Blog Neglect Hits new Heights, Ideas are Everywhere, Including the Strange Case of The Mirrors and The Guinea Fowl,

The New Year's Eve gig we played at our local pub had a masked theme, so I spent a happy half hour knocking up this fake primitive mask out of some packaging I had lying around and some acrylic paints. I couldn't really see to play while wearing it, so it didn't stay on long ;-)

Well, first things first - Happy New Year!

May it be full of love, light and creativity and all that stuff. . .

I have been pretty busy with all sorts of things over the last month or two, and as a consequence, not really in the mind set to write blog posts. When you are busy, some things have to be put aside, and as blog posts are a kind of ephemeral extra, they tend to be victim number one.

Victim number two, though by no means an ephemeral extra, has been bead making. I took the opportunity to take a break, as cramming in the the odd hour or two in my workshop, between serious DIY and catering for Xmas guests is not really useful or satisfying.
A break meant that I could take stock and do the New Year thing of taking a step back and looking at where I am and what direction I might take next. This break also meant sacrificing a couple of week's potential earnings, but you can't make the proverbial omelette without breaking eggs. . . Well, you could try, but it wouldn't be any entirely sane person's idea of an omelette really. . .

Some of the serious DIY I have been busy with. Faux panelling with corbels and bits. The right hand door has since been replaced and stained etc, and the wall behind the clock is a gingery dark brown. Very cozy and old looking.

So here I am, somewhat shamefacedly blogging again. Thank you for your patience ;-)

As you may have noticed over the months, my work often goes off on tangents, triggered by something I just discovered by accident, or just came across in the course of day to day life. Sometimes a process, sometimes an object or type of material. I have developed an instinct for noticing potentially useful happy accidents, and due to the positive response I get, the confidence to pursue them further.

Mirror shard, poly clay backing, blue alcohol ink, copper bail

So when I accidentally broke the mirror we had put out in the garden for the Guinea Fowl it triggered an idea. . .
Wait a minute, you put out a what?
It's a bit of a long story, but I will be as concise as I can.

We have two guinea fowl which potter about our large garden and the surrounding area, including neighbour's gardens. Everyone seems OK with this as they are harmless and quite amusing to watch if not to listen to (!).

Everyone that is except our immediate neighbour who was a touch upset by their habit of pecking at his patio doors and leaving a bit of a mess on his doorstep from time to time. Was there anything we could do about this, he wondered.

Well, other than having a quiet word with them, which wasn't an entirely serious idea, or getting rid of them, which was out of the question, we couldn't really come up with anything. So we did a bit of research.

Guinea Fowl are social creatures and live in quite large flocks in the wild, so we wondered if the reason they were hanging out by, and pecking at the windows was because seeing their reflections made them think they were amongst other Guineas.
So as an experiment we put a couple of spare mirrors we happened to have left over from our house move, out in the garden.
This did seem to get their attention, and they did spend time in front of the mirrors so we hoped for the best.
The neighbour hasn't complained since, but he has found a new partner recently, which might have mellowed him out a bit ;-)
(he looks after two boys in their early teens on his own, which must be a bit stressful)

So crossing fingers, that has amicably solved that little issue.

Not easy to photograph any of these mirror thingies. . . The copper came out looking a bit brassy in this pic

Now, to the happy accident part.

One of the mirrors was leant against our household compost bin. This bin is rather full and the seams are opening up somewhat. It needs emptying but I figured a well aimed kick might help close it up a bit. Only it wasn't a well aimed kick, it caught the mirror and smashed it to bits. (it was cracked already to be fair, so I didn't claim my 13 years bad luck). I was on my way to the waste bin with said bits when I had a 'Hmmm. . I wonder.  ." moment and headed for my workshop instead.



A mirror is basically a sheet of glass with silver nitrate on the back, so, I figured, that backing could be scraped off in such a way as to make interesting patterns. I carefully broke off some small bits of mirror and reached for the Dremel and the grinding bits.
It worked quite well, (I quickly realised I should wear a face mask as inhaling fine glass dust is not such a great idea.) so I made a few drops/charms using this technique. Extending the process to involve polymer clay backing, both coloured and non coloured.

I'm enjoying these little 'man' motifs. Kind of petroglyph - ish ;-)

So there you have it, how Guinea Fowl related disruption can lead to creative innovation of a modest kind ;-)
Which supports my long held belief that the wonder of life has a lot to do with it's random and absurd moments. . .
Until next time, which will not involve a wait as long as the last time,
Cheerio
Jon x

They combine nicely with other objects, so you may see more of this sort of thing in the next few months

Cameras, Lawnmowers and Etsy Trauma. .

I made some shards the other week. Always fun to do

Well, it's been a funny couple of weeks. Not funny as in deeply humorous, but funny as in a bit odd or not like one would expect. Though a bit of humorous crept in too for light relief. Nothing all that exciting really, which is why I haven't blogged about anything for ages. But in the interests of keeping this whole thing going, I can just about scrape together enough mildly riveting things to keep you amused. Probably.

