02jan09

The wizard had to switch rejiquar's server to a new IP address yesterday---so if you've been wondering where the site was, well, now that you're seeing it, that means its new addie has propagated thru to your neck of the intertubes.

So, lessee, we did a 12:30am ride on New Year's to get one in the first hour of the new year; a 11am walk, then a noon ride; and today the weekly ride-to-work (except we were the only ones who showed up, but since I had an etsy package to ship, I actually rode to work!) Two of the kids want to do more riding in '09, so I took 'em to the library. Oh, and to their auntie's house yesterday and granma's today for belated xmas celebrations.

Needless to say, I didn't clean up the studio and get those heart/pink themed beads sorted into sets and photographed---so we have buttons instead. Yeesh my swatch is bad---I need to knit a better one. Right after I finish the easy pair of socks I'm working on now, based on one of Cat Bordi's patterns, the "Ode to Eames" I promised my teacher, plus the various projects I need to help the kids with, as f2tE claims interest too...see, one nice thing about cold weather is that woolen objects, like socks, are very useful:)

Speaking of knitting, two quickie reviews: it doesn't take long to figure out that skacel's addi turbos are the premium circular knitting needle. These are the brand Posy had me purchase to make my first pair of socks, and I have to say, they held up to the incredible abuse I heaped upon them as a very (very very) tense beginning knitter.

Alas, I lost one! And we're kinda broke right now (yeah, if you know anyone who needs a senior perl programmer who has a facility for solving challanging problems, especially in the Washtenaw county area, do please lemme know, as the wizard's looking for such a job) so I tried out knitpick's brand. Teach doesn't care for 'em, but I do for a number of reasons. Besides being half or less the cost, I went ahead and substituted 24" with the longer metal parts for the 16"ers I got the first time, so that all (half) of a sock's stitches would fit on at once which I prefer as I'm still lousy at moving stitches along knitting needles; I like the sharper points; the purple cable of course pleases my color sense; and I really like the smoother join.

That last was the selling point. That way the stitches would catch on the junction between the cable and metal on the addi turbos made me nuts. (Yeah, I also tried the $6 JoAnne dpns. On toe-up socks. Bleh. And concluded that besides all the cool new sock yarns, the development of sock knitting on circs is one reason it's taken off.)

Which brings me to Cat Bordi's book, New Pathways for Sock Knitters. I found the amazon reviews of this book kinda interesting, as they tended to fall into love it or hate it. If you want a get-up-n-go Giant Treasury of Sock Patterns this is not the book for you---it does have about 20 patterns in it, including 3 or 4 that I actually want to make. But the reason I'm so excited about it is that it has algorithms for designing socks in it. The author was sitting under a tree one day and realized the increases necessary to get a sock over your heel didn't have to be added in the two traditional places.

After a lot of experimentation, she came up with 8 new methods of doing these increases, with "master" (or pe'raps they oughter be "mistress") patterns. Far and away my fave is "Bartholomew's Tantalizing Socks" a "sky architecture" pattern with a cuff and sort of diamond pattern of linen stitch over the front and instep of the sock. (Interestingly enough, only the adult version excites; the child's version fails utterly to catch my interest, which just goes to show that I've a ways to go before I can divorce a basic concept from its execution.)

Unfortunately, like so many sock patterns, it requires two sizes of needles, so until the latest batch come in, I'm doing simpler versions (and given that I still have such a poor concept of purling that my 1x1 rib cuff ended up having plaited purls) which to be frank are more sensible for someone with my beginner skill level. But I'm so excited to have a book with so much info on sock design. I was looking for a book with a wide range of heels, toes and other construction techniques.

This book isn't exhaustive in that regard, but it has a nice selection, and moreover the instructions are extremely clear, such that even a clueless beginner like myself could figure out lifted increases and judy's magic cast-on. It also has extensive charts to aid the reader in adapting the various architectures to any gauge from 4-1/2 -- 9-1/2 st/in and from baby to large adult feet, as well as a discussion (and mathematical formulae) for adjusting the patterns to narrow or wide feet or legs.

To be sure, I'm still looking for my treasury of heels and toes, and I have to say the cover is so bland I very nearly didn't sign the book out. But if you like the idea of designing your own patterns and want some new approaches, this book is wonderful. I will be purchasing my own copy---and can't wait for the next in the series, in which the author plans to expand from toe up and cuff-down to starting in the middle.

Keeping with the knitting theme, today's offerings are buttons (all displayed on a rather rocky swatch I made) ---a large button with two winds of twistie border, a pair of buttons, and finally, a singleton with one wind of twistie, all in a cherry red, root-beer, and aqua color scheme.

And I'm very pleased and honored to feature Monarchdancer's very spring-y pink/coral/sweet&sour green treasury, which includes my garden fantasy necklace. All of the items are lovely, but this textile was just stunning. ---I had no idea what it was until I clicked on it, and I haven't had a waist of 22--25" since I was about 10, but it reminded me of Candace Kling's wonderful Artful Ribbon, which someday I'll have to pick up...

Oh. Stockings. Yeah.

31dec08

Wishing you all a Happy New Year! (One thing I really like about this holiday is that it's pretty universal:) Yes, I realize not everybody's new year starts Jan 1, but I think just about everyone recognizes a new year.

Anyway. Nothing like wanting the December etsy directory images to actually get posted in December to get me throwing those things out there. So we have three more pink focals---one color is messy cotton candy pink, one utterly simple bicone pixie, and one rather fun focal that has subtle strips of color in it.

We're planning on doing a midnite ride, so's I have to get to bed soon to rest up for it, so no featured etsy artist today---but I do have another of my stocking posts.

29dec08

Wishing everyone a belated happy holidays. Can't say as I've been doing much---we got up early (the wizard, JDftY', and I) to watch the sunrise on the solstice, and as every year since we started this custom, it's been too cloudy to see; though at least we had sunshine later on that day---much the same with xmas, which was beautiful; the three of us went on a walk, admiring the pale blue skies, the sun on snow, and quacking mallards on the river. (Alas, we didn't think to bring food for them.)

I meant to post some of the stockings I've been making over the years in 2007 (or even 2006), for the twelve days of christmas, but didn't really manage it. In honor of all the snow and freezing rain, fog, and assorted other precipitation we've been getting for the holidays (and I do appreciate a white xmas, just not a half inch of ice on the roads and sidewalks: hurrah, once again, for studded bike tires, or I wouldn't've been able to get around at all) I figured I'd start out with one featuring a beach, one of three sea-themed stockings I was lucky to make all-at-once, for a family.

Today's etsy offering, being a rose colored vessel, also looks forward, albeit not as far (yes, our local craft stores had the valentine's day stuff out the day before xmas---eeek!); and today's etsy artist, in honor of the f2 generation's return, is offering those same hello-kitty cute skulls with bows that the kids, especially the younger, find sooooo endearing.

Enjoy.

08dec08

I spent the day sorting receipts. Ugh. Not, mind you, inputting receipts, or actually making decisions based upon our financial records, just moving pieces of paper from one place to another.

I did make a wall hanging over the weekend, which is something I've been wanting to make for etsy ever since I started my etsy shop; of course, now I have to figure out how to photograph it. ---I also happened to be discussing a red, grey and white color scheme with a friend, and wanted to show her some gravity swirl beads I'd made in that---and discovered that I'd photographed 'em over a year ago, but never managed the post.

And, it just so happens that a bead from the same series is in my featured etsy listing for the day, a set of red-themed bargains. Continuing with the red scheme, here's a striking black and red ceramic curliQ by etsy artist Surlyramics which just so happens to be showcasing a knitting pendant on their site---certainly apropos in my case, as I'm rushing to finish up my first pair of socks, so's Posy can torture me with this fancy mosaic-style two-color pattern next.

Enjoy.

03dec08

Between various projects that aren't ready to show, Thanksgiving, and the sleep-inducing cloudiness of winter weather, I've been really lethargic the last week or so. I've also been racking my brains for an idea to post on, desparate enough even to photograph the bag'o'beads---various gifts, trades (and even a couple of purchases) I've accumulated over the years when I realized that my etsy find for yesterday, A luscious thing, reminded me of this box I decorated years ago. I only ever did this one thing in this particular style, and it has some major problems I discuss in the post but you could easily understand why I find this etsy artist's work, both her jewelry such as this necklace in seafoam green and bib in aqua blue as well as her mixed media assemblages, like this panel with tulip and pink beaded flowers so attractive. Also, I love her styling on these items---it's so rich and romantic (though I find it overpowers the smaller pieces for me). And she says she trades. Gee, I love trading stuff, mebbe I should put a similar announcement in my etsy shop too ...

Speaking of etsy, my latest offering, a button, got exactly zero views, so I reshot it on a little swatch of green stockinette, or whatever you call the most basic stitch---I'll try relisting it later this evening.

I also made a bunch more buttons today, and though I still have to take 'em off the mandrel, I think I'm slowly getting the hang of shanks. And really, I must reprogram my kiln (ugh!) so's I can finish up those dougie pink exercises...

25nov08

Today's post is kinda bittersweet, I'm afraid.

On a slightly more cheerful note, I finally photographed some of the many, many bargain lots I put together over the weekend for my etsy shop, and am featuring three of my personal faves (because it's snowing, and so I'm thinking of warmer weather---spring green, light blue and violet (reminiscent of early understory wildflowers, no?) and of course pale pink .

I'm not the only person thinking of spring---I thought this lime green and turquoise purse was pretty sweet, and I'm not even much of a purse person.

21nov08

Oh jeez, but I'm behind this week. First, I've been out a lot the last couple of weeks, so it's difficult to get ahead of the curve. And, as I mentioned last time, I've been trying to review the Doug Remschneider stuff while it's still fresh, and that's really time consuming, though I do feel I'm finally making good progress on that.

