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Signs of Spring
Before I knew a thing about flowers – and this wasn’t long ago – I didn’t really realize there were flowers that were heralds of spring. I mean I guess it makes logical sense but if you’d asked me I’d have been unable to name them.
I started this spring off with a new order of pansies. I’m happy with how these came out.
Of course, another sign of spring is that we’re spending THIS weekend painting, too. The windows can be cracked open so it’s not even too fume-y.
New Focals
This is the latest batch of my favourite elements: face canes and floral layering canes. These are all slim, smooth river rock shapes but fairly substantial in size. The smallest is about 30mm tall.
As a complete side note, the picture is taken with my new camera, in a halogen lit studio, with flash, at 12inches or so. So it’s not a macro picture, there’s no lighting correction. Not bad! The Ti1 is much smarter than my old Olympus but I guess 7 years of technology will do that!
Making
I’d been hurting for a little inspiration and motivation at the end of 2009 so I took the advice of the experts and took that first step: I started making things. Sometimes all you need is a little motion to get you going in the right direction. I’m still lacking the solution to some projects but I have a growing pile of ‘productive procrastination’ projects. Here’s a few:
A customer challenged me to make them bright roses in the colour of my citrus canes. So I did. Some of these canes are in my Rainbow of Roses listing. The bracelets are basically wrist candy to get myself using my own beads, especially the swirlies. How else do you sell the things if you can’t convince people they should be essential parts of their art?
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!
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.
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.
Not Just Beads
Sometimes I actually make things other than beads with the canes. Sometimes I make things with the beads. Of course, that’s usually right before shows but that’s the way it goes.
Marbly brown and pearl and gold beads wire wrapped the way I do a lot of my pieces.
Green caned beads on brass wire.
The prototype for a pen tray in ‘boy’ colours. I say boy colours because the boyfriend asked, mostly in fun, why I had all flowers. So here we go, brown tiles.
The last pieces are earrings on silver wire. Simple but it works.
New Colours
Wow! Crazy bead making week! But in with the tablespoon of crazy was a nice scoop of productive. I got the initial batches and photos of my latest two colour schemes setup.
This is latte, a sort of lighter version of my very popular coffee tones. It is all cream to dark brown, monochromatic so it should be an excellent neutral. It pairs well with the coffee tones, the crimsons and the sea garden colours right off which means I have some ’sperimenting to do.
Forest flowers is a remake of a batch that has sold out a few times on Etsy – forest green background with forest toned flowers all over it. The rusty coloured mum cane is still my favourite.
My Bowl Overflowed
I meant to bake these and photo for yesterday but time got away from! So here we go before noon today, on their way to the tumbler:
There are some new designs in that which I will snap some better pictures of once they’ve gotten their pampering done. It seems the best way for me to get fresh, fun, new ideas is when I am crazy busy cranking out the regular stuff in a big production run. It never fails.
I did make sure to stop and do them though. I’ve learned not to ignore ideas because sometimes the little idea bunnies hop on to friendlier places.
