forgotten valentines

Months and months ago, before I disappeared from cyberspace, I was working on some Valentine jewelry. Well, here is what I completed and took to Oxide. I think only one sold. The ear-threads have not been successful at all for me, though they make such an elegantly simple little minimalist ear decoration. Ah, well ... live and learn.

valentines

I am FINALLY getting a little momentum on the project I have been planning since discussing Valentine's Day with Warren at the gallery, two weeks ago. I want to get him at least half a dozen valentine pieces; more would be better. I hoped to
have already done it, but between Red-bird Ridge work, house-shoveling-out, and spending way too much time on the computer, I haven't accomplished much in the jewelry line.

But yesterday and today, I have created 8 little beaded hearts for earrings, and I am in the swing of it now. I have a really rotten cold and am forced to stay wrapped up in bed, which limits distractions. Pictures later of the current crop. These are the ones I made two years ago, from beaded hearts that I made a year or two before that ...

the cat that saved my shop

Actually, Agate might not have saved my shop, but he certainly saved a good deal of my inventory.

Well, the story goes like this. The week before Thanksgiving I visited Crispin and Turid and Tom in Lincoln (Massachusetts). To show off to them, and to show to the jewelry-making sister of Barbara in N.H. where we planned to visit, and maybe to place in the Central Square Emporium in Hillsborough, where I have a few pieces, I wrapped up and packed a large proportion of my finished pieces. Of course I put them in my carry-on, not my checked bag. I'm not that stupid; I know checked bags get lost.

Into the checked bag went the pints of home-made chili sauce and green tomato pickle, since such items can no longer be hand-carried. And into the checked bag SHOULD have gone my new Koil Kutter, which though I love, I thought could possibly be improved with suggestions from Crispin. But not thinking clearly, I packed it with the jewelry in the carry-on.

5:30 am at DFW. I check in, alone at the counter. I go to the TSA guys and give them my suitcase. I go through security. They study the pounds of jumprings, and the pliers (the cutter was checked), and the Koil Kutter. They say the Koil Kutter has to be checked, of course -- little motor tool with a sawblade on the end, never mind that it is completely enclosed in a housing, and won't run without being plugged in.

So back I go (not really worried, plenty of time). Long line now at counter, so I go to self-serve kiosk, put in info, credit card, take "the documents below" and go back to the TSA. The document they gave me was another boarding pass, not a baggage sticker; I held it out as I approached the TSA guy, same one I had seen 15 minutes earlier. He ignored it, and took the bag over to the conveyor. Silly me, I assumed he was doing the right thing. I went through security again and off to the plane. Sorted jumprings and made chain all the way to Boston, to the fascination of the attendants on the empty plane.

Boston. Only one bag. Filled out inquiry form. Called every day while I was there. No bag. Came home. Trudged all over DFW to different American gates where helpful people said I might inquire. No bag.

Next day I thought I might get my photos uploaded to the computer. And what did I find? Helpful Agate crawling into the suitcase the day before I packed, and looking cute, so I took a couple of photos. Helpful Agate demonstrating that yes, there was indeed a name tag on the bag, AND THERE WAS ALSO A UNITED AIRLINES OLD TAG.

Drove back down to DFW. Went to the far corner of Terminal E, where UA has three gates. Waited for baggage attendant to come back from break. "Well, we have these bags." Nope. "And we have those over there ..." You could have probably heard my squeal in Boston. I tried to give the attendants bracelets, but they declined. If I didn't give Agate treats when I got home, I should have.

Moral: Always check anything the least bit weird. And if you don't take off the old luggage destination tags from your hand-carry bags, at least know what airline they are.

Chainmaille Contest VOTE

Head right on over to the Etsy Chainmaillers' Guild blog to vote in our first contest, "Linked to the Sea."



I haven't quite got these pics to work right, and I don't have any more time to mess with them. Click the little blue square and you get the picture. Or just head straight on over to the contest, the text link above works fine. There you will see a beautiful display of all 22 candidates. You have to only choose two favorites. VOTE! Then put your contact info in the comments, and you will be entered in a drawing for half a dozen gifts the chainmaillers have made as thank-yous for our voters.

oxide gallery!

The owners of the Linwood-Alford florists are opening a gallery in half the store, specifically to showcase Denton artists. They held three "artist's calls" in August: one was invited to bring in up to three pieces to be photographed, following which their jury considered the photographs, and those they liked were asked to come in with a selection of work for the owners to choose from to put on consignment (40% fee).



I auditioned with the stretch "goth" choker and earrings, and the silver, turquoise, and red seed necklace that I made three years ago, that is stunning if not wholly practical. And they asked me back! So as of noon today they have twenty of my pieces - five necklaces, three pendants, three bracelets, eight pairs of earrings, and a ring. And my Etsy shop shelves are kind of bare, as 14 of the 20 had been for sale there.


