It was a fantastic day seeing people really chip in to help a cause!

Local Backyard gets a tiki re-do

We were lucky enough in March to get a call from new homeowner looking for someone to help them with a tiki bar that came with their new piece of property. In a weird stroke of luck and fate one of our friends had been doing other work on the property and recommended us for the job!

The bar had been built using carved palm tikis as the supports, and after a few years in the Florida weather, were not supporting much of anything anymore. We usually only recommend hard wood tikis for outside use, so we knew right away that we would be able to help. The owners liked the style of the existing tikis and we decided on designs that would mix elements of all of them into new designs, and then when the poor palm ones that were still standing were freed from having to support the structure they would all mix and match into the landscaping. Two tikis were originally ordered to stabilize things, and then we got the go ahead to do the other two.

We were so thankful for the work and so pleased with the outcome. In between the first day to inspect the job to the finish there were drawings, sign-offs, all the things you do to get a custom job ready to go. It was a pleasure each step of the way, and a challenge to take someone else’s designs and turn them into our own. But when we call ourselves “DeTiki Custom Carvings”, well this is what the custom part means. It makes us so happy to know that these tikis will be witness to a fine family’s outdoor living, and that we were able to make them strong enough to be there for the long haul.

This week some news about our upcoming shows, pictures of some of our work that hasn’t even made it to the website yet, and maybe some tiki finds along the way. Its getting to be tiki convention season, and we are getting ready for it just as fast as we can!

Why yes, we love to do custom work

We get asked a lot if we can do a custom design on a purse, and the answer to that is always YES! We make these things totally from scratch so it is never a problem to do something different and unique to our customers. We don’t do any of this by machine though, so our work can mix from an idea that we make into an original design, a picture of a pet that we sketch and carve into something in between our more primitive style and a portrait, and every once in a while someone just gives you a design that is going to work perfect. When we got this custom order in we were stoked, it was even better when we saw what she wanted.

Elyse is the singer in the Flees, a South Florida punk band, and also girlfriend of our buddy Rob, so it was the perfect time for him to commission one heck of a birthday gift.

This is the logo they sent us

Awesome! We also hand draw all the templates, so with some vellum and a rare moment of silence in our work shop that also doubles as home for our small children, we drew out a couple of varying sizes and placements until we thought we had the proportions right for the purse. It ended up being pretty close to the scale of what they sent us.

This is what we ended up with. The handle is white and pops!

White and green are the most tempermental of the wood stains (no we don’t use paint, not normally. But it stays where you put it, unlike wood stain), so even after the carving is all done, the finishing process is layer and layers to get this effect. We wouldn’t have it any other way though. Picture taken at the Kreepytiki because I seemed cursed to never have time to take good photos before we can’t stand it and deliver the item. We know where this one lives though so I’ll sneak it into the daylight next time we make it back down south.

And here is the lovely happy and beautiful customer and friend. We were so happy when she liked it!

Check out the band here Flees, and never be afraid to float an idea by us. We love turning ideas into something pretty, and will work on the design until everyone is happy with how it is going to look. This one is our new favorite till the next one, its always that way!

Celebrating our newest item

We knew that the last weekend would find us back down in South Florida, so we planned our work week around making something special for most special place in all of Florida. The custom Mai Kai purses we have been doing for the gift shop have been doing great, so we decided to up the ante a little and bring down a special Mai Kai Bar Case.

We roll all profits from the gift shop directly back into the Molokai Bar, so we brought 3DP in with us, and enjoyed another happy hour at one of our most favorite places on the planet.

I’ll be adding more pictures of the bar case to the portfolio page, and if it doesn’t sell before the Hukilau I will get much clearer day time photos of it too. We are going to be doing a couple more in time for the Hukilau but they will all be a little different, so if you like this one, support us and the Mai Kai, it couldn’t make us happier to be a small part of such an amazing place. If there is a lost tiki temple that you loved we can do something similar on a purse or a bar case too, just let us know.

Next post will be recaps of all the custom work that has kept us from more prolific blogging. Lots of things we are really proud of!

Final Post from our Vegas adventure- Frankie’s Tiki Room

The real thing we were really excited about seeing in Las Vegas was Frankie’s Tiki room. It is a new bar filled with a classic poly-pop vibe and tons of artists that we know and love, so we NEEDED to see this place. It had been raved about from everyone we knew, so no matter how big the place is, we knew we were in for a treat.

The place is a smaller building I assume was some kind of restaurant at some point, and has a great neon sign, tikis out front, and you walk in to a dimly lit exotic local that you just know is going to take you all night to notice even half of the cool details. Ron and Katie shuttled us there Friday night after a crazy day of sales and fashion show madness, and we ended up managing to walk out of there near dawn. Since the memories of the place were a more than a little fuzzy we decided we needed another trip on Saturday to make sure there wasn’t an experience or drink we had missed.

Despite all the cocktail culture we involve ourselves into, I am not a real liquor drinker. Just don’t do it in general. But when in Polynesia you do as the Poly-Popsters do and order a fruity drink. I stuck with the Kahiki Kai , which at two skulls I was worried about over doing it, but it was like evil citrus-y pina colada and was just perfect. It also had a whollop. So we had a couple more but stuck with what I knew. Justin and Ron were more adventurous, and between the two of them, and two nights, crossed all the three and four skull drinks of the list. That is real man with a drink with fruit in it- not easy to do.

If we only got to see one thing in Vegas this was it. Everything we had heard it was, drinks were all great, we brought home 4 of the mugs and if we could have afforded all we would have gotten the rest. Something else to work on next year hopefully!

We will feature some more of our new work, a back yard tiki hut rebuild, and an upcoming pit stop at the Mai Kai. Next up is Art Rock though, info where to see us this weekend coming shortly.

Oh, and here is a copy of the drink menu. Great bargain for quality cocktails and the mugs are amazing. Will do a post with pictures of the ones we cbose to bring home.