Balancing the Christmas Distractions, I mean Inspirations!

 

I have mentioned the balancing act that I struggle with when it comes to allowing myself to work on projects other than jewellery.  (The previous post on that topic is here.)  Well, Christmas-time magnifies this dilemma for me.  There is a desire to present new exciting jewellery pieces at the myriad of craft fairs throughout the holiday season, but I also used to, (long, long ago,) make Christmas gifts for people, as well as tackle crafty projects in general.  This has fallen by the wayside in recent years, since I've gone 'entrepreneurial'.  The regret of projects not tackled, in lieu of jewellery, gets tiresome to be quite honest.  So as this festive season ramps up, I've just chosen to seize upon my success with being most productive in the mornings and into the afternoons (and so I make jewellery then), and I leave the afternoons or evenings open to different creative whims.  It's working!  I have found a balance of sorts. 

Above are some heat-coloured, folded copper bird ornaments that I thought had a whimsical appeal.  The inspiration came from a bird on my advent calendar, and I went with it.  These will be available along with my jewellery, at the Anna Templeton Christmas Tea & Sale this coming weekend Dec. 13,14, & 15th.  This is the last event for Susan Lee Studios this year!  Below are some new pieces you can find at my booth located at the back of the second floor.

7 brand new photo-etched Porthole necklaces

Roller-printed reversible necklace and earrings in sterling.

Photo-etched brooch and necklace in sterling silver.

May this festive season bring joy to your household that spills on and on into the new year.

Ready or not, here comes Christmas!

I blinked and the Christmas season is upon us once again!  It begins fast and furious for craftspeople this week in St. John's.  Tomorrow is the opening of the Craft Council's two gallery exhibits: Comfort & Joy in the main gallery, and Fire & Ice in the Annex Gallery.  I hope you can join us!  2-4pm

At right is a sneak peek at the work I have in these two shows. 

Comfort & Joy will run Nov. 2 - Dec. 18th, and Fire & Ice will run Nov. 2 - Nov. 23rd.

And then next week the biggest and best craft event of the year starts!  The Craft Council's Christmas Craft Fair is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year and the caliber of juried craft just gets better and better. 

You'll find my booth upstairs this year, near the south entrance to the theater auditorium, booth #S211.  The fair opens Wednesday, Nov. 6th, at noon and runs until Sunday, Nov. 10th at 5:00.  Full fair hours and other details can be found here.

I've been exceedingly busy making new work and I'd love for you to drop by and have a look.

Reinventing my booth

My booth, Christmas 2012

The Craft Council Christmas Craft Fair is looming scarily close.  Less than a month away in fact.  I'm steadily working away at my jewellery.  I will have lots of one-of-a-kind work as well as some of my more standard favourites.  This year however, I've committed myself to a larger (and much more expensive!) booth at the Arts and Culture Centre.  I'll be out on the concourse, near one of the auditorium doors.


And so, I'm taking to heart the advice from the many marketing gurus that preach "if you double your space, you'll double your sales".  This is a simplified soundbite of course.  But there certainly is truth in allowing enough room at a craft fair for customers to browse.  I know that as a customer, if it's too crowded, I don't linger long to look at the work on display.  When it's busy, my booth has been crowded, and with the small size of my product customers will pass by rather than elbow their way in to see what I'm selling.  However, with a bigger booth I must reinvent my display.

I enjoy this planning.  It's a bit of a puzzle, considering all the factors that make a successful booth display that works for me, as well as my customers.  One factor is cost - as my display must morph from one craft fair setting to another, I can't break the bank on any one display set-up.  Another is portability - all the component parts must be carried to and from my small car, often within the bustling chaos of all the other booth holders who are also setting up.  And because I share my humble abode, I must also consider the storage of the display components between fairs.  The display components themselves must also function well once they are set up - it is alarming to customers if the display is wobbly or they're uncertain of whether they can touch the product without something tipping over.  Uncertain customers don't linger, and therefore don't make a purchase.

I've been wanting for some time now to figure out a way to move my display from primarily horizontal surfaces, to more vertical ones.  The challenge here is the traditional "pipe and drape" set-up at the fairs.  Drapery, obviously, doesn't provide a stable surface for mounting things on.  This year I think I have figured out a solution, that still meets all of my criteria above for display components.  It will no doubt need some tweaking, once it's in use.  But between now and then I'm trying to foresee glitches and remedy them.  

I will have this one big plinth for some display items as well as storage.

And so:

I'm sewing a long narrow curtain to wrap the booth at eye-level.

I've been collecting boxes, and had hoped to find green tights to cover them.