As is so often the case with classes, the things that I suspect will ultimately be most important to me were basically asides, or stuff we were taught on a lark---for example, I'm trying to learn how to make good button shanks. Well, as it turns out, Remschneider uses the same approach for making bails on his pendants as I do for my buttons---putting a little bead on a mandrel ahead of time, and then attaching to the pendant or button. He heats both the edge of the bail and the side of the bead, like I heat the bleb I put on the back of the button and the side of the bead, and then mashes them together. But then he pulls 'em apart to make a smooth seal. Well, that would make the shank too proud, but then, I just push 'em back together. Voila.

But pendant-making was the Friday class---he just showed us pendant making, basically, because we were a small and experienced bunch, and he had extra class time. It was an extra, a throwaway. The other thing he talked about that I really feel I needed to think about in a more conscious way is how critically important it is for beads to "read" well, even in substandard (e.g. fluorescent office) lighting. Sure, he says, you can light a dark bead so it looks great---but once on someone's wrist, it's just a dark bead. (Boro is particularly susceptible to this problem. But I have beads that look fine on the bead curtain, with the sun shining thru them, but are basically useless as anything else. I've been aware of this problem for years, but now I'd like to approach it even more proactively.)

He also interspersed his lectures on colloid development and flame chemistry on the current state of art glass manufacturing for lampworkers, which I found absolutely fascinating. To my mind, what with Trautman glass, Double Helix, Precision, etc, not to mention all the small boro manufacturers that have sprung up it seems to me that lampworking glasses are following the model one sees for microbreweries, or handpainted yarn---you have your tiny one-person companies (I have one or two marked as faves in my etsy shop; or in the case of beer our city's local brewery) your medium-small manufacturers (e.g. Lorna's Laces, or Sam Adams brewery) and then your heavy lifters, who occasionally pretend to be artisanal (naming no names;)

That is, once upon a time, folk were making beads in their garages. (Well, of course we still do;) But now, people are making the glass in their garages---in fact, Remschneider has moved on from making beads to making glass for beadmakers. He also appears to have wholeheartedly embraced the open source/creativecommons model, much to my delight. A lot of the info about glass manufacturing is still closed, and some folks, while perfectly happy to talk about what they've learned on their own, must be chary, or feel ethically obligated, to keep secret what they've learned from others. But I think that art glass manufacturing will continue to become more and more accessible to the average artist, and I find this tremendously exciting.

But in the meantime, I need to learn how to reliably make that !#$@ dougie pink---*before* the guild member to whom I promised samples gets back from her trip to Peru! Also in addition to recovering from the weekend colloid development boot camp, aka boro bead magic, I've also been attempting buttons, which has been one of those ongoing, and extremely frustrating projects, like learning to do pixie dust beads---I whined about 'em for years before I finally got good enough with the technique to enjoy them. I knew I was going thru the same irritation with buttons, but that didn't really lessen the frustration, only helped to keep me experimenting, however erratically.

Well, I came up with a really simple button that I really liked (the client complained that it looked like eyeballs---ah well, honesty is good, no?) but these are actually simple enough that I could really focus on the shanks. At the same time, I thought they were cute (well, I like the combo of ivory, tongue pink and turquoise, and after the dougie pink, that dark brickish red is so nice and easy to strike!) so I didn't mind making 'em. Went back to my old floral designs, and man, those are hard! What was I thinking, to make something so complicated when I was just learning? Duh.

Oh, and Wednesday my power supply died.

I don't know what it is about power supplies, but in the twenty-odd years I've been watching the wizard manage our computers, we've gone thru more power supplies than the rest of our hardware combined (and in fact it was one of many that the wizard cannibalized to make my leaf sucker, which Arrow Springs now sells as a $70 tool. Theirs is fancier, but mine was a lot cheaper, consisting of a dead power supply [fan still worked] and some packing tape---oh, and a voltage converter) So I putzed around yesterday tidying up my sewing area and studio, though both still have that dreaded, difficult last 10% to go...and today yesterday, I had unavoidable household paperwork. Ugh.

So, sorry, no new etsy listings, though I've got tons of the bargain batches in the pipeline, just waiting to be photographed and posted; and alas, tomorrow today, I'll once again be out, working on a long term project that I hope will be really exciting:) (Yeah, though this is a friday fugly post, but I'm actually making it Thursday, the night before---always, my goal is to have posts up by midnight, which realistically means, by 9pm or so---though if I can get 'em up by 10am, that's ok, but I know that's not happening...)

Today's friday fugly is another glassact spinoff: I made this demo bead at winter wonders, and to my surprise got it back. But it was a good thing the guild didn't give it away.

17nov08

I spent the weekend taking a Doug Remschneider workshop which focused specifically on silver and copper colloid colors. I've discussed these a bit in the past and though I've slowly improved the boro amber-purple series has always been somewhat hit and miss for me. I'd heard, many times, about the necessity of heating these colors to clear (which in fact happens every time, pretty much, that I make vintage garnet dotties) but this was the first I'd heard you had to keep the bead in the flame until it turned clear. So that was the biggie for me. There was a lot of other information though---even though I've heard some of this stuff in Henry Grimmett's lecture several years ago at Gathering, it was very helpful to actually do the exercises (and Doug basically ran us thru colloid/crystal growth/color development boot camp) ---I haven't worked this hard at a workshop since I took Loren Stump.

So if you've even wanted to master silver and copper colors (that would be your [effetre] opal yellow-silver pink/[boro]amber-purple/silver strike/caramel-butterscotch, and transparent reds, respectively,) then this is the class (or video, `Boro Bead Magic' but as I said applies to soft glass too, silver and copper don't care) for you. Though the boro companies have particularly made it their business to make controlling colloid development (traditionally "crystal growth") easier, it's like the difference between and manual and auto on your camera---and while auto is certainly helpful, sometimes you really want that precise control.

That said, I promised to make samples and write up notes for another guild member---the one angling for the class---who missed a day, and that's going to be eating up a lot of my week, so posts may be on the vintage side. Speaking of which, two fabulous etsy sellers who work in that vein, both wirewrappers: one in particular has not only products but photography that positively makes me drool; the other works in luscious faceted gemstrones which to be frank are probably still my faves, much as I love the glass.

Speaking of which, given that the orange bargains are doing so well, I put another lot of those up, as well as some sunny yellow to cheer up this cloudy day, some sky blue to match the sunshine and some white bargains to reflect reality, since what we're actuall getting is snow:). I'm also honored and pleased that abbasgirl put my Garden Fantasy Necklace in her treasury.

Enjoy.

14nov08

So yesterday I was driving to see folks, and I left an hour earlier than I normally do, around 9am, and when gas was quite a bit cheaper than it's been---I've seen signs as low as $1.85/gal---and the difference, especially on the highways, was striking.

Quite a long time ago, I decided, however much I loathed driving and wanted to finish it already, it wasn't worth speeding, not even my wussy 5 miles over. I'd set the cruisecontrol to whatever the speed limit was, and that was what I went. Of course, merely going what the law permits can be taking your life into your hands in the passing lane.

But lately, as gas climbed towards $4/gal, I noticed that folks were no longer passing me left and right---I was actually passing people. Also, there seemed to be fewer cars on the road. And that people were more civil and less in a tearing hurry---the slow lane actually had cars going consistently under the speed limit! But then gas dropped temporarily, and that all changed, with the heavy traffic, tailgating (by huge SUVs of course), and impatience back with a vengeance.

So, ok, one more reason to promote other forms of transportation (and consider high gas prices, however painful, something of a silver lining). I mean, doesn't the idea of a nice comfy train seat, with plenty of legroom and a little table (with wifi, of course:) to craft, eat, use one's laptop, read, whatever, seem a lot more enjoyable than fighting with traffic for an hour or more? If I could get stuff done, I'd certainly be open to the trip taking longer. And, of course, if folks were staring out the window, that would be one more reason to bring back beautification projects, besides---I sometimes think the only thing we really need to do to either get leafblowers banned or redesigned to be silent is simply to have people spending more time outdoors, instead of insulated from it.

Speaking of outdoors, my sort of autumn color schemes for the latest batch of ribbon cane pretty much failed miserably. So much for that experiment. On the other hand, I love the turquoise necklace series so much that I've held onto them, unlike most of my other semi-precious strung work, waiting for a venue that could give them a good home. I hope I've found it, with etsy, so here are three turquoise necklaces, two with cinnabar, and one with sand cast african glass, some of it brought back by my father-in-law from Liberia.

13nov08

Yesterday's post was a correction to a long-time goof on this site, but I wanted to address one other one before I forgot about it, which is also illustrates just how rotten the average person's attention to detail really is: I mentioned, in the political sign post dated 2nov08 that I'd been looking for variations in McCain signs for weeks, and only saw one kind: but that's not so: the sign I saw most frequently, at the corner house (which I always had assumed was republican, because the wizard and I have a theory that, on average, republicans are much more into the perfect lawn, no clutter, flowers neatly mulched look) did not have Palin's name on it. Worse, about three doors down, there was a house with two McCain signs with the Palin name on it, so I have no excuse whatsoever for this lapse.

I try, I really do try, not to be sloppy when I write on this site. Sometimes, it's just too much of a pain, for stuff that ultimately won't matter that much, and for which the true version (as I see it, of course) is simply too complicated and/or distracting to get the point across. Or whatever. But people are suggestible creatures, and it's a little weird, the way you can mess with your own memory. Ferex, elsewhere in town as I was walking around I thought I saw a McCain sign with slightly darker orange spikes, that were straight up and down cutoff next to the central star. Later, examining another sign, more carefully, it was clear that the spikes were trimmed to make 'em "fit" with the star. ---So...was that one sign manufactured by someone else, with a slightly darker ink and less attention to detail?

Later (i.e. several days?) while I was ruminating about this, I happened to drive out to see a friend, and happened to be parked at an intersection which had a McCain sign which looked as if it had the more crayola orangey-yellow spike---but I couldn't tell for certain, at that distance, whether the part of the spike next to the star was straight or shaped to match the star edges---in other words, because of blurry vision it literally represented sort of a schroedinger's cat (or sign;) and my memory wobbled as I looked at it. Very strange.