Green abused image transfer disk charms

My trusty, or up 'til now trusty, camera suddenly developed a fault. The on/off switch thingy had been very sticky for a couple of years at least, and I guess the extra strain involved in turning it on and off finally broke something. Just in the middle of a bead photographing session too. So I have a few beads with no photos to show scale, next to a ruler, as per my usual procedure.
Anyway, after ringing up a few camera shops I tracked down somewhere that actually repairs cameras rather than just selling them, and drove the 50 min to get there. It was touch and go as to whether Fuji still sent out the relevant parts needed to fix it, but eventually it transpired that they did, and I will have a large bill to pay. Annoyingly, not quite large enough to warrant me getting a new (to me) camera of the same type instead of paying for the repair. Oh well, I can claim it off tax as I use the camera mostly for product shots these days. . . I'll have it back in 10 days or so.

A collage of four shots of a single 'pot' dread bead type thing.

Mechanical Breakdown 2 - The rusty and trusty sit-on lawnmower that came with the house, as the previous incumbent was moving to a smaller place with no need of such a thing, and we would need it to deal with the big lawn, also developed a fault. The height adjustment was stuck. It was fixed quite easily, but we had to call someone in to do it. As it was such an old beast, we had to get an agricultural machinery guy in to sort it. Modern lawnmower repair men wouldn't know where to start with a 40 year old machine. Hah! It's proper lawn mower, in that particular shade of green that garden machinery and metal playground equipment like slides and roundabouts used to be, you remember. . .

Brown abused image transfer disk charms

Anyway, talking of on/off switches, the forums over at Etsy are in turmoil at the moment. A great many shops are complaining about their views and sales suddenly stopping, as if there was an off switch that had just been thrown.
Sellers moaning about low sales on Etsy forums is certainly nothing new, it's one of those 'death and taxes' type constants, but the scale and intensity of complaints this time does seem to be much higher than usual.

Coupled with the lack of views/sales is the state of the search function. From what I read it is really not fit for purpose, throwing up hundreds of items not really related to the search terms at all. Sellers feel that they are just not being found, through no fault of their own. They feel that there has been too much tinkering behind the scenes by coders and suchlike people.

Also, to add another layer of resentment, it seems that Etsy HQ is one of those kind of corporate hippy places you hear about and roll your eyes. There are Yoga rooms, free organic gourmet food a couple of days a week, a communal loom and something called a 'breathing room'. And that's just for starters. . .
Obviously oodles of money has been spent on such organic fripperies. This metaphorically chafes the collective rear ends of the sellers, including me, who have been paying Etsy listing fees and percentages of sales only to find that the employees have been lounging about in breathing rooms, belching organically while buggering up the search function completely. The money could have been better spent, one feels.

Ridged and textured tube beads

To add yet another layer of resentment to the ferment, as if one was needed, the ousted CEO, before he was ousted, had made a seemingly strange comment that he saw Etsy as a 'Tech Company'.

Eh? . . . Mulling this over, I eventually came to an understanding of what he might have been on about.

You may think that a site that sells things is primarily just that, a site that people sell things on. Well, when you get to the scale of Etsy, (and Amazon and Ebay etc) issues of server size come into play. They have a certain amount of server space in which to accommodate a very large number of things/shops. So what they allegedly do is rotate the visibility of said things/shops as that is much cheaper than paying for more server space. Sellers have been suspicious of this for years but any evidence is circumstantial. . . Etsy says nothing. . . The 'tech company' comment could well have referred to the possibility that Etsy staff might be employed to write algorithms that enable this rotation to happen in supposedly non obvious ways, and the idea that Etsy would then sell on the resulting algorithms to other companies who require such things. So Etsy could perhaps be seen by those of a cynical disposition, as just a sandbox in which coders could test their algorithms. Sellers being relatively unimportant. . .

And some image trans tile squares. Double sided no less. The images are the same beads from different sides

It also turns out, according to said ousted CEO, allegedly, that Etsy makes more money from listing fees from hopeful sellers, than it does from actual percentages of sales. Leading to conspiracy theory number two, that Etsy manipulates shop visibility in order to encourage sellers to keep on listing, and for new sellers to buy into the dream of giving up their day job and successfully selling their work instead. The idea being that the manipulation of sellers visibility allows them to just sell enough to keep going and to keep listing, and not notice the down times as anything other than the ups and downs of retail life. Give 'em just enough to keep 'em sweet. . . All very cynical. Who knows what the truth of it all is, but there are a great many upset sellers on those forums. . . The new CEO may or may not be inclined to address their concerns. Time will tell. But by then half the sellers may have left. . . Including me. . .
Until next time,
cheers,
Jon x