Well, Christmas and New Year and stuff got in the way didn't it?

Kind of a long time between posts I know. But never fear, I am still here. Large as life and twice as ugly, as the saying goes, though of course that saying is referring to somebody very unlike me, oh yes.
Anyway, I hope you had a good holiday season and a good new year. Mine was nice. Three F's - Food, Friends and Family.
It was particularly hard to get back into the swing of things this new year for some reason. Christmas being on a weekend, and the new year tying up the next weekend didn't help. But I am back in a modified form of 'work mode' now and have been making stuff.
Despite previously talking about not making loads of beads, and instead, making some jewellery pieces, I have been making loads of beads. . . Yeah, well, I am going to follow my inclination in 2016 and let the second guessing and planning go hang. I am 'following the fascination' after all. Of course my inclination might change, and I might want to actually do the second guessing and planning thing, but only if I feel like it and it feels good.
I am lucky in that I am not making beads and jewellery as a way of making a living. I would like to increase the amount it makes me but it is only part of my (modest) income stream so I can play the self indulgent artist with a bit more freedom than some. And anyway, a lot of advice out there urges artists to please themselves before trying to please others, and that way attract a genuinely interested audience. I can see the logic there. The basic drawback being the hows and wherefores of attracting said audience. 'Marketing' I think it is called. I find it hard to raise my feelings about marketing above 'necessary evil' status I'm afraid, but I shall keep trying. There has to be a way that suits who I am better than bugging people on FB etc.
OK, so where are the pics of these beads I have been making? thought you'd never ask.
Here you go.

Image trans beads made from bits of digital image transfers rolled round a baked core.

Printed tube beads, using inks and my digital image texture sheets plus some alc ink.

These look like sweets but are entirely inedible. image trans patterns applied on chunky beads with a bloomin great hole in the middle. Kato Clear liquid as a varnish. Faux ceramic humbugs.

Rummaging and Rediscovering. . . And the Cut Off Point

Well, I've been rummaging through some things I made a few months ago, that I wasn't quite sure what to do with at the time. It's a quite useful thing to do, to assess your not so recent work through the prism of your current set of criteria, if that makes sense. I mean, look at it in the light of your current creative confidence and with the benefit of your subsequently gained experience and see what you make of it.

My rummaging turned up a few worthwhile things, amongst the stuff that was justifiably not worth bothering with.

Such rummaging and re-assessing is a useful exercise because it can reveal how your attitude to the medium and to your process might have changed in the intervening period, in ways you hadn't actually noticed owing to the gradual nature of said changes. For instance, I found that my work of a few months ago tended to be looser and more free than my recent work, which is something that, it having come to light, I can consider and act on. Basically I need to loosen up ;-)

The things I found were a bunch of thin, textured spikes. Only just thick enough to be drilled through without breaking. I remember a few did break when I drilled them. These ones were the thicker, more robust survivors. The current incarnation of my creative sense decided they would look good as earring beads, so I paired them up and got my trusty camera and tripod out.

Which brings me to part two of this post. Something about a cut off point.
You see, for each item you need at least four photos, an intro shot, a close up, a scale shot and another variation on the intro shot, each of which you have to set up, take, load into your computer, run through Photoshop to resize, adjust colour/levels etc, sharpen and save as a .jpg. Times that by seven for the seven sets of spikes, then add the time it takes to upload to Etsy, write a title, paying attention to likely Keyword Phrases, a description, match your tags to your title, add some more useful tags to make up the 13, preview and finally list.

The trouble is, if the item is only selling for five quid, which is probably about right for these, is it really worth all that time and effort?
I am slowly streamlining the process, but long term I might have to reconsider whether to sell pairs of beads for instance at all. Maybe sets of six is a better way. . . That or charge more for pairs of beads and run the risk of never selling them. .
Bah, economics! Who needs it? 'I just wanna make stuff'.

Quality, Quantity and my 'worrying strategy'. . .

