An Extraordinary Store for “All Things Handmade”

I realized that I've been talking about Etsy (Right Turn ArtWerks) and maybe some of you haven't heard of it before. The best way to describe Etsy is it’s an online co-op of handmade goods. Each artist creates and maintains their own Esty shop. The place really has its own lingo too and I'm still learning everything. It's fun and very professional. You can shop ‘til you drop using a variety of methods they call Pounce, Time Machine, Treasury, Showcase or in the usual way by categories or keyword searches. They have a forum and chat rooms too. You can find some cool and amazing things there. If there is a trend they will probably have it first. I also added an Etsy Mini to this blog so you can check out my store. Click on any picture and it will take you to an item I have for sale or just click the link above. The cool thing about the Etsy mini is that when I add a new item to my store the mini automatically updates itself.....freaky!

Loosen Up and Squiggle

Every once and awhile you have to shake up the "norm". Here is my new shake, rattle and roll! I made a decision to let the glass dictate what it wanted and took my inspiration from two well known beadmakers, Anastasia and Melanie Moertel. I'm not them but these aren't half bad and have their own style. The one in the center has been posted on my Etsy site and is for sale. The others I think I will hold as examples for awhile. The first picture is one side of the beads and, of course, the other is them flipped....except the little one. It's just plain on the reverse side.

Lost and Found

Lost, an opportunity to show my work. Missed, the Fire and Ice Show in Traverse City due to a conflict with my work schedule (such is life). Found, interesting information via a blogger on the legalities of arts and crafts. This is no philosophical debate on “copying” someone else’s work. What is written is factual information by an attorney who specializes in arts and crafts law. Way cool, huh? It’s fascinating! Check this site out yourself: Arts and Crafts Law. One of the things (I think) I understood from reading it is: I can use or post things that are common/public domain but not new/proprietary.

I think I am safe (common/public) if I list The U.S. Copyright Office, as was done on her blog, you want to check out what Uncle Sam has to say in regards to the proverbial “artistic license.”

Have a great day…and lose nothing of importance.

The Slippery Slope of Pricing Your Work

I wish I could say that I always follow this formula, but I ought to. I’ve known how to do this and we have tried to stick with it for my husband’s business (countreetoyshoppe.etsy.com). It’s not easy, but if “art” is truly is your business you should have a formula by which to price your goods. Any pricing formula should include compensation for:

Supplies
Overhead (Expenses)

Your Time

Aside from these factors, which are the basics, you then have to take into account your intended market. This is where most of us fall flat. It takes some honest self-appraisal.

How easily can I replace the components in this work if I want to create a similar piece?
Was I competent in my work – is it a well made piece of jewelry.
WTMWB – What the market will bear.

One hard rule should prevail. You can not drop the final retail price below the base price formula. If you do, you will be losing money.

Base Price Formula
Base price=
(cost of materials + packaging) X 4
+ your pro-rated hourly labor rate
Then, + 10% of that total for overhead costs.

Example:
Figure your pro-rated labor cost.
30 minutes of labor to string a necklace. So, half of my $20. hourly labor rate equals $10. of labor on that necklace.
2 Next, add up the cost of your materials:
$10. of jewelry supplies + $1. packaging = $11. subtotal
3. Multiple your total cost of materials by 4:
$11. X $4. = $44
Then add your pro-rated labor to that:
$44. + $10. = $54.
Add in your overhead, which is 10% of that:
$54. X .10 = $5.40
Finally, add the overhead to your $54 subtotal:
$54 + $5.40 = $59.40
Our base price would be $59.40
(rounded to $59.)

That means we can not price the necklace below $59 without losing money on it. Here is where we can adjust the retail price up a little, or a lot, depending on all of the subjective factors you are going to take into account (the second set of red items). Does that seem like a large markup to you? When you sell beads or your jewelry, you need to be paid for all of the time, effort, and craftsmanship you put in to each piece you create. If you don’t, you won’t be in business long.

Your overhead expenses also include things like your web site, art festival fees, jewelry displays, and business cards. And don’t forget, tools, insurance, bank fees for your business account (including merchant charge fees), digital camera (and all of it’s accessories for photographing your work), trade magazines, workshops, gasoline/ or mileage, and so on.

And, when all is said and done you are hoping to have a little left over to pay yourself. Hobby or business? It’s all up to you.

Adapted from: Home Jewelry Business Tips and 20 years of Sharon’s experience.

