Postikortti exhibition

What?

So, I have a Telegram channel, called Postikortti Suomesta, I have made several notes on developing its bot. But now, I want to tell about my first ever offline event.

So, apparently, in Espoo one can request a place to make an exhibition in one of city libraries. Yeah, libraries in Finland are more than just libraries - you can loan tools there, record your own music etc. And make an exhibition too.

The best part - it's free.

That's why I have decided to do just that, and here I want to describe how it is done, and what I have learned.

How

First, you need to contact the library service: luckily, it is described on Espoo city website. There you have to fill the form and... wait. You're going to wait quite a lot, more than half a year.

What I did wrong at this point

I should have gone and taken a look at those places - I ended up picking not the ideal one

Meanwhile

We have selected pictures that we would like to print and put them into a dedicated TG channel. So I needed to download them, one by one. You know where it's going, right?

So, here's a script that can be used to download pictures from the TG channel on my GitHub: dump-channel.ts.

It is not exactly fast, but it worked well.

Next task - print them! And, preferably, not pay too much for it.

After checking known to me local places and being unpleasantly surprised by their prices, I have discovered ifolor. They offer good prices, though not so fast delivery as they print in Germany.

What I did wrong at this point

I should have paid more attention to the way ifolor makes margins - on some pics they were even negative, which resulted in some author names being cut off.

Time T-0

So now I've got a response from the library with the confirmation of my exhibition and printed pictures. Actually, I've got two dates: the date of the exhibition start and the date of the opening event. Remember, I've said I did not pay enough attention when picking the place? We ended up having an opening in one corner of the library hall and our pictures in the opposite.

But that's later - I came to the library to put pictures on the wall, equipped with a ribbon and masking tape. I've had an idea to put those ribbons on strings, that were already attached to the wall and put pictures on them.

That did not work. Well, I should have thought of that earlier and seen how those strings actually looked.

Luckily, I was able to put pictures on strings themselves, and with the help of one of our channel admins, we have put it all. In two hours. My fingers were sticky from the masking tape to the point that it was uncomfortable to drive back home.

The end result looked like this

Opening

To say that I was surprised is to say nothing. There were actual living people - at one point there had even been a queue!

The above picture was taken while I was discussing growing tomatoes with my friend from ParkRun

Conclusion

So, there are several things that I should have done differently and maybe will, given that this exhibition was not the last one.

Now you too know how to do that, in case you're interested.