Memories, so I understand, are protein chains, laid down in long term storage as we sleep, reinforced by additional encounters, and, most importantly, subtly changed by their use in our own personal narratives, to better match the world as we think it ought to be. Mine has always been particularly poor, and perhaps malleable as a result---that's why I take pictures and write web pages and the like. Without it, large chunks of my life would slip away.

Of course, it does inevitably anyway.

***

Well, that's enough philosophizing for one morning. Once again I'll be out and about, and one of the things Page and I will be exploring is what I think of as `vintage' style product photography. A lot of the folks selling old house keys, czech crystal ornamented with victorian-ish brass stampings, and of course the steampunk like to put their pieces on pages of old poetry, fancy (but subdued) backgrounds, shoot at extreme angles, and whatnot. Once only the purview of extremely expensive print catalogs, it is now available to anyone with a camera, imagination, and sufficient space to show more conventional record shots as well. Since etsy allows up to five photos per listing, and is obstensibly an artist's market, there are a lot of creative people into presentation and packaging who are exploring this.

After so many years of shooting in a jury slide mentality, in which you're always under the gun to get the juror's attention in 15 seconds or less, it's a change to move from plain light grey backgrounds. ---In a sense, I still have to get the juror's attention in 15 seconds, but with a new twist: downsizing.

I've known for a long time that for some odd reason (that if I recalled my color theory class stuff better, I could explain) that when scaled down, images look darker. This is the reason Kristin initially wanted me to shoot on white and why I sometimes lighten up the crops I put on the main page. But it presents something of a dilemma for etsy, because if I lighten a dark-by-nature image sufficiently to look good on the little thumbnail, it will likely look overexposed after the etsy viewer clicks on it---not exactly a good first impression!

Obviously, some stuff lends itself well to looking good under both circumstances, and I have no doubt some canny etsy sellers actually adjust their offerings to this situation. But I'm more interested in figuring out how to make difficult pieces look good despite the limitations---sometimes, it's a pest, being stubborn. ---But the other thing that surprised me was that even with the elaborate backgrounds, things could look good even in the tiny thumbnails.

I will be returning to these topics again (and again). In the meantime, a couple more discounted dottie sets---a nice long 9-bead one in purples and aquas, and a spring version that photographed so well I'll probably put up a post about it someday. Indeed both are beautiful, but the contrast between how well they "thumbnailed" is as night and day...And, of course today's post, more examples of photography that needs work.

12nov08

I got email from someone asking about this kumi pattern, so finally fixed that. Am also hard at work on my sample for GlassAct's 2009 winter retreat, a french beaded flower featuring a lampwork bead center. Etsy treats for today are a trio of dottie sets, in purples and blues, autumn greens and browns, and a fuchsia accented grouping, all discounted to approximately $6 a bead.

Still have bulbs to plant, beads and buttons to make...preferably today. (No wonder I feel busy...;)

11nov08

Still seem to be running flat out, and I have to leave in about 10 minutes. But today's post is about some beads most folks would consider fridayfuglies, but have always had a special place in my heart.

At least I've managed to get my light going again, so new etsy listings will resume soon. Really.

10nov08

I spent the day cleaning my office.

It really was that bad. ---The house has been appallingly dirty, since I put it on the kids to do the housework, and guess what? They're (mostly) content to live like pigs. The thing that keeps me gritting my teeth was how much cleaner my parents' house got after we all moved out. There's hope! Children, even teenagers, can be civilized! As an example, f2tE did tidy up the living and dining areas over the weekend, which I admit helped to inspire me (the alcove is just off the living room.)

That we have mice infesting the house is another sort of inspiration, though I admit I had no idea people could catch them in their hands: f2tE does this (wearing gloves). I'm pretty impressed, though the internets provide easier ways than on your hands and knees, along with tips to smear the peanut butter thinly, sand the logos off commercial traps and get mice used to unarmed traps before setting 'em.

I still have a lot of paperwork to sort, but at least I feel I can work in here again. In fact I've been doing a lot of this behind-the-scenes prep. I have so many cool ideas for things, but with paperwork hanging over my head, I really don't feel free to do them. And then I get into displacement activities attempting to avoid the paperwork, which means neither it nor the art gets done.

Moreover, tomorrow, I'll be out much of the day, ditto Thursday, so things'll probably be kind of spotty this week---but fun stuff is coming---really! In the meantime, I have Rita Stucke's wonderful bead to show.

Today's post is about my other winter wonders trade, and yesterday I managed to spend about an hour cataloging images using Konqueror to browse the directories, looking for the shard bead I traded---couldn't find it, even after all effort. Took about 5 minutes to locate it using gqview, so, however irritating I may find that program, it's obviously much better for my purposes. Sometimes, older is better. (The text editor I'm using to make this post---xemacs---dates back in its original form some three decades, and it has some pretty sweet features, such cutting and pasting rectangles (very helpful for data in table form) that certainly aren't available in your typical word processor.) Otoh, I really do need a better imaging tagging system than the flat file method I'm using now, so I guess one of my new year's resolutions is to find and that program and start using it for 2009.

Anyway. My photoflood lamp died this weekend, and until I purchase a new one (or successfully salvage and old one) I'm going to have to coast on old photos for a bit. Such as today's, of a winter wonders trade.

07nov08

Even though Winter Wonders was a pretty low-key show, I still spent Sunday and part of Monday recovering from it: three hours of sleep the night before didn't help (the post dated 3nov didn't actually go up till the 4th, and I was so tired I couldn't bring myself to update it). Like a lot of Americans (of the US variety) I spent much of Tuesday following the election, and even most of Wednesday reading up on the campaigns and so on. ---I have to say, I found McCain's concession speech very moving, and was sorry I didn't see more of that man during the campaign.

Though I'm cautiously optimistic, it's a bit disconcerting to have one's election feelings summed up more adroitly by the Onion than anybody else. I'd surely like to have a better health care scheme in place, because that's one of the huge worries about being an artist---you can get by with cheap food and ratty housing, but there's no good way to economize on health care. I'd love to see more public support for the arts---say, on a par with sports---but I'd settle for enough just so people can starve for their art without having to die for it as well.

Given that I cast my ballot absentee, I kinda wished I'd thought to go to our local (nonsmoking!) brewery, where I gather a lot of the town, including the mayor, hung out to watch the returns. People were dancing in the streets the next town over and letting off firecrackers over at the campus around 11:30.

By then, I was in bed.

Thursday I went to visit my friend Posy and finish my sock. ---So I haven't gotten a lot done this week. I did manage, finally, to get those pink and green beads up on etsy listed today. ---Kristin Perkins had this fab orange pendant featured on the front page, and I have to say, the session at which I shot it did go really well:) And I absolutely love this new seller's functional brooms---I so want one for my studio!

At least I'm making good progress on warm socks to wear in there during this winter:)

03nov08

I promised a garden fantasy necklace, so here 'tis. and here 'tis again in its etsy incarnation. ---In fact, we have very nearly spring-like temperatures, the kind of gentle warmth that causes seeds to sprout and plants to green.

And, keeping with the floral theme, here are some lovely pink florals by CDLampwork ---the very first item I favorited on Etsy, in fact:)

02nov08

Tuesday is election day in the US. I haven't written a great deal about the election or the candidates on this site (though I don't think my preferences are any secret) but the graphic aspects of the respective campaigns have fascinated me, and graphic design, of course, is art, and thus fair game.

The first thing that interested me is the difference in variation in yard signs. I've probably counted 8 or 10 variations of Obama yard signs---with and without the logo, the latter half size (quite popular, and, I presume, cheaper), with just Obama 08, Obama-Biden. The full size signs typically have a navy blue background, but some feature the turquoise as a border in addition to the logo; others eliminate the turquoise completely, substituting navy for the sky in the logo; again, most have Obama on the top and Biden's name below, and some of these have Biden's name in the same white as Obama, others in a pale blue; some have 08; some have "for president".

And then there are the weirdies, like the one with a pure white background and the names in turquoise, or the orange and white version! But all share the same font and very similar layouts, even the outliers such as `postal workers for Obama' which state they were not paid for by the Obama campaign.

McCain's signs, at least around here (and living in a college town, there are admittedly fewer of them, though they're plenty popular in the outlying farm areas) basically come in one design, full-size, with McCain's name on top, Palin's on the bottom and the star and spike between. Today, I finally saw a different version, with just McCain's name. But it's a first, and I've been looking pretty carefully for the last month or so, ever since I started to notice the difference in styles. The McCain unity is very effective visually, but I like that folks get some latitude in choosing their decoration.

(All of the signs were commercially printed, so evidently folks weren't that into making their own. The only hand made sign I saw was for Ron Paul, and it got replaced with a commercial one, and of course it disappeared awhile back.)

Ever since Cindi loaned me her disk press, I was thinking it would be fun to make Obama's logo, which would fit perfectly, into a bead. I rather like the bold, graphic quality, and I think the turquoise in it gives a nice zing. I thought if I made such a thing, it might've even sold on etsy.

Alas, Cindi borrowed her own press back, so I never got to try the experiment, but then I started wondering how you would render McCain's logo as a bead, since I were going to sell one, it seemed only fair to offer the other. (I have no idea what the minor parties' logos look like, sorry.) McCain's would be harder, not least because it's long and thin, as opposed to a natural (i.e. round) bead shape. (I cottoned on to the idea that the star and spikes were supposed to evoke the military, which makes perfect sense, as that's considered one of the candidate's strengths. But I'm embarressed to admit how long it took me to realize that Obama's logo is round to represent the first initial of his name. Duh.)

Anyway, the Obama logo could be pretty easily interpreted as trailing, I imagine: put a big sky blue dot on top of cobalt mashed bead, then a second dot for the rising sun, and then case the lower area and white and stripe with red.

McCain's would be much trickier, because each arm of the star is half white and half navy, and it seems like it would be really difficult to maintain that crispness. The best I could come up with would be to use the star on disk Cattwalk press, but that's a six point star, oops.

I also thought the contrast between their sites was striking. Obama's is very low key, without much decoration, and a pale background, with a lot of text. The day I accessed it, there was a small portrait of him in the header, and a large photo of someone whose story was being featured.