Pushing Up Daisies

This pendant is part of a continuing series of beads I am making. The imagery of skulls is something that has always tripped my trigger (so to speak). No, I'm not morbid. It relates back to collecting them since I was little. My parents and relatives started the whole thing, an attempt I'm sure, to get me interested in biology. A subject I simply abhor. No human skulls, really! Just a ton of other naturally deceased critters in a collection I still have stashed away. Good reference material, I tell myself.

I got the inspiration for the pretty girl to the left from a recent post on Lampwork, etc. (a forum I regularily frequent). I posted the other skulls to their gallery area and one of the artists said her teenager (who usually ignores her mother's work - don't they all!) saw them and commented, "Hey, it looks like they're pushing up Daisies." An idea born.

I expect to make more of these so I'm keeping the prototype for myself. I'm still pondering if I want to hang my pendant from a bone bead or all by itself.

Any suggestions for this pendant, or any "skull" ideas will be gratefully accepted...Sharon

Let The Sun Shine In

See Ya REX! It's sunny here. Not as sunny as it is for my friend Susan Lambert (http://northcarolinasusan.blogspot.com) but it looks great to me.

I've been watching Rex for months now and waiting for the day of his demise. I even thought a bunch of artists could jump the fence he was kept in, build a fire, and dance naked with beautiful ribbons around him. Like a maypole. For a visual person that's a pretty interesting image (especially if you KNOW me). There's no need to mock Rex though. Spring did the "dirty" for us and he's lost his head.

Now, about that BFF Susan. The rat fink is in Florida vacationing and if you get a chance go to her Etsy store (susanlambert.etsy.com) and click on all her items (buy something too!). It'll drive her that she's not at home to respond. And for me, it's a tiny pay back for her telling me when the plants bloomed in North Carolina!!!

Tag - you're it!

What a Week Off !!!

Photo's from the Gathering Place Studio of Trey Cornette and a selection of his beads.

It was a glorious trip. See those pictures!!! Those are Trey Cornette’s beads and a picture of him making a bead. Trey taught a bucket full of hot shop techniques I’d never seen used for bead making. They made perfect sense. He was generous with his information and resources. What a Lampworker and technician.

I came back from Naperville The Gathering Place Studio (http://thegatheringplacestudio.com/) supercharged, picked up a different set of tools, and headed out for Brighton Beads here in Michigan. Nancy Graber (BB’s owner) has talents and connections with her own set of top notch instructors. The studio space is a little cramped but it’s only because it’s jam packed from ceiling to floor with tools.

I’ve owned a hydraulic press since they came out but never had the proper instruction as to its capabilities. Jiro Masuda (http://jirojmasuda.com/) is a tool junkie’s wet dream of an instructor. That’s probably a crude way to put it but JJ knows tools and does “Art”, with a capital A. Lucky for me he also likes teaching and is a friend of Nancy’s.

Don’t you love it when the stars align in your artistic house of learning?

I learned crease folds, T-folds, pleat folds, fold this way and that way. Forcing metal into sublime submission is more than just a hoot – it’s darn near orgasmic. Following all that folding and hammering came the pressing and annealing. Talk about metal torture. I felt like a Soprano with a snitch. “For getta ‘bout it!”

The pictures posted above are from Jiro Masuda’s class. The first one is of JJ (Jiro) demonstrating for us and the other is some of the forms I made in the class. I also included the pair of copper earrings out of the some of the forms.

I just need to meld some lampworking with some hydraulic work and see what I can create.

Spring Skulls?

It's time to rest, post, and have a cup of tea. It has been entirely to hectic this week. Gosh, you know how it is, run until you drop but "U Git Ur Done". We (DH & I) packed for Chicago, well Naperville and Wonder Lake. We're heading out in the morning for a class with Trey Cornette http://www.treycornette.com/ and a visit with darling daughter, Kate.

The tea is hot and Celestial but I'm really thinking of checking out The Tao of Tea http://taooftea.com/. The site is interesting and I'm sure the tea will be fit for a King - or a Queen who needs to 'slow her roll'. Who says teenagers never get anything right! They may not know the tale of Sisyphis but they CAN quote the concept to you when you look like death warmed over.

The beads in my still life - about the only thing still in my life - are going up for sale on My Etsy site over the next couple of days. Spring Skulls! Personally, I think they'd look good on one of those new peasant blouses and in any spring color.

Welcome to LEST

Hello out there great big Internet world! If you're reading "artsy fartz" blogs then I'd like to introduce you to my Etsy Street Team (LEST - Lampwork, Etc. Street Team). They are really cooking (well more like flaming hot) in the blog area. You'll find lampworking techniques, tons of interesting tidbits, and this week an in depth interview with the Lampwork Artist "Pipyr". She makes these phenominal borosilicate sculptures. The one I've posted here just rocks. Want more???? You bet your sweet bippy you want to bookmark their site for frequent return trips. http://welcometolest.blogspot.com/ Don't forget to leave them a few comments. Everyone would love to hear from you!