Since green tights couldn't be found, I've resorted to spray paint. These boxes will hang in front of the long, narrow curtain, and, with the buttons I will attach to them, will hold my jewellery.

This is my pricey experiment: some warm LED lighting tape which I'm hoping to suspend in front of my vertical display.

Hope to see you Nov. 6 - 10th at the Arts and Culture Centre in St. John's.

Full Tilt

Audio interlude:  Mo Kenney with Joel Plaskett

 Audio Interlude: Katie Baggs

Visitors, traveling, craft fairs, and the glorious folk festival: it's been a busy summer.  Now ahead of me I see time free to tackle ideas that have been on the back burner, waiting.  There are many exhibits with open calls-for-entry this fall, and I've jumped with both feet into a much larger booth for the Christmas Craft Fair in November.  I don't want to disappoint myself by not meeting my own expectations.  So now: to work!

Didn't I used to have hobbies?

Vamps for the "Walking with our Sisters" Project

 

For "Primp my Nest", an auction at Eastern Edge Gallery

In articles I read on the "entrepreneurial life", the trending phrase seems to be emphasized is the "importance of the work-life balance".  This refers to the struggle, when you work for yourself, to also have time to and for yourself that is not spent on work-related activities.  I get it.  In theory.  In reality however, if I'm not making jewellery, I have immense trouble allowing myself to work on other projects.  Some projects cause me no grief at all.  The computer, for example, very slyly sucks up my time and does not cause me guilt.  It probably should more than it does.  I can also settle into a good book for hours, and nary a guilty thought crosses my mind.  But, if I should ponder that unfinished knitting project, or the table loom that's gathering dust; the clay that is hardening from neglect, or any other of a myriad of hands-on activities, I just can't commit to tackling them.  It feels to me that my creative energy should be exerted solely on working on my jewellery, lest it be wasted or somehow run out if misused.  For some time, this guilt has felt all right; I should be spending lots of time making jewellery.  But as I find a balance in my production level that satisfies my current market demand, I'm realizing that if I continue to resist the urge to create other things, that are not jewellery, that there is a nugget of resentment that I fear will only grow, towards my jewellery practice.  So recently, I've found a compromise that satisfies, for now.  I've made a couple of projects in what I will call my "non-professional materials", for auctions or exhibitions in support of causes I feel strongly about.  This has alleviated my "makers-guilt" in two ways.  Firstly, I do like to feel I can support certain causes, but as an entrepreneur, I just don't have the financial means to satisfy that desire to the degree that I would like.  Secondly, I have other skills beyond jewellery-making that I like to explore, and these projects give me an outlet to do so.

Underlying this solution is a whole other can of worms that I won't get into extensively here, surrounding the requests that craftspeople and artists often receive for donations of their work in support of a charitable or fundraising, activity or group.  Some of the worms in the aforementioned "can" advocate for the donating of the talents we have for the greater good, no holds (worms?) barred.  Some other worms hold firmly to the belief that nobody's skills (or the resulting product of those skills) should be expected, or therefore given, for free.  In between these two viewpoints are the rest of the worms that hold a range of opinions accommodating one viewpoint or the other to greater or lesser degree.  I'm of the belief that everyone's entitled to arrive at their own solution to the "donation conundrum", to the best that the allocation of their time, and means, allows.

Last year's humpback whales for the annual Clay Studio Beach Firing

The viewpoint that I am currently selecting to embrace from all of this, is the option of submitting my work for charitable or fundraising purposes in a medium of my choosing.  I feel that this is still an indirect way of broadening my professional (read: "jewellery") network, and I get to spend time creating something I'm proud of without it feeling like "work".  The spin-off benefit I've found from this, (which is not all-together unexpected, since I am a self-confessed workshop-junkie in most any media), is that by working in different materials and pursuing different themes according to the project I'm submitting work to, lends itself to new inspirations that I can bring back to my jewellery bench.  And that is refreshing!

Craft Council of Newfoundland & Labrador: Shaping my story.

This past weekend, on Fogo and Change Islands, the AGM for the Craft Council of Newfoundland & Labrador was held.  Outgoing chair, Jason Holley, spoke eloquently about how the trajectory of his career in craft (and art) has been shaped by his involvement with our local Craft Council.  It spurred me to consider how my current life's work has also been influenced by the services of the Craft Council.