The McCain site was much slicker and glitzier, with streamers of stars exploding out of the middle of the screen, with good sized portraits of McCain and Palin to either side. (The background was fairly dark, which popped the portraits, but of course is deprecated for text, as it's much easier to read on light backgrounds, particularly for the visually impaired. So, not as functional.)

Functionality aside---and to be fair, there wasn't as much text to deal with---as someone who thinks texas homecoming mums are great fun, I'm all about ribbons of sparkly stars. (I mean, if the McCain campaign was gonna spend 150k on Palin's threads, why weren't there any beads or at least sequins? For that amount of money, I want to see some serious decoration---at least some embroidered lace, or something...) Anyway, though initially more visually exciting, I came to the conclusion that McCain's site was outclassed, visually, by Obama's. (Obama's also had a lot more links and just overall a greater feeling of depth.)

I think McCain's site would've looked better if it had duplicated the restraint of the star and spike on his yard signs, which had both a patriotic and classy look, very appropriate but which showed nowhere on the site's front page---the sparkly stars were outlines, rather than the half-and-half embossed look---it would've tied the two forms of advertising together, making things more unified. Obama's, otoh, subtly reinforced his message about the campaign being about `you the voter' by making his portrait small, and the pictures of people whose stories the site was featuring 4--5x larger.

Ok, enough of that already. Speaking of other folks, I have a post on my fellow beadmaker Ona Sostakas' wonderful gravity swirl beads. Tomorrow I'll be back to my stuff, including some new jewelry designs;)

30oct08

Winter Wonders is 10--5 this Saturday, at the Birmingham Unitarian Church, 38651 Woodward Ave. Bloomfield Hills, MI 48304, and it's $2 to get in, but you get to see lots of great glass artists, yummy treats, free hourly raffles of glass goodies, and me making a fool of myself attempting to demo glass from 1--2 pm. (Other demonstrators will on tap the rest of the day if you want to see real lampworking;)

Since I like this subseries s so much I made a post about these pink and green crisp florals; they're all for sale, though so far, I have only got the smallest two beads listed on etsy. If I can I'll squeeze the others in today or tomorrow, but they might have to wait for next week---and then, I'm hoping to start posting some new fun stuff on etsy, like say, jewelry or buttons:)

Today's etsy find is this green and red (hey, pink is just a tint of red) beach glass pendant---I have a pair of turquoise beach glass earrings, and I wonder if it's the same seller...?

Naturally, I'm working very hard to get ready for this show, so I'll be taking a long weekend from new Etsy postings and posts---see you next week:)

29oct08

I do hope that the last two day's posts haven't been in limbo (i.e. only showing up in the local system at home) but if so, my apologies. At any rate, they seem to be up now:)

Today's post is a little weird, and definitely boring, no doubt because I started writing it over two weeks ago, and now feel, what with etsy stuff, to be in a very different place. Then I was concerned to get polyurethane on the studio doorwall (which admittedly was on my list of things to do for two or three years, and it gets tiresome for a chore to hang around that long) and now I'm focused on all this business stuff---besides which we went to sunny, summer-like temps to freezing ones, with frost in the morning and snow a county or two over from the time I took this image till now. But that's what the equinoxes bring: wind and changing seasons.

So of course, I'm continuing with the blue theme on etsy, with two more square pillow-pressed beads, one with purple centers, and one with yellow centers, the latter of which has a sort of miniature photography post more suited to this site on the end---but I wanted to explain my reasoning for all the photo manipulation of that image, and I'd rather tell people everything about my stuff, than have them get it, and be disappointed, because I couldn't own up to something that would be a deal-breaker for that customer, but not a problem for some other buyer who would've been happy to get that particular bead if only the first one hadn't been deceived by a lack of disclosure on my part.

Anyway. Speaking of happy, this etsy artist makes pretty and often quite cheerful switchplate covers (an interest of mine:) and I especially liked this black and white arabesque patterned switchplate cover; also the art noveau curves in fuchsia of this one, which little flowers give a touch of 50s retro as well. In fact, I think there's some way to assemble a bunch of your faves (of others' work) so mebbe that should be the next thing I learn to do.

Wednesday, in a perfect world, is my travel blogging day, and some day I suppose I'll finish up the Viet Nam series which is why I picked this shot of early morning mist on the river; so enjoy the picture and ignore the dull text.

28oct08

Spent the day yesterday with Posy, learning how to turn heels and knit backwards, which I thought was great fun, since as a left-handed persons I seem to do a lot of things ``backwards'', or rather right to left. (Handwriting, ferex. Took me two weeks to learn how to write backwards, but six months to learn how to read backwards.)

Anyway, today is a blue day, as both the post and my etsy listings have blue in them---it's not actually a color I use as naturally as, say, green, purple, or orange---guess I'm just not as big a fan of the primaries. In any event, I'm featuring two new items for etsy today---one has bright blue flowers on a mint green rectangle and the other, which I made totally on a lark, is a miniature vessel with light blue forget me nots for which I had low expectations, but really came out well. Come to think, that's the case with the pants, too---I had much higher hopes for the ones I dyed green, and they weren't nearly as successful.

Though I have to say, I think this princess costume works on nearly all levels---like most of my etsy finds I happened to notice it while waiting for my own 15 seconds of fame to come up (I do this to try and get a sense of how eye-catching my photography is at 60--70 pixels wide) and this item really stood out. Leaving aside the whole difficulty of the princess, especially the dizzy princess culture, I thought not only was the photography great, so was the design---elegant and yet still quite wearable for a little girl---the model looks as if she'd have no problem collecting enough loot this halloween to bounce her off the walls till xmas.

It is, after all, not the dressing up and looking pretty that's the problem (if I thought that, I wouldn't bother making beads, buttons and jewelry); it's that people automatically equate those incinations with uselessness and helplessness.

Of course, my pants started life as an entirely sober grayish blue, and still retain their autumnal colors even after all my manipulations, so there.

27oct08

I took the weekend off from posting (if not the internet---ravelry patterns, yum (and yeah, it's a bummer that you have to get a logon, but evidently the site's still technically in beta, and they simply haven't got the coding manpower---literally, I think there's one guy---to cope otherwise, and yes, I promise the delights walled behind are worth the climb if you are of the knitting and crochet persuasion) and just in an afternoon bookmarked more sock patterns than I could knit in the next year.

Assuming, of course, that I um, actually, learn how to do anything more complicated than go round and round:) ---But most of the weekend I spent on bike rides---we did our local group's ``fall color ride'' Saturday, which indeed was wonderful, because although rain threatened, it had finished by the time we went, and the sunshine reflecting off the wet paths into the golden leaves was just gorgeous. Yesterday was the group's regular Sunday ride, which was thankfully much shorter and slower, as I had to be sagged home 1/3 the way through the other one:)

But besides working so hard that I was actually glad at the thought of sitting in front of a computer typing up etsy listings was the conversation I had with the fall color ride leader. Turns out he's an inventory control manager for a large (multi-location) car dealership, and he was discussing some of his goals for the firm. He wanted policies in which it was seen to that the cars were parked in certain angles and orders, that they were always cleaned out after test drives (duh) and filled with gas so the next customer wouldn't have to wait (double duh) but also more subtle things, like having the rear seat belts out in view and buckled, so as to cue the sales person to mention the car's safety features. "Men," he said, "don't care about that stuff so much, but women and seniors look for things like small blind spots, side airbags...the car companies spend a lot of money trying to figure this stuff out---how the buttons are arranged on the radio, for example." ---The implication being that, and then the salesman blew it all by not pointing this stuff out, because they couldn't be bothered to gear their pitch to the type of customer they had.

But the single most important thing I took away from that conversation is the old saw (I've certainly heard many times before) of "make it easy for your customers". To wit, I'm trying something a little new with my etsy listings. The fact that I'm willing to natter on (and on and on) about my stuff is actually a good thing, because if you're going to pay a premium for something (and art, being a very low production item, has as a consequence a big premium, even though we artists still aren't making all that much:) then you have to have a reason---in this case, the human connection, or resonance, with the artist and hir goals.

But sometimes, people just wanna find the stuff and get out, and I want to address their needs too---so instead of burying the specs (size, type) in a huge body of text, I put it chart style. Thus if someone isn't wanting anything smaller than an inch (or 25mm) they can see right away that what I have isn't for them, and move on. Conversely, if they want smaller beads, they know whether what I'm showing fits their requirements as well. (And please, feel free to email or comment "convo" at etsy with any ideas for improvement---on selection, presentation, price, you name it. Or, if you find the shop just perfect, well then, tell all your friends;)

The other realization I made is that I need much softer light for texturally complex surfaces and the multiple reflective areas of the current series of beads, because otherwise they're confusing and hard to read. The strong clear light that's perfect, say, for Kristin Perkin's earrings (I love the zigzaggy light I got on the right one, but have no idea how I accomplished it) is not going to do for my stuff.

Since folks seem to be enjoying the pink and purple, that's what I listed today, another set of purple squares in the crisp floral series. However, I think I still need to work on the photography some more---lighter grey background to start (ah, an excuse to hit the art supply store) and perhaps, in the future, some of those more romantic setups some people have used so effectively in their listings (well, both f2tE and I want one, which is something of a spread in terms of potential customer age and taste) ---it's particularly noticeable in this listing, because the quality of the model shot contrasts so strikingly with that of the item alone.

And, keeping with the whole autumn thingie, I made JDftY and f2tY some candy corn earrings---which like today's etsy listing are a tad on the wonky side, but cute nonetheless.

24oct08

It's time for Friday Fugly! Even the weather is kinda blah, all grey and cloudy. But this is good because it means I'll sit at my computer, or in the dark damps (aka my basement photography studio, complete with squeaking mice---ugh! They're awful cute, outside. Inside, they are vermin that chew my house and food) or in my studio, either making, photographing or listing stuff to sell.

The etsy shop is up and running. I've even had a sale, of what the customer calls "wonkers" (known in this part of the world more commonly as dog beads, or...fridayfuglies!) altogether appropriate for reporting in today's post.