The gallery opens October 1, with the big opening reception (artists requested please to show up!) the evening before. Well, who knows if they'll make a go of it; the florist's shop side looks kind of bare just now. But maybe that is because they have been concentrating on the gallery and have planned for a couple of slow cash flow months. Hope so, because I REALLY want this enterprise to be a success!

Department of "I remember when ... " — the florist's shop, then Linwood-Roberson, is across the street from where I lived from age 3-7. Its red and white sign, turning on top of its post, Linwood | Roberson - Florists - Linwood | Roberson - Florists - has been a landmark on Hickory for my whole life. I hope they make a go of this, not just for my benefit, but also for the continuity of this town that seems to be turning into all anonymous interchangeable chain stores.

rings rings rings

Lloyd of the chainmaillers' guild ordered a size 10 turks-head ring two weeks ago. I am at last ready to mail him one tomorrow, as soon as the P.O. comes back from Labor Day. Turned out it took me several tries to come up with a satisfactory product.



Quoting from my note to him,

"I'm so sorry to have taken so very long. Turns out I should be building one of these at least every couple of months to keep in practice, it is NOT like riding a bicycle ;-)

Actually the first one I made came out quite nicely. Only it was about a size 12, because I figured wrongly the spacing needed on the jig used for starting the pattern.

So I have a nice big ring; I will probably sell it at the show I have in two weeks. I made another, right size, but I hammered it too hard as I stretched it and evened up the wires on the ring stick (Loren supplies cut sections of billiards cue, they work really well)

So it looked kind of battered, and I tried again. Success.

At this point, I decided to try using my Dremel and some fine sanding discs to smooth of the surface of the over-hammered one, kind of to put smooth "facets" on the raised parts. That worked moderately well, and I polished and cleaned it. THEN I discovered that somehow I had picked up the wrong ring, and sanded off facets on the successful, non-battered one! Erm ... regrettable ... language was heard.

I then did one more, CAREFULLY. I am getting really good at the pattern, thank you."

He was gracious enough not to complain at the delay, and was amused by my account of my attempts, said he was glad to hear these things happened to other people too.

the benefits of root canal work

Not MY root canal, thank goodness! But Mary had an infection, and they sent her to a Flower Mound office, so she asked me to drive. I had a couple of hours in the quite comfortable waiting room, and I almost completed a green-on-green half persian 4-in-1 stretch bracelet. Got it all done but the last two links, which were giving me a devil of a time — could not get them to go into the almost-completed fabric. Later, at home, I got them in without trouble — had to warp them the other way from the usual when opening them.

applied to LolliShops

A new shop venue I learned about from the Etsy Forums. I'm not at all sure that I will get in, because they go for the really sweet cute cottage-style, with much pink. Still, "I'm Purty as a Pitcher" should fit right in, and the iris-photo I'm planning to fix up, and I think the LolliShops clientele might be just the folks to buy my gorgeous but so far unsold purple beaded flower. Also maybe what I do with Spoonflower, when I finally get around to getting a design in there.

LolliShops is a juried site, which is such an amazingly attractive notion, after the mess of sellers on Etsy who don't fit the rules and yet seem to get away with it. Only, of course, since it's juried I might not get in, and that would be a shame. Well, we'll see.

Here's this button to take you there, if I can figure out how to get it in here.


We'll see if that works. Hey, yes! there it is! Go check out the preliminary buzz and the blog.

Later ... (but not much later) ... well, I'm not froufrou enough. Oh, well. Worth trying. Sadie's response speed was awesome!!

found!

Well, whoopee! Ellen and I washed the blue couch covers last week, and when we put them back on and were tucking in the ends, I found that coral dangle earring. I figured it might be gone forever. So I wiped it down with an alcohol pad and put it back with its non-wandering mate. and re-activated the listing.

Living with cats does make one reassess the necessities of adequate storage, even when temporarily laying something down. At least there are now just three adults, not also five kittens. They were cute, though, sigh.

cranefly at VAST

Today was the take-in for the Visual Art Society of Texas members' show. I took in my cranefly, which I had fixed up with a doubling of the main support wire, so that I think that it will not dangle so low. I was feeling pretty proud of it till I saw all the art at the show, which was intimidating.

Everybody gets one piece in the members' show. But I have to get a lot more practice and make a lot more things before I expect to get in the 125-mile, I think.

The show is up from August 10 until Sept 5.

thanks to a secret admirer!

