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Twitchy Fingers
Usually, my fingers are twitchy either from anticipating being knuckle deep in clay or from having been. Right now they’re a little twitchy from a bit too much Super Mario Bros. Wii. Which was bound to happen since it was one of the gifts we lucked into this holiday.
Speaking of gifts here are three of the necklaces I made for various relatives this year. It happened that I ended up not making nearly as many gifts as I usually do this year – I sometimes make 30 or 40 or more, mostly clay and jewelry ones, sometimes photographs or drawings – so I bought a few handmade items to round it out.
2010 I plan on getting back to my finished jewelry roots a bit and indulging that bug so I expect there will be more jewelry gifts next year.
Sometimes the best gifts are the simplest ones. The two cuties here are my daughter and my niece. They were ignoring the stack of kid goodies at the family gathering and working on a duo doodle with the box of markers and pad of paper I got my niece.
If the last pic was of the next generation of crafty women here’s one of the previous ones – my mom and my grandmother. While my mom is the avid collector of my efforts (and always has been, right from the fridge decoration days!), my grandmother has been my crafty muse my whole life. I followed her to craft shows as a little girl and later worked beside her at them. She’d Tsk-tsk me but really she was the entrepreneurial spirit mixed with the creative bent that got me hooked.
Here’s hoping your holidays were as sweet as mine! Minus the twitchy fingers.
Taking a Break
I’m heading back to my home town for a few days to celebrate Christmas with my family. The gifts are made and wrapped. The bags packed. I’m looking forward to a few days away to visit with friends and family I see too rarely.
My online shops are closed for the length of my visit but if you need to get in touch with me I’ll be checking my email. I wish you all a happy holiday and time with your loved ones.
The last clay thing I finished up was a series of photos for how to make my nautilus shell canes. So here’s the first cut into the cane!
Writing Prompts
I was clicking through writing prompts on the internet – something, anything to give me an idea to write that wasn’t just a ‘buy my beads, they’re really cute’ post – and one of the prompts was: Pick a meaningful quote. Why is it meaningful?
Ah! Quotes! That I can do. One of my favourites is by Voltaire and is approximately: “The perfect is the enemy of the good.”
Of course, it’s also why I hadn’t updated. I could have pointed out that I had been busily fixing errors on my website here, adding canes to the webshop, adding gift certificates to my Etsy and ArtFire Shops, making gifts for relatives, formatting tutorials for pdfs to be released on ClayLessons.com, tidying up my studio, bullying my boyfriend into actually doing his gift shopping and wrapping up 2009 as a year.
That’s so blah. No pictures. So I didn’t write it. Because it wasn’t perfect, only good.
So there’s a trap I still have to drag myself out of all the time. Not to let the perfect prevent me from doing something good.
The cute cat picture at the top? Absolutely nothing to do with the post beyond being some eye candy. He’s FireHeart, a friends cat, and he was enjoying his role as doormat.
The Shop: Swirlies!
This week we have the What’s New in ArtFire shop. And that would be some new canes and some more swirlies in my fave colours, turquoise and coffee brown.
Of course, this is just a few of the items in my ArtFire shop and you can find most of these in my Etsy bead or cane shop as well. Not all of them but most of them.
Beads Baubles and Bowls
Beads, baubles and bowls essentially describes my finished work! Sometimes that’s more apparent than others as I clear the tables and photograph their residents.
This was a big batch of big mirror image beads – the smaller ones are still an inch long – that are fabulous hot colours. They will probably get strung up casually for several vaguely ethnic inspired pieces.
Here’s a wireworked bracelet (I wired everything before I began clay and it’s still my preferred technique) with a combination of my pillow beads and bead slices. I like the variety you get with the change in type of beads and I am going to explore this theme more this year.
What can I say? I’m a sucker for bowls. These are a few of the latest batch of ring bowls I’ve made with the glass inners. They are instant gratification as far as vessels go.
New Tutorial: Covering Round Ornaments
Well I buckled down and posted my latest tutorial for covering round glass ornaments. It assumes you have some understanding of how to make sheets of patterned clay (an instruction I still need to write a tutorial for, ack!).
If you see a spelling or other error or can think of some small improvement please let me know either via my contact page or in the comments. I’d also love to see what people make with the instructions if they get a chance!
Updates and To-Do’s
With Canada Post’s recommended cut-off date for international packages now past I’m working on the little projects I’d been neglecting.
First up was the tearing down and updating of my web shop on the site here. The software had stopped talking to my server and to PayPal a while ago but with everything else so busy and my work available easily on Etsy and ArtFire I’d neglected to do the housekeeping and just fix it.
I’ve fixed it and begun reloading it. The prices are all in Canadian $ which is a little under the US $ so American customers could enjoy a bit of a discount by purchasing here rather than Etsy. I will offer a larger variety of work here than on Etsy – though I will likely offer the same variety on ArtFire which has less painful listing options than Etsy. The prices also have a small increase – there’s no discount at the 6 bead stage anymore but still a buy 11, get the 12th free – and that will roll out to my Etsy and ArtFire shops as well in the coming days.
What else? I have a tutorial for covering round glass ornaments I will post this week. It’s nothing Earth shattering but it made my life simpler this season and made some cute ornaments to boot. Much less sanding than the method I had been using.
For 2010, I intend to offer my beads as buttons and I’m going to send out some batches to testers for free to start. If you are a fiber or fabric artist and either sell or blog regularly and would like some buttons to play with drop me a line and I will let you know at the end of the month what I’m giving away.
Craft Fair Lessons
It seems like each show teaches me something new. This weekend I did my favourite little show in my old neighbourhood – Marlborough in Calgary, Alberta.
I borrowed a friends little foam cones that she’d whipped up to showcase her jewelry sets and put my bracelets out on those. The result? I sold bracelets. Since they’re usually lumped on a fairly unstable t-bar they don’t usually sell well but I bring them because they’re quite pretty. The instructions to make the cones are right here, along with a wealth of other information and you can bet I’ll be making some of my own!
Of course, last year at the same show I learned you sell earrings if you raise the display high enough so people do not have to bend over. Did I do that this year? No. Oops.
On a plus note, I now have several new display fixtures including proper, stable earring and necklace stands. I have to wait for the spring to USE them of course but hey, I can’t wait now!