But getting back to the fall thing, I'd also like to feature three of my listings that especially evoke autumn for me---two pair of cylinder beads, one with orange and yellow florals, the other with rust and pink florals, and a shard vessel. This last item has gotten the fewest views, no doubt because it's a soft and subtly colored bead, which is tough when it's only got 15 seconds and 75 pixels square. But I reshot it upright (this is considered a Good Thing if you make long beads, that they stand up on their own) and I'm hoping it gets a little more love this time around.

And if the thought of looking at my friday fuglies doesn't thrill you, let me finish off the ode to fall with this gorgeous pmc and gasperite pendant that I happened across while waiting for my own stuff to show. All of this artist's pmc stuff is nice, but the pendant---well, as she says it's yummy.

Or, you can check out my frustrating and fugly buttons.

23oct08

Today's post is going to be short and sweet, since I spent the entire day signing up for various online thingies---first my invite to ravelry.com came thru, so I posted my very first sock knitting project which seemed suitable as my very first practice post on the site. I've encountered this sort of thing before, for libraries (but I ain't willing to put my library online) and they have useful organizing tools for keeping track of your yarn, needles and crochet hooks, excepting that my bead crochet & knitting needles are too small for the current chart. I mean, doesn't everybody have size 4x0 knitting needles and size 13 crochet hooks? (I actually have a vintage 14 hook, which so tiny even I don't use it---you could crochet sewing thread with this thing....) And in the course of doing that I had to start a flickr account as well. I figure this sort of social networking is the wave of the future, so I might as well start practicing with it.

But the biggie was getting my etsy shop going; for that, I had to wait for paypal to verify my account, which they do by making teeny tiny deposits into it; they did that this morning, and I even managed to create an online account for my business checking, something that the microsoft-centric attitude of banks has always hereto defeated.

So far I have three items up, all recent florals from the crisp floral series. The ravelry site, being for knitting and crocheting, has knitting, of course, because after hinting to Posy for years that I'd like some warm woolen socks for wearing in my freezing cold studio, I concluded I was just going to have to learn to make 'em myself. She has visions of turning me into some sort of 2-color sock knitting wizard, which perhaps is optimistic, but at least this time around I did learn left handed knitting, which is new for me.

So, check out my etsy, check out my ravelry, and today's post, the source for my etsy banner:)

22oct08

Hm. I have been exploring the joys of sock knitting, and fast approaching the heel, which'll have to wait until my teach can show me how to do that. Till we get together, I could be getting my second skein ready to go using this tutorial via whipup; I have to admit, though, that it surprised me that people could be so squeamish about toilet paper rolls. Quite apart from the fact that kitchens, on average, are much germier places, there's nothing inherently unsanitary about a toilet paper roll. It's all association, I guess.

If all these textile divagations ain't your thing, well, while trying to find a commercial maker of small press-in bead texturers (or presses, or surface decorators) who obviously needs to promote her product more, since I wasted spent a lot of time trying to find the link (that I swear I saved...) I found this other link for making your own ---which I've been meaning to do (using basically the same concept except using 10mm diameter threaded brass rod, which I could then tap and screw into a pin vise---I think my idea would be less work, but then I don't need inch wide stamps). Of course, today the wizard gave me a gutter spike left over from repairing the studio roof, and the nail head on it is just about the right size. And has this cool texture on it, though very shallow. But it's aluminum, which should be easy, relatively speaking, to work, hmmm?

In the meantime, I actually managed a reasonably successful ribbon cane. I'm so proud of myself. Now if only I could duplicate the feat in glass that I use on a regular basis...

21oct08

Turns out I took a bunch of photos of the studio when it was cleaned up earlier this year; I was just too depressed, or something, to post them.

Really, since there's too many to fit in one page---even from the current batch, let alone both sets, I thought I'd break this up into sections. (Be it said, I enjoy seeing other folks' studios, so I consider this a treat---if you don't, well, did you know dolphins, whales and people could blow circular bubbles, underwater? My old college roomie likes to send me various forwards---the latest is about a premature deer small enough to sit in the palm of a man's hand---and she sent some thing about the dolphins. Of course, it was a .wmv, or whatever the detestable nanomush file format is, so I couldn't play it, but I did a google search on youtube, and found out what she was talking about. This guy's site has a bunch of pix and links (more of those darned .wmv's, naturally) and explains not only the physics, but how to create these yourself---something he evidently discovered how to do while on a swim team. I was on swim teams for years, but never saw this. Evidently the fluid mechanics for both smoke rings and underwater bubbles are roughly the same, and the former I had at least seen on film---but the hydraulic kind don't involve the risk of lung cancer;)

And yes, I'm still planning on doing the etsy stuff---I applied for a paypal account today, and picked out a buncha beads to photograph. It takes paypal several days to validate the account, so perhaps I'll have something up by the end of the week. ---The lady who ordered the mini-hollows sent me a bonus, which I have to say raised my spirits amazingly, not only because we, like so many americans, have been affected by the country's economic woes, but also because obviously she was very happy with the beads. I like people to be happy with my stuff, because, sappy as it sounds, yes, we artists really do put a part of ourselves into our work. ---So, seeing as the work earned this, I figured it should get funded---I'm thinking about a lentil press, since I've wanted one ever since I took Stevi Belle's class, and thought it'd be perfect for creating old-style Greekish vessel type beads (how many years now...?)

Anyway. So, today, we have studio pix.

20oct08

For those of you who weren't able to get to the site yesterday, my apologies: the servers had to be moved.

I spent most of today doing our little town's fall bike ride, as a sweep for the "casual" paced group (I thought the organizer was really clever in coming up with terms like this, casual being the slow group, 10--12 miles/hour. Back when I rode with my parents, we were just the D-paced group.) We went 16 miles, enjoying sunshine and the fall colors for which the upper? midwest is famous. Really, the only downer was seeing a freshly killed fox on the other side of one of the roads. ---I've only ever seen a live fox once, and since I don't raise chickens, my pleasure in these beautiful autumn-colored animals is uncomplicated.

It was unfortunately hardly the only roadkill we encountered, and though I've mentioned it before, a lot of animals pay a mortal price for our automotively dependent society. (And yes, I drive cars, and yes, I think I once hit a squirrel. But I wonder if we as a society would be so complacent if, say, the 80--90% of folks who ride in autos also rode bikes on the shoulder, the "roadkill" lane. Even at 70 mph, it's hard to miss a dead deer, but at biking pace, it's much harder to tune out the multitude of smaller animals, and of course, there's the smell, when you're in open air.)

After the ride, we ended up at the local brewery, and though I'm not much of a beer fan, even I can tell the local stuff is a vast improvement over the kinds advertised on national tv. A local band played some wonderful jazz/rock music to raise money for our community gardening organization. This sort of thing is why I love living in a small town. Now I just need super-hearing, so I can actually pick out conversations in a noisy (but smoke free!) bar. (Hanging out in bars yakking is one of those things I love in abstract but find difficult in practice because my hearing discrimination is so poor.)

The rest of the day I spent in tidying up my studio. I've done some more stuff to it since I last posted pix, and I almost got it documented earlier this year, but not quite. However, I've finally repotted the houseplants, more or less ahead of the frost (since I consider this to be an outdoor job, and yes I waited all spring, summer and fall till we started getting patchy frost warnings before finally doing it) and brought them back, and managed even to clear the stringing area (always more difficult than the lampworking table, because I do more things with less storage) so perhaps I'll be able to feature that.

But of course I was so busy cleaning the studio, I didn't have any time to make anything, so here's an earlier project featuring one of those mild-frost hardy plants, mint.

19oct08

Our local group's newsletter editor asked me to come up with some cane recipes (or mebbe I volunteered) and though I could just submit my faves I thought it might be nice to come up with some original recipes.

This is always harder than it looks, but today's experiments aren't bad.

18oct08

Yesterday I talked how a langniappe---the bead tied to the handle of the bookbags given out at Gathering---inspired the beads for the day. ---I missed Gathering this year (in part because the restrictions on flying have become so invasive I didn't want to get on a plane, and given that I live in the midwest, and the conference was in California, there wasn't a practical alternative) but mostly have fond memories of the ones I've gone to, despite numerous suggestions about how the folks organizing it could improve it;)

Today's bead is by Nita Van Til, with whom I traded, two-three Gatherings ago.

17oct08

Gee, I was so proud of myself for getting a friday fugly post out, except, um, yesterday was Thursday. I have a difficult time keeping track of the days, evidently. It used to be the other way around, BC (before computers and cell phones) that have the date handily displayed: I'd know what day of the week it was, but not the date.

Ah well.

So today we have a real, authentic friday fugly.

16oct08

*Finally*, I've managed the friday fugly post. And speaking of fugly behavior (the non fun ugly kind, I'm afraid)...Fred at Slactivist (who I think is one of most humane folks I've had the fortune to encounter on the intertubes) circled back to his Proctor&Gamble discussion . Why, he wanted to know, do people want, no need to believe bad of others (in this case, the hoary old rumour that P&G's lovely old 19th century moon and stars logo meant that the president of the firm was donating profits to a satanist cult)? And, more important, how could they be weaned of this dreadful need?

Amanda at Pandagon picked it up and ran with it, but as is so often the case with these discussions, it was a link in her comments that I found most interesting; that was a post attempting to explain (on a biological basis) why in fact people do feel the need to build insular communities, with high levels of commitment (i.e. believing impossible stuff): it keeps the parasites out. ---In other words, when people are stressed and fearful, they tend to huddle around a strong purpose, and tolerate highly strict rules so their communities survive and non-contributors are kept out. Somehow I wasn't altogether surprised when I discovered the blog was a science fiction author's; the post is quite interesting, once you get past the aggravating intellectual snobbery.

The answer to Fred's question also popped up somewhere as well: provide social services, options, resources: I seem to recall reading years ago that it was incredibly stressful to have to deal with problems, but not have the freedom to use your own initiative to solve them---that is, to be locked in. (I think they cited secretaries as an example---having to deal with the boss's crap, but not be able to apply their own smarts and experience. It was telling, of course, because of the gender divide---even the term, secretary, should give you the idea that I read about this at least two decades ago.)