Well, usually I check Majaba.com far too often in the course of the day. But yesterday, what with VADO in the morning and then spending much of the rest of the day messing with Photoshop Elements, I didn't check it once. And this morning I find two new shop hearts and four item hearts, after getting none in the last several days. This is a nice surprise. One of the shop hearts and all the items are from a secret admirer -- one of the maillers I have been Yahooing with? It's nice, anyway.

I worked more on the painterly kitty picture yesterday, and then tried printing it. Much to my disgust, my yellow cartridge appears to be out. So that's a priority this afternoon, getting that refilled before it dries up. I want to see if it looks pretty good on paper before I send it off to iprintfromhome for a giclee´.
I'm only going for a little one; actually I think I will put two ACEO sized ones and a 3.5x5 on one 5x7 for $8. Plus I need to get a print of kitten Agate and the prickly pear, in case anybody buys one.

Urgent today is to get the best of the new shots of my gothic choker printed, and the kitty painting printed, and mail off my application for the Prosper show. So I better cut short this blog entry and go do that.

altered photo art

Oh, I'm pleased with myself! I feel like I have learned a new skill. I spent the morning at the VAST artists' day out playing on the computer with my picture of Little Floof and the yellow pitcher, and I produced something I am quite proud of. "Before" is below; "after" is at the head of this post. This photo was taken back when she was only fifteen ounces as an undersized six-week-old, and was mostly referred to as Miss Teeny-Cat.

Of course the original picture was snapped opportunistically, with no chance to do anything about the peculiarly large-scaled jade plant behind Floof, or the filthy window glass. But by use of the palette brush tool (I think, unfortunately I wasn't writing down what I did), as well as outlining and deleting half the bacground and fuzzing the edges both with the rubberstamp and the smudge filter, I think I produced a nice result.

sigh ... destash

Well, I just sold the bright maxi-thin solar calculator that was in the office -- Isabel's desk drawer? I think I got it for them at a museum shop about the time I came home from NY. I sure didn't need it, and Carrie in Grand Rapids, Michigan wants it. Certainly $12 is better than giving it to the DUUF sale where they might get a buck, maybe. Still ...


Ayway, I can feel as ambiguous as I like, but Paypal has the cash and it's a done deal now.

insecta shimmerae treasury

I neglected to note my inclusion in a most impressive treasury by molecularmuse, she of the silver molecule jewelry, a couple of weeks ago. It was my cranefly, honored for the second time, among a whole cast of cool bugs.


Most people seem to like molecularmuse's serotonin, at least it is one of her best sellers. I prefer the playful-looking dopamine earrings here. Lots of cool stuff. (But I bet she doesn't really work at her bench wearing a spaghetti-strap little black dress, as shown in one of her thumbnails!)

picture proportions

There have been several threads off and on in the Etsy forums about involuntary cropping of pictures caused by Etsy's three ways to display an image. I hope this can make it a bit easier for people to get the biggest views of their items possible, without cropping off the edges.

All five (if you use all five) of your pictures show as the square thumbnails at the side of the large picture in a listing. The first one shows as that same square when your shop is viewed in List view. That same first one shows as a rectangle in Gallery view, as a featured image in the shop, or in a treasury (or of course Front Page if you get there).

When a thumbnail is clicked, the large view is shown 430 pixels wide and as tall or short as it is -- no cropping for this view. And if you click it, you get the original uploaded size in a new window.

So there is no cropping for the main view . The only consideration is that if your original is SMALLER than 430 pixels wide, it will be enlarged by Etsy and look blurry and awful.

Etsy recommends 1000 pixels for the uploaded shot. I actually usually use 860, which makes my original fill the screen nicely in the zoom view, and I fancy it eliminates any tiny distortions of scaling by being exactly 2:1 for the reduction. Some people upload an image exactly 430 wide. It is always disappointing to click on the zoom for them and nothing happens. At the other extreme, some upload hi-res images 2000 pixels wide. Aside from taking AGES to upload, these are a nuisance because the zoom is two or three times wider than the screen.



OK, for the cropping. All five pics will be cropped to the square thumbnails. Also the first one will be cropped for gallery, feature, or treasury use. The size is 155 x 125 pixels, or very close to a 6-to-5 ratio. If you make your uploaded image that size, but leave the right and left ends of it blank background or unimportant image, then it will look fine as the square thumbnail. If you upload a square, but keep anything important out of the top and bottom edge, it will look fine in gallery view. The proportions are shown in the sketch above. If the image is a 6x5 rectangle that just fits the gallery view, the gray ends will get cropped off to make it square. If it's square like the red outline, the orange areas top and bottom will be cropped to get gallery view.

If your image is really tall and narrow, or wide and short, it will be badly cropped to fit either gallery or square thumbnails, with only a strange, often mysterious center section visible. Better save those odd-proportioned pictures for the second through fifth images, rather than the one that you are depending upon to bring a click on the item.

