Bugs and Birthdays, Image Transfer Revisited Yet Again and Necklace Prevaricating. . .

It seems that Monthly posts will be the way to go for this blog. I intended to keep the posts coming every ten days or so, but that hasn't happened, so monthly it is. I hope. . .

There has been a particularly nasty flu bug going round our part of the UK this year. And although normally I am one of those people who 'Doesn't get ill', it knocked me for six. Admittedly, not for long, It was an intense night of constant coughing and no sleep at all, followed by a day of feeling 50% less ill but very sleep deprived, then a slow recovery over the next two weeks. I am back to about 85% normal but my work, the celebration of my wife's birthday, Valentine's day and my birthday were seriously disrupted. . .

But we did manage to get away for a night on Valentine's day, to this place. . .

And the weather was bright and clear, if a bit chilly

Anyway, back to something approaching normal now, cross fingers.

I have been getting back into making image transfer tile beads using my digital images. Trying to let the images speak for themselves a bit more than I used to. I made some bigger, more confidently patterned beads.

My idea was to sell them as plain tile beads, without bails or frames etc. This wasn't entirely successful. I think buyers like the extra element that a wire frame can add. I admit that I do too.

I tried deliberately not distressing the images, in line with my intention to let them speak for themselves as mentioned above, but I couldn't ignore the fact that my image beads look so cool when they have been knocked about a bit and scratched up, so I gave in to my instinct and gave them the treatment.

The black and white image beads seemed to respond best to this treatment. Especially once attached to a suitable upcycled wire frame.

same as the first image in this post in case you were wondering

I did discover something faintly interesting though. I had a small, bright, abstract, printed image in my image drawer that I thought would make a good tile bead. So I did the usual thing of placing it face down on poly clay, wetting the back and rubbing to transfer the image. it was only then that realised that it was an inkjet print and not a laser one. It was on high quality matt paper so the image stayed crisp and didn't run. Once all the backing paper was rubbed off I was left with a very thin but dull looking layer adhering to the polymer clay. It didn't look very good so I picked at a corner and found the whole layer just peeled off leaving the image on the poly clay. Unfortunately the image left on the poly clay was only about half as bright as the original print, but at least I got a result from inkjet paper, which I didn't think was possible. So image trans from inkjet paper is possible by the wetting and rubbing method, up to a point. As the tile bead looked quite old already I distressed it up a bit, which made it look like a very battered artifact from an alien civilisation or somesuch.

I know, but I did say only 'faintly interesting'. . .

On the necklace front, I made some somewhat more conventional bead ones, using some of my seriously grungy, rustic, crackle glaze effect, ancient look technique beads. I am quite pleased with them, and will probably try them for sale quite soon. Most likely in my own Facebook selling group, once I have created one that is. . .

Until next time. .
Jon x

Having a Bit of a Turn, Going For The Throat, Getting it in the Neck, Hanging by a Thread, etc etc. . .

In a moment of inspiration, I actually thought of something for my wife to get me for Christmas just passed. I find that just one of the many downsides of being all grown up (technically at least) is that you struggle to find anything you actually want for Christmas. Anything within a reasonable price bracket anyway. Grown ups are so boring. . .

Talking of which, I actually asked my kids to get me some slippers this year, sheesh, what happened to me??

But contrary to expectation, this festive season found me prepared.
"I'll have one of those cheap Chinese micro-lathes" I said. "Please."
And that's what I got ;-)

I've only had a bit of a play with it so far, but it's pretty good. All I want to do with it is cut groovy grooves in polymer clay, or wooden beads, which is relatively undemanding. I tried it on some wooden beads I picked up in a charity shop a while ago, and once I had stopped the bead from slipping too much it worked OK. (I need something called a 'drive centre', I'm looking into it but for now I am using a countersink from my power drill which works up to a point. .)

I seem to have gone all vibrant, colour wise. . . hmmm. .

I made some experimental, randomly grooved beads, which I then painted with alcohol inks and varnished. I like how they came out even though they soaked up the varnish somewhat. I will make some plain poly clay tube beads to experiment on next. As well as scouring the charity shops for more wooden beads to mess up of course.

A double grid, ancient lino, plastic sleeving and early JBD experimental poly clay claws. Kind of Industrial Gothic

The other thing I have been slowly venturing towards is making actual necklaces using my eccentric grid based pendant focal things. Rather than selling them on for other people to have all the the fun, I have been considering how I would hang them myself, in a way that is a bit more arty and considered than just sticking them on a bit of chain.

Modelled by Ethel, the dummy retrieved from the local dump for £2 a year or two ago.The last of the big spenders, me. .