To my mind, there has been a great deal of fear-mongering. I suppose there always is, and I'm just more aware of it right now, but I think people who lie deliberately, for their own gain, as the amway people did to cut in to P&G's sales, without regard to the huge amount of damage they push onto others simply to get a little advantage---it's wasteful. To blithely wreck ten or a hundred times' worth of consequences, to not even think about the unforeseen and unintended harm because of self-centeredness, strikes me as deeply evil.

And it saddens me that other folks, the receivers, the complicit, are worked over by this. It's no fun to be fearful. For the most part, I have to work at not being frightened of others, but one of the defining moments of my college career happened while I sat at the communal dining table in a house where I first rented a room after moving out of the too-expensive dorm; the local rag was excoriating gay teachers on the editorial page, and I was nodding along, and then thought: "wait a minute; teachers aren't supposed to discuss their sex lives in the class room; so what does it matter, what they do?" Or at least, that's how I remember the story now.

I consider myself lucky, in a way, not to have discovered homosexuality until I went to college; so the prejudice is not so deep; and in that moment, I threw a lot of it off, and could feel that weight lifting from my shoulders. Would that I could do so for other people against whom I have a visceral prejudice; perhaps someday; in the meantime, I do my best to behave with justice.

But that lifting of fear: that is why Fred thinks to believe in such wrong things is cruel. It is cruel to live in fear. It is hateful to promote it.

***

I'm not a touchy-feely person. I don't like hugging people, to the point that my children are surprised when I do it to them; I'd much rather shake hands (or even go to a system, like that of the Japanese, that involves no touching at all, such as bowing). But one comfort I feel deeply is the skin-to-skin contact, the spread of warmth, that my spouse and I share every night before we drift off to sleep.

Now, obviously, one hasn't got to be married to enjoy this benison; but it has always symbolized for me the epitomy of marriage, its great tactile benefit, above and beyond discourse, companionship and whatnot (which after all one can share with platonic friends also.)

So it seems sad and heartless for folks to spread lies and push, not only to deny others the joy of marriage, but to deprive people already married of their union. Yet, that's what's going on in California, and this little note is my effort to combat it.

Oh, beads. And another thing: if only people didn't feel so constricted by gender roles, my customer base would be instantly doubled: although a few folks collect beads (and notably, they seem to be men, e.g. Robert K. Liu) most wear them. Imagine, if people regardless of sex could wear beads and paint and gorgeous fabrics---or not!---when they felt like it. That would be a bead-happy world.

In the meantime, one strives. As I do here, attempting better florals.

15oct08

Well, today I started putting polyurethane on the floor where all the rain came in by the doorwall. Halfway through the project the orbital sander gave out, and doing it by hand is not nearly as even. C'est la vie. In between that and going to f2tY's parent teacher conferences I managed a couple of beads using long emerald presses (for the first time) and today's post documents one of them, a quite amusing & unanticipated variation if I do say so myself.

Enjoy.

14oct08

Well, we've been keeping busy, trying to get all of our end-of-summer chores done---repairs to the studio roof, polyurethane on the studio doorwall (that was supposed to have been done two--three years ago when the door was installed), repotting of houseplants, last-minute dying, plus the wizard has been doing a lot of fall rides in prep for some he'll be leading in the next week or so.

Coming up on my plate is GlassAct's Winter Wonders at the Birmingham Unitarian Church on Saturday November 1. Page and I and a whole lotta other people, such as the redoubtable Kristin Perkins will be there. Admission is $2.

And, I think it's time for me to get my own etsy shop. Page and I will be reviving our joint effort, but I want my own space where I can post my weirdities, like odd little wall hangings, decorated cocoa tins, and items such as today's featured post, french beaded flowers.

Look for it soon;)

08oct08

At last, some beads!

So, of course, I have a long, nerdy intro---never rains but it pours (in fact it's raining right now...) Amanda Marcotte had a thread going over at Pandagon about science fiction to read during the election season (she picked Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale which is an excellent if somewhat depressing book for all the reasons she cited, but I refused to read Oryx and Crake on principle because it pisses me off when would-be literary snobs reject science fiction---Atwood doesn't want to call her book what it is, fine; but neither does she want anybody else calling it sf---well then I as an avowed sf reader obviously ought not want to read---or purchase---or recommend---it. That kind of discriminatory behavior should have consequences.)

I found the comments, particularly about the libertarianist strain in (classic) sf, and the lack of democratic societies, interesting. Honesty compels me to admit that I was formally introduced to, and entranced by, libertarianism reading F. Paul Wilson's sf: first Healer, and then the more explicit Enemy of the State. But it's not as if I hadn't got a taste reading Heinlein (the scene in Have Spacesuit, Will Travel with the father and his money basket for the government---what, fill out tax returns like us rubes? Oh, come on!) comes to mind, and of course Vernor Vinge's novella The Ungoverned in particular also promotes this view.

And of course sf, and even more, fantasy, is rife with the idea of the few, the chosen, the special. Star Wars is a good example in the fantasy genre (despite the spaceships, the tone of the movie is classic fantasy---I mean, knights with swords and mystical forces---there's no science at all, really. To be sure, there isn't much in most sf film, as John Scalzi convincingly argues but I'm assuming readers are more likely to have seen movies than read a lot of semi-obscure books;) Compounding the problem is that I read the bulk of sf when I was younger, (now I waste my time reading blogs and other stuff online;) and though I certainly appreciated the big idea---there's a reason sf is called the poor person's philosophy, after all---and even knew that government and voting and what not were important, I hadn't really put together just how much the one informed the other. (Well, for one thing, I found stories of cruelty, corruption, and waste profoundly depressing. I still do, but perhaps my skin has grown infinitesimally thicker.)

Come to think, it would be difficult to write stories in which democracies work perfectly, because then you'd have no plot, or the form of government would recede to the background, as things that work tend to do. That is the situation, ferex, in the Vorkosigan books: the planets with democracies (Earth, specifically Great Britain, Beta, Quaddiespace) don't have their governments much explored, whereas those that don't (Barrayar and Cetaganda) do. Leaving aside that, if I understand it correctly, what we have is technically a republic.

One can assume, for example, that the protagonists in Joan Vinge's wonderful Outcasts of Heaven's Belt come from a democracy (or at least a republic), and in fact, one of the planetary governments they encounter is also a democracy, a true democracy, a "demarchy", in which everyone votes on everything...the results, as you might imagine, are less than salutary, which I think was sort of the point. But Vinge was an anthropology major, and her books strike me as being unusually thoughtful in setting up interesting societies. (The heroes of this book, the crew of the visiting starship, are in a successful group marriage, for example, and Vinge was obviously extrapolating from marginal societies to show why this might be a logical choice for them.)

I got the impression that at least some of the city-states in Vonda McIntyre's Dreamsnake were also representative (as well as at least some of the planetary governments in Superluminal); but yes, government is not likely to be a prominent part of the story unless it's broken (as it is, say, in Cory Doctorow's Little Brother, which oddly enough reminds me of Heinlein's Sixth Column, except without the super-science or racism. However the main characters are both more-or-less ordinary blokes, and for whatever reason Whitey Ardmore the advertising guy attempting to get the USA back on its feet with good ole fashion marketing ploys still sticks---fondly, even---in my memory.) But what about this idea of sfnal folks all being elitest?

Certainly that was a major problem I had with Neil Stephenson's Anathema; PZ Myers had his own problems with the book, and again, there was an interesting thread on his blog discussing the book. I cited the sexism, but didn't feel like getting into the racism; but it's a real problem. Briefly the book is predicated upon the idea that critically-minded thinky types renounce the world, like medieval monks, and live in maths analogous to the old monasteries. So far, so good; it's a fun concept.

The book opens with the 19 year old protagonist washed with embarressment as his teacher interviews an outsider craftsman about his ignorant witch-doctor views, his jangling, intrusive (and mostly useless) "jeejah" technology, and his overall lack of mental discipline. Stephenson stated in an author signing that this initial scene was in fact the starting point of the book, and I when I wrote about it for the apa, I asked the other members whether, in fact, the character was ever so disdainful anywhere else; that is, whether the author was just using the character to illustrate his irritations with modern life.

I think the idea of a life devoted to mathematical thought in a disciplined, austere setting is lovely; but the idea that everyone who failed to choose this lifestyle was perforce going to eat this plant (drug) that made them content, that the maths were the sole source of scientific insight, and that the bulk of the outsiders were slines---uneducated slobs---was annoying. To be sure, it's always tempting to see the undifferentiated mass of folks vaguely out there as idiots who don't read, won't think, and can't care about the stuff we-so-special are up in arms about.

To my mind, this temptation is one of the darkest, because it pulls us to seeing human beings as less than, or worse, not us as all: and down that road, cruelty and prejudice very soon await. So I tend to be nervous when people castigate "the masses" as stupid and immoral. It's been my unvarying experience that once I get to know someone, anyone, well enough, that they have that which they care for and think about and love, and other things for which they've devoted few resources, and about which their ideas are discontinuous.

So, the slobby slines in Anathema were bad enough; far worse was for the narrator to characterize any ethnic group as doomed by its genetics to be stupid and venial was insulting. I don't care that he was a sheltered 19 year old "avout"---he was also the product of a community that valued observation and critical thinking above all, and to have him swallow this outside prejudice, especially when he was taught to be deeply suspicious of outside memes, undercut the underlying themes (and coolness) of the book.

I had other issues. Obviously there would've been people outside that for whatever reason refused to the eat the contentment drug; clearly stupidity, veniality and criminality (as are kindness, intelligence and perception) all human traits, not particular to any one (genetic) population or culture; and brilliance, I imagine, is as particular as the people who have it: some would thrive in a monastery type setting, others wither, others do equally outside or in.

So I found it more than a little disheartening that a very traditional fantasy (Robin McKinley's superb new Chalice) would be far more open to the idea of the worth of all people (despite a highly hierarchical society---the head of the little desmesne in which the story is set is literally called the Master, and the position is not only hereditary, but via primogeniture to boot) than Stephenson's explicitly big idea (and big---about 900 pages) Anathema.