A recent necklace idea, completely irrelevant to this post. I'm just trying to work more finished pieces and see where that takes me.

I keep intending to post more often, but life gets in the way and I realise it's been ten days since I engaged your attention with my somewhat less than fascinating current activity ;-)

Alongside keeping the house in its hard won state of minimal clutter and unreal cleanliness, for the benefit of house viewers, of which there have been three or four so far, I have been over analysing my creative and commercial goings on, like I do. .
( For instance, I worry about whether I should or shouldn't be worrying, and whether there are more important things to worry about. You have to prioritise your worrying after all. Imagine how you would feel if you found out you had spend all that precious worrying time worrying about the wrong thing ;-) a worrying thought. . .)

You see, there is the question of quantity. Is it a good thing or a bad thing? People say 'Quality not quantity' as if they were mutually exclusive, implying that you should limit your output, as being prolific is somehow cheapening your brand.
Then other people put forward the idea that giving potential customers a lot of choices is a good thing, 'If you don't put it up for sale, nobody can buy it' is their angle.

So, the two extremes are - 'Only hit them with your absolute very best stuff', versus - 'Get the stuff out there and let the market decide.' Both are perfectly logical, you just have to decide which applies to what you are doing, or making. So really, it comes down to you. Nobody can decide for you and even the most sage advice can only be a generalisation which might not apply to you at all. All of which is really annoying if, like me, you want some easy rules to follow. . . Bah!

My angle (at the moment anyway) is that you can be prolific and make good quality things, it just depends what kind of things we are talking about - rustic, hand made beads, yes, fabergé eggs, no.

My trouble is that at the stage in my bead/jewelry making adventure, I am constantly discovering new (to me) things I can make, new options I can take, and new uses for techniques and for stuff I have made. I make something I think is cool, and want to make a load more of them, so I do. I get all enthusiastic and inspired, after all, 'following the fascination' is what I am all about.
So, does the fact that I have ten different sets of textured disk beads mean I shouldn't put them all up for sale?
Does the fact that I have twenty great designs that could look equally good on tie tacks, rings and stud earrings mean that I shouldn't go right ahead and make twenty of each of those and put them in my shop? My instinct is that this would be a bad idea, but there isn't a strong argument either way. As it only costs 20 cents to list something on Etsy the 'Throw it all at the wall and see what sticks' approach is very tempting.

Being fairly cautious, (something else I could have good worry about. . .) I will keep to the middle ground and list a few new things to test the water, but that denies me what could be useful feedback about customer preferences, so might be a less than useful compromise. . .
etc etc etc etc etc

Oh well, I guess it's called 'learning'.

Jon x

Waste not. . .

Even though polymer clay isn't ever so expensive I still don't like consigning potentially useful bits to the scrap . . . er. . . lump in my case. (What there is of it gets rolled into a multicoloured clump, like the way plasticene always ended up when I was a kid.)
So when I made these hollow beads I posted about before,

I used the squares cut out of the middle of their inner layers, to make these hollow beads,

Then the squares cut out of the middle of those beads' inner layers got made into these non hollow beads.

Only the little scrappy edge bits left over were fed to the 'lump'. . .

What I liked about this whole progression was that only the first part was planned, the rest was a spontaneous reaction to seeing the cut out bits in front of me.
I'm not trying to maintain that this was a major piece of lateral thinking or a unique insight, just the kind of enjoyable creative diversion we all make from time to time. Let's call it 'Play'. . .

I'm sure I read something recently about how useful play is in the creative process, (the Fall edition of Polymer Arts magazine I think) and I can only concur. The imagination and inventiveness involved in play make it a valuable and precious thing. For reasons I can't fathom those attributes are often underestimated and even dismissed, seemingly just because using them can involve fun, and of course anything fun is somehow not 'serious' and therefore not really the domain of adults/professionals/serious practitioners.
Yeah well, I'm happy to leave the serious work to the Grown Ups. I'll keep playing with stuff and see what I can come up with.
You can join in if you like ;-)
Jon x