February Overview

I'm not much of a wisher. Dandelions, falling stars, birthday cakes...I tend to be more of the (paraphrasing) "if you want something done, do it yourself" mindset. But I was going back through some old files recently, and this line caught my eye:

"always wishing, ever hopeful"

is a snippet from a years-old poem of mine. (1996, to be exact). It's part of the penultimate line of the poem, and it sounds so very unlike me, especially back then. But if you knew the very last words of the poem, it would make more sense:

"and still I linger, always wishing

ever hopeful, gaining nothing"

February felt a little bit like that. I am working on making changes to my personal life and my career, and for now I feel like I'm the girl who is looking up hopefully, but so far gaining nothing...or in some ways, losing nothing. 

I am now moderately drinking wine, after January's no-alcohol stint. And I find that I am drinking less of it, and wanting less of it, overall. But it still seems to have not made a whit of difference in my weight, which was one of my key reasons for abstaining. 

I'm also off all extra sugar, and that has apparently had no effect either! This I find amazingly difficult to believe. I am having no hot cider (with whipped cream) on cold days, I am having no whipped cream on anything...and I am having no candy, chocolate, licorice, frozen yogurt (which I love, and seems healthy, but is really full of sugar). And I'm still exercising regularly three times a week. Apparently I am managing to eat my way through enough calories to keep my weight the same...they're just healthier calories.

I've realized that while I do enjoy "good" food, like salmon or chicken or veggies, I really do consider sweets a treat...and I was treating myself several days a week. But apparently not enough to make a difference in my weight or clothing size? My only hope so far is that I am in the midst of a very slow weight loss that will take at least three months to happen! ~wry smile~ Apparently stronger measures are needed.

But I have noticed some changes...for one, more energy. I am not quite the exhausted soul I was for most of January. Whether that's due to the COQ10, the exercise, or the reduced amount of sugar I'm having, I don't know. But I have been feeling less pain from time to time, and am not wanting to sleep six hours a day PLUS eight or more at night...I'll call that progress.  :)

Career-wise, things are slow too. I didn't hit my January deadlines for submitting to festivals, which leaves a huge gap in my schedule. I could have filled that with...well, "filler" shows, but that's the kind of panicky thing I did last year, and it didn't work so well for me. So I did not allow myself to send in applications for shows that I feel I've outgrown. However...that means very few shows from March - May...a long time to be without my main source of income.

I spent a good portion of January and early February feeling stressed and worried about the looming months. And then I just had to let it go. I have to trust and believe that what I'm doing is what's right for me, that the path I'm on is part of the larger journey, that the Universe will provide. That's big stuff for a girl who has never trusted anyone / anything to provide for her...and pretty much still doesn't. "If you want something done..."

But I am finding that I just can't rush the progress on the jewelry. I did finally get the new items photographed and submitted to a few shows. One of them is probably quite out of my reach, the others, maybe less so...but I'm still optimistic, I suppose. So now I just have to wait see what happens with those. I won't know anything until April 1 at the earliest...all I can do is keep working, keep trying new things, keep growing my skills and also...hope for a little luck in the jurying process

Always wishing...ever hopeful.

*Also, at today's weigh-in, down two pounds from the beginning of the month. *Despite* five days in New Orleans. So it's not a big change, but I'll take it. Better than going in the other direction!  :)

Studio Set Up, Part I

I posted previously about tackling my utter disaster of a studio. Last year was a year of craziness, running around back and forth to Arizona to visit my father as much as I could. I also exhibited at a lot more festivals than usual, so I was home even less of the time. And actually, after the major jaw surgeries in 2011, I hadn't given the studio a good overhaul / organizing in nearly two years..it showed. Everything, everywhere, was just a pile of clutter. I wasn't really being as productive as I wanted, because I either:  a) couldn't find things when I wanted them, or b) couldn't get to things when I wanted them.

You know how sometimes you get smacked with the realization that YOU are your own worst enemy? As I looked around the studio, I saw myself. And it wasn't at all pretty. Or manageable. So I took some time to sort through what was working for me and what wasn't. And I made some small changes that I think will make me SO more efficient going forward. The small details are just as important as the big changes.  :)

What wasn't working:

The soldering table was the biggest mess (actually, maybe *not* the biggest, scary as that thought is). But it certainly was impeding my ability to create. It's hard to see in the photo, because of all the white flux and crap all over the table top, but there are scattered bits of sanding disks, wire, sheet, and assorted other miscellaneous detritus all over the table. I must have had eight or so little sorting dishes (I use these) that held assorted "metal to use", left over from other projects. But they never got sorted. And I didn't know which type / shape / gauge of metal was in them - they were all mixed together in each bowl - so I never wanted to go looking for what I needed. I just ended up using new metal - horribly inefficient and not exactly cost-effective.

It seems that I somehow get flux all over everything when I'm working. I just do. I'm a crazy flux-spatterer! Like Pollock, only it's all white on black background. I can live with that (it washes off pretty easily), but having all the bits of metal around was not efficient or productive. So I sorted ALL OF THEM. Tedious? Definitely. Necessary? Absolutely.