Well, that said, I have actually stuck one or two on some simple chain, but chain that consists of large, artily crude, home made (by me) links that suit the vibe of the piece. Using plain copper or upcycled garden wire hammered flat(ish) for strength and because I like how it looks.

A large image transfer poly clay square with some double sided through drilled squares that matched the colour

 I am encouraged by the results and am considering trying to sell some pieces. I admit to feeling somewhat intimidated by this prospect, as the subject of price rears it's contentious head. . .

Ethel again, showing you how it should be worn

Also, I am not entirely sure where to sell. I need to research some Facebook groups I think and ask around for some feedback and advice. Any thoughts you may have on the matter would be gratefully received ;-)

So here are some more things I have been working on. . .

Enjoy. .. and see you next time,

Jon x

Electronic components, a poly clay im trans square and a plastic railway figure

A bit long maybe?

Two fuses and a big electronic whatsit in a nice shade of blue

Copper links this time

Sticking my Neck Out. . .

The more observant amongst you may have noticed that I haven't listed a new necklace in my shop for quite a few months. Why could this be? you ask yourselves. I will tell you. Despite having sold a few necklaces over the past year or two, I have never felt entirely at ease with the process of making them. The nagging feeling that I don't quite know what I am doing is hard to shake off. Possibly because it is an accurate assessment ;-) But that said, I pick things up pretty quick. . . I shouldn't be so hard on myself. It's all down to what 'works' and what doesn't really.
And anyway, I have been madly making beads and so haven't had the time or inclination to diversify much. Excuses excuses. .

Over time, quite a few pending necklace related projects have been abandoned and left hanging on the hooks on my studio wall. Oh all right, on the pirated bits of a wooden plate rack wedged between two water pipes that serves the same purpose. Whatever, it does the job.

The other day I had an urge to actually do something with these neglected projects, and, armed with a bit more knowledge, gleaned over several months of Pinterest and FB exposure to other artists' work, a bit more confidence, and a steely glint in my eye, I got stuck in.

The results are below. I'm trying to keep the rustic/tribal/boho/whatever vibe that my beads have and translate that attitude into more complex pieces. For better or for worse ;-)

Close ups and other details are in the listings for each necklace in my Etsy shop, each pic has a link in the caption.
(Thanks to 'Ethel' the polystyrene dressmaker's dummy I found in the 'salvaged things for sale' bit of my local dump for £2, I can not only test my work all through the design process, but also photograph my necklaces to show how long they are and how they hang. Yay, for Ethel!)

I'd love to know what you think of them, and if you have any guidance/criticisms for me.
thanks,
Jon x

1 - This one has been around in this form for ages. I just wasn't sure about it. It has 15 miscellaneous grungy image transfer tube beads, various rustic spacers and some printed, bigger spacer beads.

2 - This one has four early image transfer tube beads, featuring my signature digital tile patterns, paired with three translucent and red clay mix round beads I made a while ago too. Plus some of my simple white round polymer clay beads.

3 - This one has some black and white, textured spike beads garnered from a previous project, with some rustic black and white drum beads made using the same technique. All my own design textures.

4 - A simple, 'primitive' necklace made using a large semi translucent cane covered bead, made when I was playing around with caning etc, quite a while ago, with two semi translucent round beads, some more rustic spacers and some shop bought small, simple spacers.

5 - I got all designy with this one. A textured ring bead and two stick beds on a copper loop.

6 - This pendant one has six, triangular cross section, textured stick beads on a copper bar.

7 - This was fun. A simple formula - one interesting but different bead, spaced using two simple wood spacers, and so on. Random, unusual, funky and cool.

8 - Well, this one was a repurposing/upcycling project involving stuff from the hardware store mainly. Washers, cotter pins and some plastic tubing. With two small polymer clay tube beads of mine. Fun.

Oops, it's been ages. . anyway - Necklaces etc

I hadn't realised how long it was since my last installment. Oh well, keep 'em wanting more is what I say. Conveniently. . .

Anyway, I've been taking it a bit easy on the bead front this last week or two, since making loads of things to list bit by bit etc. I'll have another burst of enthusiasm next week I reckon.

But meantime, I am having a bit of a hiccup in confidence on the jewellery front. I sell a few things, mainly cufflinks and earrings, so I am OK with those, mainly, though my earrings are a bit plain compared to a lot of the wonderfully eclectic artists I admire. My hiccup is more about necklaces.

I don't really know what level of sales to expect, so may be reading too much into it, but it feels as though I need to raise my game a bit. I like the things I make, I know that they sit on the crude side of 'simple', and I realise that might not resonate with many people. Necklaces are more of a special purchase perhaps and they need to look a bit more consciously 'special'. Also, I do rather wing it with the design, following my instincts rather than considering the end user or what the 'rules' (perfectly valid rules or 'best practice') might be. I do like to go with my own flow, I think it is important, but perhaps I am putting potential buyers off by not being very aware of how necklaces are 'used' or worn. Not being female or a jewellery wearer myself and all that.

