Collating Ideas and Inspiration, Keeping Track of Work Progress, Enamel Earrings, and Keeping Up With or Rather Ahead of The Joneses

Still busy with the after effects of the move (sorting, cleaning, catching up on things I put off, etc), but wanted to stop in and say hi.

I'll have the kiln going next week so I'm thinking I'll dedicate next week to metal clay.

The following week will be enameled earrings. I made a pair for myself and loved them so much that I made three other pair (before the move).  I want to pick up where I left off so I can offer a great variety of color to my bold, color-loving friends.

Here's the first pair I made...

One of the projects I'm doing in my spare time (ha ha ha!) is combining all my notes into one place.  I think I mentioned this in my New Year's Resolution post.

I've got stuff (inspiration and potential ideas) all over the place.  They're scribbled in notebooks (20 or so different notebooks), I've taken photos with my cell phone while I was out, and I've marked pages in books I own.

So what I've decided to do is create one file (in WORD probably) and have all my text notes and photos there.  Here's an example of one entry.

This would be a really awful rendering of a Byzantine earring from the 7th century.  It inspires me to make something similar.

One other thing I'm doing, well continuing to do, is called my end of day photo.  At the end of the work day, I gather up what I worked on a take a photo.  It's not a glamor shot.  It's just a photo that I put into a WORD document, add some text notes on what I did as I worked on the piece, date it and we're done.

Then if I need to remember what sealant I used on a pendant or how many drops of dye oxide I added to my resin, well, I've got all the info logged.  'Cause I tell ya... my memory is NOT a thing to be relied on.  There are just too many variables going on in the workroom for me to memorize all the timings and amounts and combinations of techniques, etc.

Here's an example of the earrings I was talking about earlier.  Because I took this photo, I'll easily be able to reproduce them should I need to.  I don't even need notes for this one because I included the enamel jars in the photo.

How's everyone's 2015 going so far?  I hope no one's in a rut or down in the dumps about their work or their sales.

Sometimes it can feel like an uphill battle when you go to a show and every other booth is selling mass-produced imports that to the untrained eye may LOOK like a good deal, but we all know the difference between value and bargain, right?


So what can you do?

Keep moving, forward if possible.

Ask yourself, "What can I do that they can’t?"

If someone's already making something that you'd like to make, but they're making it faster and cheaper than you ever could, think about letting it go and moving on to the next idea.

No moss grows on a rolling stone.  Let's roll!