Laura's Jewelry Workshop: More Etsy Ranting and My Thoughts on an Art Fair

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Okay, where did I leave off? Had a couple of swamped days in a row… and my poor peacock is sitting unattended. Hm…

Anyway, Sunday Monica was at a team function for five hours, but it was in Los Gatos and it wasn’t worth me driving home and back so my good buddy agreed to meet me there and have lunch with me. Dang, she’s nice.

Had a great lunch. Got some fabulous beads and got to show my new silver caps as well as Monica’s latest creation.

After lunch, we headed over to an art festival that was going on that weekend. Unfortunately, we could only find a parking spot for my car, so Alex and I said our goodbyes and I proceeded to blow off the next two hours until it was time to pick up Mon.

Aside from trying to keep my shoe heels from sinking in the grass as I went from booth to booth, I discovered that I was interested in looking almost any booth that wasn’t a jewelry vendor. A lot of the vendors sold “highest quality materials from artisans around the world” pieces… which basically meant nicely designed bracelets and necklaces made from mass-produced imported glass beads.

There was one jeweler whose work intrigued me. I could not afford the prices, even though I felt they were fair.

But then I found a booth with something that really caught my eye… they were Japanese-looking things, earrings mostly, made from colorful… “things”… and designs that were really nicely laid out. I asked the vendor about her products and it turned out she did make them all (yay… not selling someone else’s work). She said the colorful “things” were fabric. I asked if they were coated in resin or… She told me it was a process of six finishes with sanding between each time. I realized then that maybe she thought I was trying to figure out her technique so I could steal it. What’s funny is that I was asking her technique so I could find out if she really made these herself. Ha ha ha!

We ended up talking a bit. I adore her work. She was telling me about a show in SF every year for women who make art and it’s juried, but the art can’t be assembled… you have to MAKE the components in whatever it is you’re presenting.

Anyway, that was that day.

Then it was work and hockey on Monday and work and hockey on Tuesday and today I took the day off and we went to the beach. Yay!

More Etsy Ranting

Do an Etsy search on by category:
Home > Buy > Categories > Supplies > Handmade > Bead >
... then if you type in "caps" (as though you want to see only bead caps that were handmade by the Etsy seller...

… and be disgusted when you see how many NON handmade items they allow into this handmade category and tagged with handmade. I can’t, can’t, can’t buy anything at Etsy because I can’t search for what I want.

Damn!

I have a lot of metal clay stuff to show you in my next post… stay tuned…