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Where did the holiday go?

November 29, 2009 in Miscellaneous by Julia | No comments

I had good inten­tions for this five-day week­end, I truly did. Like so many of my good inten­tions, they didn’t get com­pletely ful­filled. I was going to:

  • catch up on the mas­sive grad­ing back­log. Well, I at least sorted out the papers and graded a lit­tle bit. A very lit­tle bit.
  • get a bunch of items listed at Art­Fire and 1000 Mar­kets for hol­i­day shop­ping. I did get some pho­tos taken and cropped/resized, so I can at least get some bracelets up this week, I hope.
  • do some more cold-connected jew­elry pieces. Nada. I did do another chain­maille bracelet, but that’s it.
  • try out the Pris­ma­color pencils-on-copper tech­nique. Nope, though I did at least get a bot­tle of gray gesso & some Kry­lon spray Sat­ur­day, plus found a cou­ple of sheets of phos­phor bronze mixed in among the cop­per at Dick Blick.
  • tidy up my stu­dio. Let’s not even go there.
  • catch up on some read­ing. I barely man­aged to read the news­pa­per a cou­ple of those days.
  • Sleep. Now, that’s the one true suc­cess this week­end. Most nights I did get plenty of sleep, which I badly needed.

On the plus side, I did a good deed by fill­ing in for the Thurs­day evening meds per­son at Good Mews (and get­ting thor­oughly carved up by Sil­ver and Mickel in the process). I spent time with my entire fam­ily on Thanks­giv­ing day (get­ting rather over­whelmed in the process), and some time today with part of it when we went over to wish my mom a Happy Birthday.

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Photo Woes

November 28, 2009 in Business, Techie Trivialities by Julia | No comments

I was try­ing to pho­to­graph some of my chain­maille bracelets tonight to get them listed at 1000 Mar­kets and Art­fire. Pho­tog­ra­phy isn’t my favorite part of the process, but tonight was par­tic­u­larly aggravating.

One prob­lem I’ve had in the past is get­ting a clearly focused pic­ture because I run into depth of field issues. In auto­matic mode, my cam­era shoots at a low aper­ture, typ­i­cally around F5.6, which means I don’t have a lot of DOF. If I up the aper­ture, the cam­era thinks there isn’t enough light. So I’d got­ten a day­light flu­o­res­cent bulb for one of the reg­u­lar lamps in the stu­dio, and I added that to the two photo flu­o­res­cents I have in there. When I turned all three on, it cer­tainly SEEMED bright enough in there, even with the photo tent fil­ter­ing the light.

I decided to try to fig­ure out Av mode (aper­ture pri­or­ity) on my cam­era. Well, the user man­ual doesn’t exactly explain it clearly, but I finally man­aged. So I set the aper­ture to F16, but then couldn’t get it to accept a slow enough shut­ter speed. I gen­er­ally use the two sec­ond timer on the cam­era, and have it on a tri­pod, so I should in the­ory be able to use a long expo­sure. But the cam­era just wasn’t happy.

I finally got some pic­tures taken, just to trial-and-error. When I down­loaded them, I found that the ones on the black back­ground seem a lit­tle over-exposed, if any­thing, and the ones on the beige tile back­ground are a lit­tle dark. I’ll have to see how well that can be cor­rected in GIMP.

Some of the pic­tures seemed to focus through the full depth of field, but most didn’t — either the front part or the back part were still blurry. I really wish I had a “Pho­tograph­ing Glass and Metal for Dum­mies” guide so that the cam­era could do its job the way I want!

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Show, Day 1

November 21, 2009 in Business by Julia | No comments

It was slow. What can I say? Pretty much we were all in agree­ment — even Audrey, when she came and browsed late in the after­noon, said it had been slow. Of course, we have had shows with slow Sat­ur­days before, and they have usu­ally been fol­lowed by good Sun­days, so we shall remain optimistic.

In the qui­eter moments today, I had chances to chat with some of the other ven­dors there. I found out from Kim St. Jean when she will be teach­ing at William Hol­land Retreat next sum­mer (the last three weeks of July!) so I can account for that in my sum­mer plans. I had a nice lit­tle visit with my lit­tle buddy Chase St. Jean, who actu­ally DID remem­ber me from back in August. I even made another chain­maille bracelet, my first one in open round­maille, using mixed color nio­bium rings.

Even though it wasn’t ter­ri­bly busy I came home exhausted, so it’s really time to go ahead and turn in. Cross­ing my fin­gers for tomorrow!

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Quickie

November 20, 2009 in Business, Lampworking & Glass by Julia | No comments

No, not THAT kind of quickie ::frown::. I spent all evening doing all the show prep stuff that I know not to put off until the last minute but do so any­way. I always end up clean­ing the last batch of beads on the last night, and then they have to be sorted, culled, placed into sets, inven­to­ried, placed into the right place in the dis­play boxes. Every­thing has to be fit into as few boxes and totes as fea­si­ble, and then even­tu­ally put into the car. Oops? Did I say put into the car? That didn’t get done yet. It may wait until morning.

Heck, I’m not even sure what I’m going to wear tomor­row! I just know that I bet­ter be at the Cobb Gal­le­ria by 8 a.m. ready to unpack and set up because the doors open at 10, and we HOPE there will be lots of cus­tomers look­ing for unique hand­made hol­i­day gifts…

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II">I Don’t Do It Alone, Part II

November 9, 2009 in Business, Lampworking & Glass by Julia | 5 comments

Besides Gary, there’s one other crit­i­cal per­son asso­ci­ated with my busi­ness — my occa­sional busi­ness part­ner Andrea, of Four Tails Lam­p­work. Although we have sep­a­rate online busi­nesses, we team up to do shows, and that works out VERY well for us.

One rea­son is that our styles of work are com­pli­men­tary but not copy-cat; she works mostly in soft glass and I work mostly in boro, and we both exploit the char­ac­ter­is­tics of our cho­sen glass as much as possible.

Hav­ing a sec­ond per­son there to “share the load,” so to speak, makes doing shows when both of you have a full-time Sort-of-Day Job pos­si­ble. At our last show, Andrea’s job actu­ally got seri­ously in the way to the point that on both Fri­day and Sat­ur­day she couldn’t get to the show until mid-afternoon. With­out the part­ner­ship she would have had to can­cel, but with two of us I could han­dle things (with help, of course, from Gary) until she got there. In return, I got to sleep in a bit on Sun­day, which I muchly needed! It also makes it pos­si­ble to make a bath­room run with­out wor­ry­ing, or to take a walk around to peruse and schmooze the other vendors.

We also have com­pli­men­tary strengths and weak­nesses. She’s bet­ter than I am at the schmooz­ing; I’m bet­ter with the num­bers. So Andrea does the bulk of the meet-and-greet and I han­dle the account­ing, and we’re both happy.

Of course, we get along very well! If we didn’t, none of the above would mat­ter at all because we wouldn’t be able to work together!

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