I will give an overview of our current fabrication and experimental activities in plasmonics and metamaterials at optical frequencies. First I describe fabrication of ultra-thin films of high quality. We particularly focus on uniform gold layers having thicknesses down to 6 nm fabricated by the E-beam deposition on dielectric substrates. Then examples of multilayers with alumina, titania and Cu/Zn alloys deposited by atomic layer deposition and highly-doped InP semiconductors will be given. Experimental activities include effective medium breakdown characterization, directional surface waves spectroscopy by the leakage radiation microscope, absorption enhancement in electroless deposited nanoparticles and observation of nonlinear effects with picosecond pulses propagating in thin gold stripe waveguides.