All This Stuff

I love doing craft shows and art fairs. I love meeting people. People are so interesting. I watch people walk by, notice their expressions on their face, and wonder what they're thinking about as they look into the different booths. One thing that surprises me, though, is the number of times people that walk into my booth, look around, then ask me "Do you make all this?". I reply "Yes, every bit of it (well, there are exceptions to that rule, but that's another story)". I think people assume that, since there is so much on display, I couldn't possibly have made all of it and perhaps I'm a representative from one of the direct sales companies such as Premier Designs or Silpada. No, I'm not selling some mass-produced line of jewelry. I'm selling jewelry that I pored my heart and soul into. This isn't my hobby, this is my WORK. I work in my studio for hours every day making jewelry, often to the point of neglecting my family. I'm in the studio working when I should be cooking a home-cooked dinner for my husband. I find every excuse there is to slip off to my haven and work. So yes, I make all this, and yet there's still so much more inside me to make.

Jewelry Design Revisited

Jewelry design is an ever-evolving art. As artists, we are constantly honing our skills and learning new ones. Often times we come across a piece of our earlier work and realize it needs a little updating. Sometimes this task is somewhat bewildering. After all, when I first designed the piece, I thought it was perfect. Why is it less than perfect now?

I recently pulled out some of these older pieces to re-think their design. I realized when I initially made these, I really wasn't doing much wire work, mostly just stringing. These pieces, although lovely, just look too heavy for today's styles. Now days jewelry has a lighter, airier feel, and that's perfect for wire-work. Wire just naturally has a way of making jewelry look effortless. So I re-worked the pieces by wire-wrapping the beads, and I love how they turned out. Plus it was so much easier because I already had all the beads I wanted to incorporate from the previous necklace, they just needed to be re-arranged.

Fiesta Star Lampwork Bead Necklace -
Before:	After:
Maple Jasper and Turquoise Beaded Necklace -
Before:	After:

Lampwork Bead Give-away

Carol Evans (cevansdesigns.com), a fellow jewelry designer and also an awesome lampwork bead artist, is having an incredible giveaway. Every month she's sending 8 different jewelry designers a batch of her lampwork beads. I received my beads a couple of days ago and I knew when I saw them that I wanted to incorporate camel bone in the design because 1) the lampwork beads have the same beige color, and 2) I have a ton of camel bone beads to use up.

Here's my tub of vintage camel bone:

Originally I had planned on wire-wrapping this large camel bone bead as a focal pendant with a lampwork bead and some pearls dangling from the bottom, but it wasn't meant to be. Apparently when the hole was reamed out, it isn't made very straight.

No matter how hard I tried, I could not feed the wire through the hole of the bead. So, off to plan B. I pulled out the rest of the vintage camel bone and found this pretty pendant. I couldn't attach the lampwork bead dangles, but this will work well.

I just listed the necklace/earring set and matching bracelet on etsy :-)

New Website

A little over 9 years ago I wanted to purchase a domain name for my business, but the .com wasn't available at that time so I had to buy a .biz. I didn't get much traffic on the site, so after I opened my etsy store, I re-directed the URL to point to my etsy store. Things were going along pretty well. About a year ago I was notified that the .com domain name was now available so I purchased it. I created my website and let it run for a couple months. The new site was still receiving very little traffic, so again I re-directed the URL to point to my etsy store since etsy gets a ton of traffic.

As I recently posted, etsy has changed some of their rules. Etsy was originally founded on the principal of buying and selling handmade items, but over the past couple of years some etsy stores were selling mass-produced products made in China. Etsy apparently is going to continue to allow this, provided the store files an application to work with a manufacturer. Needless to say many etsy sellers are not at all happy about this and are jumping ship. One of my fellow SRAJD members recommended not having all your eggs in one basket (meaning etsy), so I am taking this as an opportunity to rebuild my website. I hope everyone will check it out - www.beadifulworld.com. I'll gradually be adding more and more items to the site.

etsy Sells Out

Yesterday (October 1, 2013), etsy notified their sellers that they have been screwed. They did it in a very nice manner, with an email letting them know they have been screwed, a video explaining how the action of being screwed is really for everyone's good, etc.

According to the email, "Over the past eight years, Etsy sellers have astounded (us) with their creativity, ingenuity and ambition. This is a marketplace we make together; we lay the foundation and you build on it. You’ve grown Etsy in ways we never predicted, but part of our foundation hasn’t kept up."........That's true.

"Sellers tell us that our policies for shops with handmade items have become confusing, intrusive and restrictive. It’s time to give those policies a renovation."........True again.

And then the screwing begins. What we etsy sellers hoped to happen was for etsy to stop allowing many of their sellers to sell mass-produced items, primarily from China, and passing them off as handmade items. Those of us that make one of a kind items are truly what etsy was all about when it first began. Back in the early days they constantly stressed "Buy Hand-made"!!

