Winter

Yesterday was the winter craft fair at the Washington Street Art Center. I sold several pieces, but most of them were older work that I'd marked down. So operation "put new awesome work on Etsy" can proceed! Last night I finished editing and picking out photos, and today I'll be gradually listing things.

I'm really liking how my most recent batch of photos cleaned up. Still need a better lighting setup so I don't have to tweak the brightness/exposure levels... that would really save time.



I'm glad that I'll have a bit of a breather to just make cool stuff for a while--no in-person sales scheduled between now and the Arisia art show. I've got a couple of commissions for friends to work on, and some neat ideas in my head. Selling things in person is fun, but I'd rather be in the studio!

Gearing up for open studios! And a craft fair!

OK, so Joy Street Open Studios are this weekend! I'm in studio #19.

In anticipation of this, I've tried to make a bunch of cool stuff to show off.





I had business cards printed, and they showed up yesterday. I'm really happy with how they turned out:


I did the design myself using Inkscape, with help from some vector art found at Open Clipart. Hooray for open-source software and resources! I used a vertical format so that I could also punch holes in the cards and display earrings on them.

In two weeks, I'll be vending at the Washington Street Art Center craft fair. In addition to my stuff, I'll have a basket of yarn and roving made by my housemate, aka theyellowhobbit.etsy.com. I designed a business card for her last night, and I'm pretty happy with how it came out, especially since I made the image of the drop spindle from scratch:


And speaking of yarn, I've started knitting this amazing shawl (using this English translation of the pattern). I'm about 30 rows in. At first I thought it would be way too difficult, but it's actually fairly easy now that I've worked out how to read the pattern :) I'll post pictures when I'm a little father along. I've also started a spinning project, but it's on semi-hiatus while I try to make the shawl before the winter starts getting cold in earnest.

Exciting texturing!

I discovered that I can achieve all sorts of lovely, organic textures with the help of a small brick in the jewelry studio. I'm really excited about these earrings--they remind me of the moon and underwater kingdoms.

These earrings will be at open studios on November 21 and 22!

New developments

First: I moved to a new apartment in the Inman Square area! My girlfriend and I share a one-bedroom unit within a much larger building that houses us and 4 other housemates. Many of my housemates are crafty, and after things are a bit more organized, we should have a workspace in the basement for all sorts of projects.

Second: Jewelry studio! I was looking around for jewelry supplies on Craigslist and saw a listing for what's essentially a subletting of bench space within a studio in Joy Street Studios. The artist who rents the studio is John Lerner, someone who's been making jewelry for 30 years. For what's a pretty reasonable monthly fee, I get free run of a fully-equipped jewelry studio whenever I want to show up, and instruction/supervision/tips from John on Sundays and Tuesdays. I started at the end of August but missed a couple of weeks. Here's some of the stuff I've made so far:







As you can see, I'm currently in love with the combination of dyed blue freshwater pearls and textured, oxidized copper :)

There may be a time when I decide it would make more sense to buy my own equipment and work in the basement of my apartment instead, but for now, the studio bench solution fits my needs really well. I can get away from the clutter in my apartment and work on jewelry whenever I want; I have access to a really great teacher; and the other people sharing the studio space with me are great to bounce ideas off of. Oh, and it's in ideal biking distance from my apartment, or a direct ride on the bus.

Oh, and we're having an open studio on November 21-22!

Silversmithing and jewelry class

I made a ring today in the Cambridge Center for Adult Education's intro to jewelry class--it's many weeks' worth of material crammed into two 6.5-hour long Saturday sessions. I'm learning lots of cool stuff--some stuff that I can't really use until I invest in some more equipment, but some stuff that I can use right away. It's pretty cool :)

(I of course had to texture my first ring with the traditional message a programmer displays for their first foray into a new language!)

Yarn!

Spinning! Yarn! I've made more of it with my drop spindle and it totally looks like real yarn.



From left to right: 2-ply wool (the dyed strand is from roving that came pre-dyed in those colors); Navajo 3-ply tussah/merino; and a swatch knitted with said 3-ply. I kind of want to make a knitted version of this hat from the 3-ply with some as-yet-nonexistent colorful/wacky handspun stuff for stripes, but I'll need to do some calculating first to make sure there's enough. I haven't yet decided what I'm doing with the 2-ply; the colors are kind of cool but also kind of terrifyingly retro. (I'm half-jokingly calling it "The Last Juniper" in my head--there's no good reason to reference The Last Unicorn, but the colors *are* pretty juniper-ish.)

Still haven't gotten around to dyeing this two-color stuff purple. It may need to wait until after the move.

New stuff in the etsy shop!

Tell all your friends! :p


purpleshiny.etsy.com

Oh man, found objects

The coolest metal bits ever are lurking around the streets of Somerville!



Do you think I should oxidize (darken) the silver on this one, or leave it shiny?



It figures, just when I've decided I have all the jewelry supplies I need for a while, I stumble across even more cool things. At least these ones were free :)

Spinning yarn!

I tried to learn how to spin yarn a few years ago and didn't do very well. Sometime last week, I stopped by Mind's Eye Yarns and asked for some basic wool to learn to spin with--and I managed to make something that mostly looked like yarn! No pictures yet, as I still want to dye it. But then I took out some of the roving that I'd bought the first time I tried spinning:



Oh my goodness, it looks a lot like real yarn! I'm going to get some more roving and ply together different combinations of singles--I find this particular combination a little too much like all the yarn I already own :) But yay, spinning is neat!

Finished projects, in the "Jewelry Inspired by Palimpsest" category

I tried to make these visually interesting in their own right even if you're not familiar enough with the book to know what they're alluding to... did I succeed?

Casimira earrings:





A more abstract November pendant:



(these are available at the etsy shop)

Pasta machine printing

I had the idea to use my pasta machine (which I've previously used for rolling out polymer clay) as a printing press. Ink a thin plate with a raised design, place it on top of a sheet of paper, and roll it through. If you click on the image above, you can see a sort of haphazard step-by-step sequence of the process I used. I'm fairly happy with this technique, although the rollers on my machine seem to not be exactly parallel. I may investigate alternate press approximations. (Maybe a vise would work? And a vise would be a useful thing to have around anyway for other crafts...)

I recently read Palimpsest and have a bunch of crafty ideas in my head because of it. It's a great book with lots of rich, visual language and interesting characters.

a horizontal surface of one's own

This weekend Susannah and I rearranged a bunch of stuff in the house so that I could have a corner of the living room as a crafting area! It is so amazingly awesome. Since the above picture was taken, I also brought out my stacking drawers that I've been using for my yarn stash; I need to weed through it so that only yarn I actually care about is in the drawers.

I also made a mixed-media painting! The media are acrylic paint and silver wires.



I am pretty happy with the technical side of things on this painting, though I'm still mulling over whether I like the final composition or not.

Quick post

I've finished a few knitted objects and have a couple pairs of armwarmers in progress. Also, I updated my etsy shop with steampunk jewelry left over from Deceminate and used some of the earnings from the craft fair for awesome new jewelry supplies. And I suspect I'll be making more jewelry soon, and possibly also playing with making small felt objects.