Hope this is useful.

a SALE!

I just this afternoon listed this green bracelet, that I finished while I was up at the lake last Friday evening. I was very frustrated that it only got three views in its first hour, I think because the images glitch made it invisible during its thirty seconds of fame on the front page and also in Time Machine.

So then I went off to Petco for catfood, and THE KITTIES HAVE BEEN ADOPTED, HURRAY! And then I browsed around Big Lots, and got home and checked my e-mail, and I had a sale! Red-letter day all oround.

Turned out to be two items sold, this brand new green bracelet, and the 3/4 persian purple one I made back in February 07 on the plane home from Boston.
They are both going to live in Walnut Creek, California. Woo-hoo! Maybe THIS time there really will be some momentum. Time to make some more. Oh, bouncing on air here.

organization, old is new, lost to the kitties

Yipes, it's been over three weeks, and I thought I had been doing a pretty good job of keeping up!

The only really new things I've listed on Etsy are my cranefly sculpture -- new two months ago, and just home from exhibit in the library, the earrings I made at Marlynda Taylor's PMC class, and the destash turquoise butterflies I just put up. (I only bought the butterflies in May when Mary and I went to Bead Renaissance, but I know I am not going to need 45 of them, so I am going to list a few lots of five.)

I guess the PMC class was just the day after my last post. It was a hot drive out to Weatherford, but certainly worth it. Unlike when Amy and I played with the stuff a couple of years ago and had so much trouble with it drying out, the material behaved very well. Of course, part of the class was to use Badger Balm on the hands, and rub the excess on the roller, and put a thin coat on the texture plate, and keep the clay covered with Saran Wrap all the time.

I rolled mine on a floral-textured brass plate, cut discs with an off-center interior cutout, and produced these earrings.

The crane-fly, fresh from a successful show at the library, needs its support scheme re-worked. I think I will re-drill the base stone with much deeper holes, and make two wires to go in one of them. The double wire will be the main support, with the second wire going up next to the first and perhaps lashed to it with fine copper. If it is to go in the members' show, it needs to be all fixed by late July.

I hoped I was going to sell my little coral earrings. I got a convo about them, asking how long they were, which I answered right away, with measurements and a photo. But, alas, I never heard anything back. And now I have had to inactivate the listing, because one of them appears to have been swiped off the coffee table by a kitten, and is who knows where!


Amy visited from the evening of Friday 6 June till midday Tuesday 10 June. We didn't actually do any crafting, though I thought she might want to work with the silver clay that I bought from Marlynda. But we didn't get around to it. We did have one very nice evening up at the lake, and we played with the kitties a lot. But the major accomplishment was to clear Isabel's closet and install two of my Elfa drawer-racks, and get everything organized to store my jewelry supplies and tools in a convenient fashion.

Also she bugged me into calling the plumber. The kitchen faucet is installed! The shower lavatory faucet is replaced! The powder room toilet no longer leaks! Jeff's sink upstairs is fixed, AND Alex's lavatory at 610 is no longer running hot water 24/7!!!

In the next stage of organization, Mary and I had a quiet lunch together out at the Ridge yesterday. She knitted for a couple of hours. I had sacked up all the mixed supplies, tools, finished items, project-in-progress, etc. that I had been collecting in the corner of the living room. I brought them all out with us in a big bag and spent the time sorting out. Entropy has been set back for another few weeks.



Every thing else I have listed recently has been something I made a while ago but needed to clean up, photo, and list. These are three of them.

another Etsy treasury! whee!!

Just a few days after I listed my cranefly sculpture (that I have to go collect from the library exhibit today) on Etsy, Ivydee picked it for a treasury! And some of the other pieces she put it in with - WOW. I had just discovered the knitted wire pomegranates myself a couple of days ago. And the copper birdfeeder is a real work of art that Linnie and Bill need in their patio.

Ivydee's shop is encouraging, because she seems to be making a success of combining beadwork, wirework, and paper art all in the same shop. I think I need to take tips from her on the cohesive "shop look" of her backgrounds.

"day in the sun" over

Well, sometime between 9 and noon today they put up a new batch of knockouts on the FP of Etsy. My earrings had about 6 days up there, and ended up with 430 views, so now we'll see what the rate of view acquisition goes down to. Nice while it lasted.

in my first Etsy treasury!

"Walrustusk" chose my Easter evening picture of sunset through the pines for her treasury. Yay!



She is a former Alaska girl who now lives in Arizona. Boy, that's a big environmental transition. At the right is one of her meticulously bead-encrusted hair ornaments, available at walrustusk on Etsy.