It makes my approach original but quite likely not altogether appealing. I dunno. Rightly or wrongly, it has made me stop making necklaces until I get my head round it all. Price may be an issue, but I don't think I'm too optimistic in that regard. I wouldn't want to charge less.

I research necklaces on pinterest and Etsy to see what I might need to change, and a few things are slowly sinking in. I am also coming up against another bit of resistance. I don't like tying up a load of beads into one piece when I could probably sell them separately as components.

Aye well, I'll work it out in the end. My work tends to go in cycles, so some new necklaces, or possibly pendants if they are more saleable, might appear soon - ish. Once I get over my hiccup.
Ah the insecure life of the creative soul. . . ;-)

Jon x

Throw it at the wall and see what sticks.

Seems to be my selling strategy at the moment. It may sound a bit random, but that's because it is.

As a non jewelry wearing non bead buyer, who makes beads and jewelry, ( I know. . . )  I can't really second guess what a potential buyer will want. Actually, I'm not sure to what extent even expert beaders and jewelry makers can second guess the market anyway. .

So I just follow my own ideas and if all goes well, put the results up for sale in my shop. As it only costs 20 cents to do that, what have I got to lose?

I suppose my only worry is that I will eventually have a shop full of unpopular unsold items just sloshing about looking sad. And that my time might be better spent just making loads of the things that sell.

Well, OK, I do that a bit. If disk beads are selling well, I will make some more, but I won't drop everything else.

People say that the more items you have for sale, the more choice the buyer has, which makes sense to me, but I guess there is a point at which you say 'enough is enough'. If nobody was buying cufflinks, I could keep making them until I had 200 pairs, but it would be somewhat pointless.

Beads are less of an issue than jewelry, bead supply shops have hundreds of listings, so I guess I'm fine with keeping on knocking them out as the urge dictates.

So I guess my selling strategy is 'Throw it at the wall and see what sticks - within reason'.
What do you think? Does that work? Have I missed some obvious disadvantage? ;-)

I remember how to do that. . No problem. . . er. . .

The trouble with combining the desire to constantly experiment, with overconfidence in your own powers of recall is that you aren't aware you are doing it. . until said powers of recall are called upon and found wanting owing to the sheer amount of experimental data clogging up your brain. . .
I was running out of image trans tube beads, (I made a bunch a month or three ago and have used most of them in different necklace projects and such) and wanted to make some more anyway, so I got everything I needed ready and set to. Only to find myself hitting issues I must have solved before, but had forgotten I had ever come across.

Like how thick to make the base bead I wrap the raw image trans clay squares around. Which has a bearing on how thick the image trans square needs to be. If either or both are too thick then the image doesn't wrap the whole way round and you have a larger seam than you anticipated, and/or a gap that needs filling. Not to mention the issue of the image coming off on your fingers unless you are very careful.
Looking at the ones I made previously, it is obvious that I had got the whole thing sorted out. They look very neat, by my standards at least.

Previous, neat ones

The new ones came out a bit wonky and bit fat. Luckily I had intended to unleash my drastic antiquing/distressing technique on this batch all along , so the imperfections would probably work in my favour. As it turned out, after I had wielded the sandpaper, alcohol inks and ren wax, they looked pretty cool.

Recent wonky fat one

I had a few squares I didn't use to wrap round tube bead bases, so I added a polyclay square back to each for re enforcement purposes and distressed them up too to make groovy faux ancient 'tile' beads.

The image trans tubes and the tile beads looked quite good together so I made a couple of pendants out of the combination.

I shall keep on with the image trans tube making, as I want to get back to the non wonky form I showed previously. This time I shall remember what I did. Was that a hollow laugh I heard? Watch it!

I could write it all down, but I know I wouldn't ever look at my notes again if I did, even if I remembered where I wrote them down. I know myself enough to know my mind doesn't work that way.

Still, I dare say I'm not alone in not remembering how I did stuff. . . Or am I?

Jon x

Dummy adorned. . .

I've been feeling a touch discouraged of late. I haven't sold much in the last month or so, and haven't had much response from the World concerning my work. Which is not all that surprising as the World probably hasn't seen much of it anyway, me being a reluctant self publicist and all. But I have put it on Pinterest, and on FB from time to time, but obviously not with enough conviction and not often enough.
I have been making stuff still, but I find the downside of having had a good response in the past, is that when the good response isn't sustained, you miss it, which can detract from the enjoyment you get from the process of making stuff. Ironic really, as if you hadn't had the good response in the first place, you would probably have just chugged along, doing your own thing, not feeling particularly disappointed or particularly elated. . .
So I have the dilemma of wanting to make stuff, but wanting that little bit of affirmation on top. But feeling reluctant to make anything if it isn't going to be noticed and the affirmation not be forthcoming.