Well, that's not at all what happened. Instead of etsy putting on their big-boy pants and telling these shop owners to cease and desist, instead they caved in to money. They don't care what is ethical, they just want the money these shops are bringing in. Hello???? In what sense of the word does "handmade" bring to mind Chinese sweat shops. I know my studio is only as big as a bedroom. There's no room for an assembly line in here!

So etsy wants us all to believe that this is for everyone's good. This is to allow shop owners to take responsibility for how their product is made and being honest about it. My question is how will these shop owners be forced to comply with this new guideline? I seriously doubt these shop owners will even take the initiative to apply.

In one of the Facebook groups I belong to, it's evident that people are not buying into this. Left and right people are scrambling to get their own website up and running, or move their listings to other venues such as ArtFire. I, too, am seriously considering abandoning ship. Etsy has been good to me as far as visibility goes, but with SO much competition on etsy, you can't also compete with ridiculously low priced items from China. It's like trying to set up a kiosk in the middle of Wal-Mart!

I may not leave etsy immediately, it's going to take a little while. I already have my own domain (beadifulworld.com) with a few items listed. I need to do some tweaking to make it more user-friendly, but this is a "heads up" to everyone that it's coming.

Transformation of an Earring Card

I have been using my vertical business cards for my earring cards for a couple of years. I absolutely adore my business cards, but it was finally brought to my attention that earrings get lost with the busy background of the card. Duh! I can't believe I didn't see that, I was so gaga over the cards. So I set out on an endeavor to re-invent my earring cards. This, I found out, was no easy feat.



I wanted to make the card simple enough to let the earrings be seen, yet still keep the look of my business cards. I contacted the person that designed my logo and found out that the font she used was no longer available, so that squashed the idea of starting from scratch. I knew I was going to have to somehow use existing cards. When I had my cards printed at Moo.com, I also had several of the mini-moo cards printed to use as a hang tag for necklaces, bracelets, etc. I determined that if I could find a way to use the mini-moo card in the design, I'd have the best of both worlds.

This is my mini-moo. It looks like a small business card only longer.



Here's what I did:

I purchased a jumbo 3.5" craft punch at Hobby Lobby. I printed out "Sterling Silver" on white cover stock paper and then cut out the shape with the jumbo craft punch.



I inserted two of the white punched out pieces into am embossing folder and ran it through my Vintaj BigKick machine, embossing the punch with a pretty embossed design to give it some texture without adding color. I also printed my contact information on brown card stock for the back of the earring card.



I turned the white punch over and attached ultra-thin glue dots on the back (two on each of the bottom corners and one top center), then attached the back of the white punch to the front of the brown card stock, lining up the bottom and sides.



I applied two more glue dots to the top left and top right corners of the front of the earring card, attached one to the back of the mini-moo at the bottom edge of the mini-moo card, and placed it on the earring card, lining up the top and sides.





The mini-moo is longer than the earring card is wide, so I turned the earring card over and trimmed the part sticking out.



I attached an adhesive back earring adapter and Voila!! It has the look of my business cards, yet it's not too fussy so the earrings really pop.

Thanks go out to my fellow SRAJD (Self-Representing Artists in Jewelry Design) for throwing around ideas, and especially to Shelly Owen and Jen Smith Fletcher for really giving me a push!

All in a Day's Work

No day off for me on Labor Day :<[ I had a long list of things to accomplish in the studio, but I seemed to have forgotten about one thing - my inventory reconciliation for the art gallery was due yesterday, and I hadn't even started, so of course that was first on my checklist. Sad thing is I found several discrepancies. Hopefully they'll still honor it and pay me for the missing items, even though I was technically one day late with my response.

My Lortone tumbler that I've had all of one week is going bye-bye. The seller on eBay said it was "gently used" - HA! I plugged it in and 4 minutes into the cycle and belt came off. My very handy husband took the cover off, put the belt back in place, tightened things up, yada yada... you get it. It ran for an hour with no problem. The next day I went to use it, and 3 minutes into it the same thing. Cover off, belt back on..... enough said. He said it could be that it's just worn out. How can a "gently used" item be worn out. It's going back to the eBay seller for a refund. Now to find a replacement as cheap!

I've been trying several new techniques, trying to narrow down my niche. However, this is not a very good place to be when you have a show in just under 4 weeks and you feel like you're scattered hither and yon with nothing much to show for it.

One of the things I'm experimenting with is different patinas on copper. Saturday I tried a technique using cedar ped bedding and vinegar that took FOREVER, so possibly I didn't prepare the metal correctly for it to adhere. More than 48 hours later, some of the items have very little patina. However, the focal part did turn out fairly decent.



Another design I'm playing around with is cigar band rings. I cut out an oblong shape of copper using my jeweler's saw, and after sanding, sanding, and just a little more sanding, I then embossed the metal with a cool design. I shape it into a ring, antiqued it in liver of sulphur and then ran it through my "now history" Lortone tumbler to work-harden the metal. The picture on the left is straight out of the tumbler, before polishing. The picture on the right has been somewhat polished (my arms got tired, will try more later).