Copy Me, Please! - A Beadmaking Journey

In general I’m a pretty serene person but last night I entered a heated debate on the Lampwork, Etc (http://lampworketc.com) site. Unfortunately, the “triggering” posts from the original thread had already been deleted. She (more than likely a lovely person) must have panicked at the responses she was seeing. It was the universal conversation artists have, no matter what the medium, plagiarism. For those not familiar with the concept it is to take and use the ideas or writings of another. I don’t think there is any controversy in that statement. It is fact. What is roundly debated is the degree to which it is acceptable to find your inspiration in other’s works and translate that into yours. Obviously a dot per dot reconstruction of Seurat is unacceptable but does that put pointillism off the batting order because he did it best? Now you see the dilemma? Or rather, the debate.

I am an artist, now working primarily in lampwork and metals. I have done so since college which gives me a pretty broad base of experience. To add to that tour de force I practice perpetual student-ism (cool made up word!). I am a technique junkie and probably a frustrated engineer because I grew up watching Mr. Wizard and always wanted the answer to “How’d you do that?”

It’s amazing how that simple question or the use of its subsequent information can cause an earthquake. Are you copying? Why hell yes I’m using that technique. But I am just as sure that when I first started, during and immediately after a class, I practice what the teacher instructs. When there were few teachers I emulated the books I could find. There was no wealth of teachers or glut of lampworkers then. And there was no Lampwork, Etc. I am not alone when I say I am delighted that there is a forum. But where people gather and talk there is bound to be some friction, it is inevitable. Someone makes a singular post usually critical about someone else’s piece of art (a handmade lampwork bead). It goes like this – and this is a variation on that theme, not a quote- “I’m confused, isn’t this a so and so design? They were my teacher (friend, etc.) and I know they didn’t make this bead. So what’s up with that?” Oh, you know the righteous indignation routine. Then we are all off and running, trying to put the worms back in the can…at least until the next righteously indignant person starts a new thread with a similar variation on the theme.

Clearly, to me, they just don’t get it!

Now, I can not make a case for Joe Boxer signing a Michelangelo but didn’t he and DaVinci have their minions? They apprenticed these people for near lifetimes. Let them paint on their paintings. Chihuly has minions too. Certainly we are not apprenticing to that extent in the lampworking arena but if you’re a good teacher there’s a chance you have minions (or at least a few groupies). I’ve felt groupie-ish. Learning is fun, flat out, and I’ve had more than my fair share of teachers. I’ve emulated, copied, and translated the work. It is the nature of an apprenticeship, even a short term one lasting a weekend.

What I have never felt is the need to defend or defame anyone capable of doing such themselves. Really! If you’re a friend (groupie) of so and so master lampworker and you see a replica (sic: duplicate) of one of their signature pieces why don’t you bring to their attention the offending piece? Let them do what they may. There has to be a motive for “outing” a person on a public forum besides poor manners or judgment.

Interpreting a bead or idolizing a bead master is certainly not a crime. We do not live in a vacuum. Artistic influences are everywhere. They are a visual assault on your senses and can fill you to overflow with inspiration. I have over 10 sketchbooks to validate that theory. If I can find inspiration in a teacher, a museum, a web page, why can’t someone else. And what are all of us minions to do with all this eye candy and knowledge? Before Lampwork, etc., forums, and Internet heaven I had the opportunity to work through this slippery slope somewhat privately. Newbie’s today do not. The world is our backyard and we are not always kind to our neighbors. No one got to be a “bead master” without first being a “bead minion”.

Of noteworthy value (if not curiosity) is that the young Turks of Beadland seem to remain somewhat clear of this fray. And yes, so do many masters. You rarely (if ever) see a Johnson, Tabor, Herrell, Greenburg, or Sersich commiserating on a forum over a “copy” (I have had most of them as teachers) – I haven’t. Maybe it’s because they’re young and the directional compasses are evolving so fast they’ve no need to be concerned about where they’ve been or are. They need only concentrate on growth.

Maybe it’s the lesson for all of us. Just put one foot in front of the other and move forward.

And yes, Virginia, there is a motive behind my name dropping. Aside from the fact it makes a good point. I’m hoping people will find this blog, warts and all. My serenity is not the absence of conflict but the ability to cope with it and learn from it. Bead On…