When I moved to Newfoundland, the only craft of my own creation that I had sold was a few pieces of pottery at a Yellowknife Guild of Crafts sale.  I remember being shocked that people had bought them.  Upon arriving in St. John's, I registered for a clay class at the Craft Council Clay Studio with Isabella St. John of Blue Moon Pottery.  Even without having ever sold anything, I know I would always feel compelled to keep making craft.  But I never forgot that feeling of amazement that someone would pay for something I'd made.  Taking the 2 year Textile Studies program at the Anna Templeton Centre, while I was wait-listed to get into the welding program, I learned new craft skills.  That's also when I learned about the process of submitting work to the Craft Council Gallery when they had open calls-for-entry.  Wow!  That was really the beginning of my craft career!  I love the challenge of making work to suit a theme.  I love seeing how other artists and craftspeople have interpreted the same theme once the exhibit opens.  And again, it's always rewarding when in buying something I've made, a customer lets me know that I've touched a nerve with them, in a good way.  The pieces I submitted to the Gallery were in a variety of media.  It's only since I've returned from my training at Haliburton School of The Arts that I've narrowed my focus to metal, primarily jewellery.  But in the years before that I made primarily textile pieces, both sculptural and functional, I also went through a "lamp phase" incorporating clay and fabric and metal, and I also made jewellery in silver for some shows.  In showing work in the Gallery I learned what ideas appealed to an audience beyond myself, and what ideas didn't (I have a small collection of "eclectic" lamps to remind me of this!).  But my craft practice wasn't my "real" job - I was a welder!  But as the years slipped by and my obsession with taking workshops led me time and again to further my jewellery skills, I developed more focus in my designs.  The Shop at the Craft Council approached me about selling my work there on a regular basis.  That was another eye-opening moment - that my creations were seen as having legitimate value in a retail setting where the customer isn't necessarily coming in for an "artistic experience" as they would be in a gallery.  As I made and sold more jewellery, and found that industrial welding wasn't very fulfilling creatively, I was motivated to make the shift to full-time craft practice.  And I'm still loving it.  It's an ongoing learning process, and luckily there are Craft Council members here who are generous with their knowledge and personal experience to help me when I'm stuck.  It's a reassuring touchstone, knowing the Craft Council exists to serve craftspeople like me.  I think it's also a phenomenon particularly relevant in Newfoundland & Labrador where craft has always been highly valued.  Other provinces value craft in varying degrees too of course, and knowing that there's a network of craft councils across the country is a good feeling.  The skills of craftspeople should be valued and our provincial and territorial craft councils exist to promote the integrity of the handmade object as well as preserve and develop the skills of the craftsperson.

CCNL AGM on Fogo, hosted by The Shorefast Foundation and Wind & Waves Artisans' Guild (top: Fogo Island Inn, l-r: Tower Studio, a room at Fogo Island Inn, Squish Studio)

Studio visits.  (At left, top to bottom: Wind & Waves Artisans' Guild, Adam Young - painter, Linda Lewis of Baynoddy (CCNL board member) demonstrates spinning for Wind & Waves Guild members.  Center: Clem Dwyer - woodturner and husband of talented rughooker and our generous guide - Lillian Dwyer.  At Right, top to bottom: Stages and Stores Economusee, Heather White of Seal Harbour Gallery, Winston Osmond of Herring Cove Art)

Clockwise from top left: Caribou on Fogo Island, a view from Seal Harbour Gallery, Studio companions of Clem Dwyer - woodturner, Sea grasses in Sandy Cove, View from Stages & Stores Economusee, Root cellar in Seal Harbour, Stage that is Seal Harbour Gallery, "Stay-in-your-boot" socks at Stages & Stores Economusee, Caribou footprint, Restored heritage home - now museum - in Tilting, Sheep in the cemetery in Tilting, The only seashell sculpture I've ever spent money on - by Winston Osmond of Herring Cove Art .  Center: Display at Stages & Stores Economusee.

Patterns, Repetition, & MayDay Open Studio!

I love making big complicated one-of-a-kind brooches and pendants.  Above is my newest Crystalline Collaborative brooch.  I'm pleased with how it turned out.  However, one-of-a-kind pieces are very time consuming, and I sometimes find myself overwhelmed with one piece of jewellery when I know I should be making more efficient use of my time.  So I've also been looking for inspiration in repeated patterns.  My thought is that if I can find inspiring shapes that would translate well into repeated elements, then I might find some efficiencies in my process, and still come up with an end product that has an involved and complex appearance that draws people in to look a little closer.  So, no surprise, I'm turning to nature to find these patterns.  Here are some images that I've collected out and about recently, as well as some experiments with arranging metal into different collectives of shape and form.

I will be working on these at my open studio event next weekend as part of the broader May Day Craft Weekend.  I'm planning some wire earrings in patterns that might find themselves enameled at a later date.  I hope you'll drop by Saturday or Sunday, 11am - 6pm and say hello.  I'll also have a raffle to win a pair of my bronze-with-copper-rivet earrings.  The rivets vary on each pair, and the winner can choose from my selection the pair that they wish.