So yeah, there's some truth to the sfnal snobbery inherent in the popular bumper sticker (back when the space program was a little more viable) that "the meek shall inherit the earth; we're going to the stars".

To be sure traditional sf does celebrate the scientific mindview, and I do think that, sometimes, people of that bent get a little frustrated explaining their outlook. And I don't know that it's particularly easy for the average person to grasp. Despite taking six college-track science classes in high-school, and being in a pre-med track for two years in college (with labs), it took me years of reading Stephen Jay Gould's column in Natural History before the underlying concepts, particularly for evolution, came easily. It was most extremely helpful that these articles were on a different topic each month---often a scientist or philosopher from ages past, ridiculed today, but following perfectly logical questions in the context of their own knowledge of the time---thus allowing Gould to ring endless changes on a theme. It also helped that these were article-sized chunks, such that I'd get to the end before my exhausted brain gave up.

Eventually, I got it.

I'm not so sure a lot of people do, though. To take another example, McKinley's prior book but one (Dragonhaven) was set in an alternate America, more or less, in which dragons, as a species, exist. Ok, well and good. Fire-breathing dragons. Okaaaaay, following gamely along. (The book is basically her reply to the Pern universe, and the easy and oh-so-peachy communication between those dragons who are after all an alien species and their riders.)

The protagonist's parent is a research scientist, attempting to document dragons in a large reserve set aside for them. Lovely. The protagonist (again, a teenaged boy) who as the child of scientists, living in a closed, scientific community, knows better than to start spouting a lot of mystical "woo", but the author has set the story up such that the dragons have, in fact, a lot of magic clinging to them, and the scientific and magical worldviews clash pretty badly, because the "woo" overrides the science.

Problem is, that's not the way our world works; the "woo" hasn't stood up. Now, one can in fact mix and match, but the successful way to do it is simply to switch from one to the other, the way my chemistry prof had us switching between molecular orbital and valence bond theories when one or the other satisfied the conditions better. Evidently those two been reconciled, nowadays so perhaps a better example is the famous light as a particle and/or wave. But the protagonist tries too hard to justify the woo, and he'd been better off to simply say it didn't fit in with current understanding, and left it at that. As I said, everyone has a few discontinuities in their thinking; even scientists.

Looking at the author's blog, and reading about her many and diverse interests I certainly get the sense that she's got a lively interest in, and keen observation of, the natural world. But I don't think she emphasizes enough with a scientific worldview enough to depict it comfortably with her magical one (and nobody but nobody depicts magic with the naturalness and subtlety that McKinley does, which is why she's probably my fave fantasy author, as much as I love Bujold's Curse of Chalion.)

But the point (um, is there one?) is that despite its roaring success---the scientific approach really only got going in the Age of Enlightenment, about 4 centuries ago, though the basic concept has popped up now and again for millennia---I don't know that it's something people intuitively grasp, perhaps because it requires both hardheadedness, that is, the willingness to discard one's hypothesis in the face of contravailing facts, and because the imperfection of theories (not to mention data) requires constant updating. Great if you revel in uncertainty, but I imagine frustrating in the extreme if you simply want to check off the box and get on to the next thing. Science, like that bugbear evolution that so many folks have trouble with, is endlessly open-ended. And that's valuable, not just for the sake of pursuing one's curiosity, but for being open-minded.

Of course, open-mindedness is equally important for making art, since the same query, ``I wonder what would happen if...?'' drives art as well as science.

07oct08

Sorry about the no posting yesterday; I do actually have posts in the queue, but no introductory material! Oh well. Today's post is another oldie made possible by the loan of my friend Cindi's light cube. Since I've made my lack of enthusiasm for these tools repeatedly (and publicly) it's just a tad embarressing to admit how incredibly handy I've found this item, especially for the straight-down "copy-stand" style type photography.

In fact, the cube is fine, though the lights that come with it are lame and useless, and I nearly always supplement my shots with a mirror to bounce the light, and quite often a second piece of plexi to further diffuse the light. But all in all, the reason you're seeing some of this really old stuff is because now I have a quick and easy way to photograph it.

And if golden oldies aren't your thing, well, I think this essay by Barry Deutsch, about copyright and comics is interesting. I'd have to go through my copy of Free Culture again, but I seem to recall Lessig discussing a similar model for licensing songs on the airwaves, which kept the early record companies from strangling radio stations: the record producers couldn't demand arbitrarily high fees for permission to play the works; and as a result, radio was hugely important in popularizing music.

I particularly like the way Ampersand touches upon "shared creations". Once your work goes into the world, its value is only inasmuch as it resonates with people; and that resonance by definition means those patrons have added some creative aspect of their own: all work is a dialog between creator and consumer (I like patron better;) ineveitably, the work will go in directions the creator didn't anticipate.

Rather like children, in a way. You do the best you can; but then you have to let go. (And yes, as a beadmaker I have to cope with this too. People sometimes string lampwork beads into what I think are absolutely hideous pieces; more often than not, they're mundane; but that's life.)

And, come to think, today's post discusses a slightly different way of letting go.

05oct08

Today's earrings do feature beads, even glass beads (if not made by me;) as this is yet another of my blasts from the past. ---Speaking of which, I flipped through a handout I received when I took a workshop from Freddie Birkhill and Shane Fero back in '99, and my goodness, the wealth of info now available, not to mention new glass colors, less than ten years later. It's easy to forget just fast technology can move, when there's a will; and compared to many fields, I imagine lampwork is rather slow-moving.

Gives me hope, sometimes, that we will manage to stay on top of the world's problems.

04oct08

One of the slightly confusing things about doing posts ahead of time is that I lose track all too easily of what day a given post goes to. Yesterday was supposed to be a friday fugly, or at least a friday frustrating...I have some beads (well, actually a lot of beads) that would fit right in, but of course, photographing one's failures is never as much fun.

Ah well. There will be beads, or at least glass, very soon. In the meantime, I offer this sop.

03oct08

So, finally, I've gotten to the post that started with the beaded belt (and what does a beaded belt have to do with a lox wax casting....?)

Well, part of the story is that I learn slowly. My technique for making the beaded belts was clunky, because I didn't know what I was doing. My initial technique for kumi was almost as clunky, but the advantage was that I knew it was clunky, and knew there were better tools that could ease my efforts; it was just a matter of finding them.

Currently I've been practicing floral petals because I feel my flower trailing, while serviceable, is not sensational. I want it to be good. And, again, I know there's light at the end of the tunnel, because other beadmakers create wonderful florals; so I know what's possible. To this end, I've made a very great many beads in a series to improve them---like, about a hundred. And they have gotten better, though I can see it will take at least another 100, and likely a thousand, before I really get where I want to go. So this need to practice was probably why I took life drawing 5 or 6 times in college; Eastern actually ran out of course numbers, and I had to retake the highest level class by the end.

But if I had to do over again, I think I'd've been better served trying a lot of different media. Problem was, my efforts in non-drawing classes were often weak, and I didn't care for that totally floundering sensation. In any event, I ended up taking no metalworking during my BFA; instead, I took metal classes at three different colleges after I graduated (including, ironically enough, my alma mater). I still haven't really crossed the hump, where I'm doing soldering and whatnot consistantly enough to have that minimum level of success to keep at it.

But along the way I've made a few not-bad pieces; this one is among the earliest.

02oct08

I'm feeling sort of nostalgic about this post, which quite possibly dates back to '96 or so, before even I had my own domain name (and certainly before I started dating my entries), so I've basically just slotted in the new photo with the older text. My writing style was quite a bit more formal back then:)

I still haven't figured out what to do with the fact that thus-and-so post refers to that other post (that needs to be written) which really should include a reference to this other object (that needs to be photographed) and perhaps such-and-such (which I can't even find to photograph) so mebbe I'll back up and do this easy one, for which I have the item, a picture...and no caliper to measure.

Oh, and now looking the directories over, I discover that the "Adornment" category is full of things that can't be worn (by people, anyway) like french beaded flowers and bead curtains---really, as times goes on, these categories become ever more blurred and overlapping. This sort of problem is why the site is always in progress and always has broken bits, like yellowing or insect chewed leaves---it's very organic, in that way...

Really, does anyone else make having a website this complicated?

In the meantime, you can now see, in new, improved and hi-res detail, just how awful my very first effort at kumi truly was (very much a case of needing the right tools...)

01Oct08

Yesterday's flower was second in a series of three, and I'll get back to them, but I'd like to reshoot the other two. I've been playing with my friend Cindi's light-cube, and I love the way the fabric background doesn't show any dust---I hadn't realized I spent so much time cleaning it away! But it's not really big enough for the flowers. And since I've got some work that needs to be shot on the plexi background coming up soon, I'll shoot the flowers then.

This is the third post I've started for today. Originally, I was going to a quick and easy post about a pendant I cast nearly 20 years ago; but then discovered the necklace I wanted to reference had dropped out of the site; so I reshot that, slotted in the decade old text for nostalgia's sake, and discovered a reference (that really ought to be a link) to the piece I'm featuring today, which turned out to be even more of a trip down memory lane.

So here's hoping third time's the charm.

30sep08

I told myself no more web pages until I got this order of mini-hollows done. Unfortunately for me, I wasn't up to doing them for much of the summer. Usually, it's elbow pain that gets me into trouble; discovering that anemia can cause numb fingertips was not really a fact I wanted to learn via experience. I'm very happy to say it's gone away. Hurray for modern medicine. (Now if only we could have a health care system that didn't eat up half the money with paperwork...)

I'm so happy to be making web pages again. In the future, instead of making these ridiculous bargains with myself, I shall simply inform my customers that I'm a flake, not to be trusted (or, to spin it more commercially, that I do not care to send out stuff that's not right, and sometimes, it takes way too long to figure out what ``right'' is...)

I believe I've mentioned over the years that I got (back) to a childhood love of beading via science fiction, which is no more than the truth; if I hadn't met a certain gentleman at ConFusion many (many many) years ago, I doubt I'd be doing much with beads today---certainly not at the level I am now.