Jump rings, fancy jump rings, flattened dots, beaded wire, square wire, tubing, etc. And they all got new homes:

Each tin holds one item - say, square wire. It doesn't matter what gauge wire, but I now know where the square wire IS when I need snippets for design elements. I labeled all the tins with painter's tape and a sharpie, and they all live in the box you can (sort of) see behind them, the one with the butterfly on it. MUCH improved. Also, notice how clean the top of the work table is without all that flux splattered on it??   :)

This is an "after" shot, because the lazy susan on the right of the wooden chest of drawers used to be here:

Pretty much where the white basket is. The lazy susan holds all my mandrels for making jump rings, as well as a bunch of pliers. Which was fine when I did a lot of wire shaping and wrapping that didn't require torch work. But I found that as I spent more time at the soldering table, I needed the mandrels to be within arm's reach. It took me over a year to move them. Sometimes you just can't see the forest for all the trees in your way...

My ring mandrels (seen on the back left of the chest of drawers) were on top of the chest already, but I had my less-often-used disc cutter on the right. Now the disc cutter is in one of the drawers until it's needed. A small, but really effective change. I also moved more tools (pliers) over to the soldering table so they'd be within easy reach as well and it's really made a difference.

I've show this photo before but it bears another look. Because I spent the better part of a year just shuffling all this stuff around so that I could do what was necessary. The mess you see in the above photo made it nearly impossible to get to any one of the work tables, at any given time. I am TERRIBLE with paper filing. It ends up in "piles to file" on the floor and then I end up working in a 2' x 2' area because I can't maneuver around the studio. So I went to this:

Which makes my life so much easier. I  put the current month's paperwork on one of these four shelves, and then at the end of the month it gets filed further into the brown expandable monthly folder. I do throw monthly receipts into the basket that you saw on the floor (I know myself!) but now they'll get filed in the expandable folder too. And the basket is now sits on a shelf, not on the floor.

Don't look too closely at the paperwork *beneath* the filing area...it will go away as soon as it's all checked and verified for taxes (that's last year's paperwork).  :)

Now I'll have to take photos a few months into this year and see how well I'm still doing!  ;)

A Backward Glance (and a New Idea)

Back in the summer of 2010, when I was really starting to use the torch on a semi-regular basis, I set myself a goal: learn to solder small jump rings. I had fount it relatively easy to solder larger pieces and thicker jump rings, but most of my "joining" rings were 18 gauge silver and I melted nearly as many as I soldered. Or I ended up with a big solder blob and would have to sand it off later (trust me, soldering blobs off of eentsy rings is not a fun job. There's no room to hold anything and you end up sanding your fingers half of the time).

For reference, 18 gauge is about 1mm thick. 1 MM, not 1 cm. It's pretty darned small. A stack of 18 gauge jump rings should give you a good visual:

So I started trying to solder them closed..I .must have soldered a hundred or so. And I still wasn't very consistent. So I decided to give myself a break and jump up to 16 gauge rings instead. 16 gauge is only one size larger but it makes a difference (or at least, it did for me). I had some scraps of wire lying around, and I laid them out with the jump rings in different patterns to see what would happen (at this point in my soldering skill set *I* was not in control of what would happen, so I spent a lot of time "winging it").

And after a lot of putting shapes together, taking them apart, and moving them around, I ended up with this:

and this:

 

They had this sort of watery, cascading effect, and in fact, that's what they ended up being called: the Cascade series. I went to my casting company and had the designs (nine in all) cast for me. And thus began a whole new problem...clean up. Cleaning up these castings was a long, tedious, drawn-out affair. And I was relatively new to cleaning up castings, so I didn't know what I was doing, so they were just a mess for me. They turned out all right, and sold moderately well, but I learned a big lesson from the experience. I haven't made anything like them since.  :)

But now it's late 2012!  I've been at the fabrication process pretty steadily for almost three years, instead of eight months, and I receive a request for a custom order: a big circular necklace based on one of the Cascade designs. I received the request around the 8th of December, and I hesitated. Busiest time of the year, and a custom order for something that had caused me a lot of grief in the past...I wasn't sure I wanted to tackle it. I well remembered the days (yes, days) spent moving little bits of sterling around to create a balanced design with the original pieces. I wasn't sure if I could actually make the piece work in the time allotted (holiday shipping and all). But I went ahead and accepted the offer. And you know what? It was...well, not easy...but much easier than the original pieces had been - both the design and the fabrication work. And the clean up was quicker! (though that might have been because I only cleaned up one piece this time...doing twenty in a row might have made me think it was just as bad as before). 

I really am thrilled at how the finished piece turned out, and it's given me a design idea as well (I'll share more about that later):

It's circular yet the inside is asymmetrical, and I feel like the dots add a bit more "oomph" to the overall design. There's no bail to connect it to a chain or anything, because the customer will supply her own, so I only had to make the pendant itself.  It's fabricated with thicker wire than my original designs because of the size, and I'm telling you - bigger is better. It's a bit under two inches across, has a nice heft to it.

And it's nice to see some real progression in my work - almost everything I'm doing right now is coming pretty easily to me, which tells me it's time to tackle some new projects, some more advanced techniques, and some more intricate designs. I'm ready for a whole new year to learn, grow, and improve my skills.  :)