Fragile artist ego stuff I'm afraid. Get over yerself etc.

Anyway, each time I make and list a necklace, I drape it over this rather wonderful old, 1960s (?) black plastic 1/4 size approx, display bust my ex was going to throw out, but that I rescued. I have sold several necklaces over the months, but there are good few still on there.
I always thought it looked pretty cool but had never got round to photographing it, until now. I'm intending to use these images on my website, when I actually construct it, but you get to see them first, lucky you ;-)

Who's that old git with a camera?

Down in Black and White

I'm having a bit of a black and white frenzy at the minute. I have a load of these simple, faux African style images (of my own design) lurking on my hard drive, that I figured would look really nice as beads. So I have transferred a batch of them onto some Cernit squares and have been experimenting, trying different sizes and thicknesses of beads to see what I like best,. And ultimately, I guess, what other people like best. The ones in the pic are mainly 15mm square with a couple or three 20mm ones lurking in there too. A few are hollow ones, using my go to method, Claire Maunsell's strata bead technique which she helpfully shared online  and which I jumped on as it suited my impatience and my 'rustic' leanings. . .

The rest are just two pasta-machine-thick-settings thick. All are painted black on the back and sides with black alcohol ink, treated with renaissance wax and buffed up. Oh yeah, and I made a couple of artily mismatched cufflinks too. 

I didn't age any of them up for a change, though the temptation is hard to resist. I'm going to make a bunch more and mess them around like the ones below. They just look so cool all antiqued and ancient relic-ified. . 

And they sold. . . ;-)

The other thing I did with some more of the longer rectangular beads like the ones above, was to wrap them round some tube bead cores, and see how that came out. I decided to put them all together in one necklace, and after a bit of trial and error came up with the idea below. I need to take some better pics but I liked how the silver tone spacers worked with them. What you reckon??

Some, if not all of these will be making their way onto my Etsy shop in due course, so look out for them. I'm still considering in what form to sell them, bead sets, earring sets, made up earrings. . . hmm. . But that's food for another post I think.

See ya next time, which, despite my good intentions is likely to be another ten days away, judging by my past efforts, and hey, don't be shy about commenting, no pressure though.

Jon x

Big steps. . .

I've been busy this last few days. Well, I've been busy this last few months on this particular project. We're sorting out the house, ready to put it on the market very soon. We made a list of things that needed doing, about four months ago, and have steadily worked our way through it. This last few days was just the cleaning and putting things out of sight to be ready for the photographer. He came yesterday, so I'm in that strange limbo you get when you have just stopped being busy and can't quite figure out what to do with yourself.
So I haven't done much claying, and haven't posted anything. I have been listing a backlog of stuff onto my shop though.
I did play around with some textures and some bits from the hardware store though.

Too big and heavy for earrings, probably, though I might be wrong. Cool for arty statement pendants though I think.

Still waiting for the house pics and description to come through, to be approved by us, but next time I post we may be in the throes of showing people round, fielding offers and all that stuff. Then all we have to do is find the right house even further out into the country. . .

Downs and Ups

Downs -
Yesterday was a bit depressing. I got some feedback informing me that I had messed up big time.
A month or two a go I made some 3cm ish size textured and surface messed with disks as a way of showing my groovy textures. I then had a bright idea, they would make really nice buttons. So I drilled a couple of holes and put them on Etsy. Yay, Buttons! They got some likes and some kind soul bought some.

The trouble was, in my haste to get them out there, and with my concentration on what they looked like, I had overlooked an important thing about buttons and about the durability of polymer clay. Buttons have to be pretty strong, and a largish disk of polymer clay at about 2.5mm thick is not going to be strong enough to withstand the stresses that buttons need to withstand.
Sure enough, they broke and the buyer left a fully justified bad review. I of course apologised and offered a full refund including postage. I felt really stupid and guilty. . . Still do. So I have taken all the buttons I was selling off Etsy and will not offer any more for sale until I know that they are up to the task. I'm so annoyed at myself.

Ups -
This morning I sold a necklace! One of my image trans tube beads ones. Don't worry, unlike my buttons, my beads are solid! And the clasp on the necklace has been vigorously tug tested so that shouldn't embarrass me anytime soon. I sincerely hope!

And a local gallery sold two sets of my glass coasters. That cheered me up. I needed a bit of affirmation to counteract the button fiasco.
Well, onwards and upwards is what I say. .
Jon x