And, having become a passionate stringer with an interest in other forms of beadwork, I suppose I might've gotten involved with the Great Lakes Beadworkers' Guild even if my beaded embroidery teacher, who was its founder, hadn't invited her class list to join; but it wouldn't be called the GLBG, because I was the one who wanted us to be a guild, not a society: we were forming to develop the craft of beadwork, not the study of beads (not that that's not interesting, but it wasn't our focus).

Recently, that founder, Chris Reilly, (of Firefly Embroideries) was kind enough to invite me to help her out at a sewing show, so in exchange for quite light booth duty, I got to wander around the show, goggle at the way hugely commercial machines, particularly embroidery and quilting machines, have invaded the home market, and visit with her. And my goodness, if you think lampworking studios are expensive to set up.... It was from Chris that I learned the techniques I've adapted for the embroidered christmas stockings (though I discovered, when I attempted to demonstrate traditional beaded embroidery, that I was quite rusty in stem stitch;)

Christine expressed an interest in my beaded flowers, so I thought I'd end my hiatus with one.

23jul08

Today's treat is a little serendipity. If you're tired of bugs, even pretty ones (I definitely could do with fewer mosquitoes) today's fun link is for the graceful envelope contest. Originally sponsored by the Smithsonian, it's now "sponsored by the National Association of Letter Carriers and administered by the Washington Calligraphers Guild".

Years ago, I purchased the dover reproduction of George Bickham's Universal Penman, and though copperplate is still relatively rare, there are several fine examples, particularly one from Great Britain (where that particular style evidently peaked) and this outstanding example combining art and science. The earlier years have the top winners mixed in with the honorable mentions, and I discovered that the ones I thought best (even allowing for weighting stuff like whether the piece followed the yearly theme) I judged the entries quite a bit differently. I found this site via some callig club in New Zealand; both it and the following via wikipedia, of course.

I also checked out the Saint John's Bible site, which I'd read about years ago in Smithsonian; but the images are frustratingly small, even compared to my dim memories (this was one of the few issues I saved; agnostic then and atheist now, I still thought this was a gorgeous effort). I remembered particularly the page with the DNA (showing Jesus' lineage, mebbe?) and a gorgeous marginal bee which I could barely parse on the site---the helices hardly show at all---which brings us back to pretty insects...

Enjoy.

(And perhaps I'll do a roundup of the remaining callig links I found to be of interest...:)

18jul08

I guess it's officially time to admit that, yeah, physically I'm only doing so-so, since the Ann Arbor State Street Area Art Fair is 3/4 over, and I'm only now posting a link. We're in booth #316. I'm not up working it---I managed a couple of hours Wednesday, and a couple yesterday, and ended up spending a lot of today resting as a result---but Page is more than able to carry the load---stop by and say hi.

Next week, glassact will have a booth at the Orchard Lake Art Fair, at which I'm supposed to be running the demo booth. I'm hoping I'll be up to it, which currently, I'm not. The good news is, folks with my not-uncommon problem do get better with time, and I presume eventually either I'll improve on my own, or the doctors will recommend something to speed the process. In any event, all those cool links I thought I might post completely evaporated. No doubt something equally if not better will happen along, with the return of a little more mental and physical stamina. In the meantime, apologies for not posting.

Fortunately for me, the weather has been, (until the ann arbor art fair started, of course) cool and rainy, and so the garden, which I had to water extensively last year, has this year been thriving on benign neglect.

19jun08

Somewhere or other I read about somebody's efforts to parse the search methods people use when cruising the web, which I gathered they compared to search algorithms used when searching for something in an unfamiliar city, which ultimately they proposed camed out of our hunting heritage...

But anyway. Via pandagon ---oops, wrong post, ok let's try that again I happened to click on Phoenician during the Time of Roman's blog and on Phoenician's sidebar wandered off to a website for Sexuality and Art (which I've stumbled on before) meandering thence to Terry Moore's site and blog to see what he's up to (I could never bring myself to finish Strangers in Paradise, cuz I wanted Katchoo, Francine and David to become a threesome, and suspected they wouldn't---that David would get forced out) and on the May 13th, 2008 entry he linked (via Neil Gaiman's blog) to what looks like this most excellent site about fountain pens ---again I've explored this subject before, as my brother is very into fountain pens.

These things are horrendously expensive, but the thought of a fine-point flexible nib pen that didn't have to be dipped like my beloved c-104 nibs---yum. Even better, they say they've got something called a flexible callig nib...wow.

Also from the sexuality in art folks, a much cheaper (DIY in fact) mini-palette ---just the sort of thing that would come in handy during my painting vacations, (though I've been getting by with water soluable crayons, supplemented with a few archival ink rollerballs).

Um, there was a point to all this, besides the fact that I wasted an entire morning, but darned if I can remember it now...

The other big art project I did during our trip was braid a cord for a gift for JDftY, who left for home two days ago, and who safely arrived in Kyushu earlier this morning.

14jun08

My father used to say that everyone should be poor at some point in their life, preferably when they're young. We lived in Detroit for many years because that was all we could afford; and the two things I hated the most were the noise and the crime. Our little 800 square foot house was broken into 11 times.

So I really appreciate returning to a house that has not been broken into (or burnt to the ground). Yes, we went on vacation, to Michigan's Upper Peninsula, mostly around the Taquamenon Falls area. Cold weather and abundant rain (as opposed to temps in the 90s and lack of same when we left home) made sometimes too much of a contrast, as at one point I had on 4 sets of clothes, though one pair of pants was wrapped around my head as a turban, and the mosquitoes, at least according to some locals, were the worst they'd seen in a long time.

But on the other hand, I saw lady slippers. Pink lady slippers. I've documented the yellow ones before, during a wisconsin vacation and I plan to post pix of some more I took this time (a slightly different variety) but this is the first time I've documented pink lady slippers and they made the cold and mosquitoes all worthwhile. (Well, mostly).

8jun08

Ok, I lied, just one more post from the series promoting my beads at B&B: this is probably the largest of the objects I'm offering, and thus, I fitting climax, I guess. (And that's probably gonna be it for a week or two---the f2 generation's got out of school and particularly given that JDftY must return home, there's an extra layer of end-of-school insanity. Though hopefully all the boxes will ship today. $300 (or more) to ship extra clothes and some snacks home. Yowch!

Beads, even big ones are so much more portable.

7jun08

This will probably be the last in my series of posts promoting booth #1018 at B&B.

Flaming winged hearts would seem to imply a love so great it's painful, so this series of cartoon strips about the heroic rescues following the 5.12 earthquake in China by an artist who wrote them in English specifically so folks around the world would get a sense of her people as something aside from the folks who provided the local takeout (though our local takeout's dry-fried green beans are very good indeed) seems altogether appropriate.

Though I do wonder what rock I've been living under, to be so completely unaware of this for three friggin' weeks. Mebbe I should add the bbc news site on my browser's home pages...

via Feministe.

6jun08

Today's friday fuglies is again kinda of a weak example of the genre, since I'm trying to, you know, promote my beads for B&B. At the same time I've had a lot of people really like beads that didn't thrill me; and there are a lot of beads out there that grab me but do nothing for other bead compatriots. This comes out of that whole dialog thing that goes on between creators and consumers/audience/recipients---there really isn't a good term for the right side of that equation there. All of the terms either have faintly pejorative aspects (consumer) or are too passive, when in fact art always succeeds because it resonates with its users, in the way that soundbox resonates with a vibrating string. Without the soundbox, the string is very little; and depending on the soundbox, the shape of the sound changes a great deal. So to are ideas changed, amplified, and spread through culture. Artists are vitally important, yes; but its consumers, in a very real sense do in fact incorporate and manipulate the art into its larger cultural context. The Mona Lisa derives a lot of its value from its fame.

This was recently driven home reading a post about what movies you have to see to appreciate other movies in which one commenter (2jun @ 1:11am) noted you not only needed to see, ideally, the entire Star Trek canon but also be up on all the related culture to ``get'' Galaxy Quest (which yes, I saw, and yes, I know enough of the culture to appreciate). I often fantasize about someone hundreds of years in the future reading some current novel laden with these sorts of references explained with annotations ---and wishing, sometimes, for such while reading Jane Austen, or better, Georgette Heyer (and, once her books go to the public domain, I could readily imagine legions of heyer fans doing just that.)

You see a little of this in fan-subbed anime: the subbers often put little explanatory details about Japanese culture or puns that don't obviously translate, etc., to help everyone get the context. I had to do a lot of it for JDftY; judging from her reactions, not to mention some of the weird manga f2tY brings home, the Japanese world-view of Christianity is either absent (as when in the wonderful film Tokyo Godfathers the holiday mall banners welcomed `Satan' instead of 'Santa' ---ouch!) or very skewed.

None of this is new, of course. Artists have been in their way trying to get all people to see themselves as artists, to see art as participatory; and because the right side of the equation is so important, that is why is there must be balance between copyright and fair use: once you release your art into the world to be appreciated, it's no longer solely yours.

So here's to some beads that need more creative minds than mine to make them extra-special.

05jun08

Some more buttons to promote Glassact's booth for Bead&Button.

Finally got a chance to try out that thai recipe site I recommended earlier, with one of our family favorites, the Indian-curry inspired `Massamun curry'. I doubled the recipe (except for the coconut milk), sliced the chicken and potatoes thin so they would cook faster, added an extra tablespoon of store-bought massamun curry paste for more flavor, used dark brown sugar instead of white (and mistook 2T for 2t, oops, and forgot the cashews entirely, waahh!), and added the juice of a lime. ---So, for me, pretty much followed the recipe;)

And it wasn't bad, though still a bit on the bland side. Mebbe more madras curry powder...?

However, I wasn't up for the more authentic version. And even my lame-o version was much better than spaghetti out of a jar. ---One reason I was feeling kinda limp is that yesterday I trekked home from the asian grocery story with 25--30# rice, plus assorted other goodies, and even with a hip strap, it was a bit of a strain. Obviously, I'm no Vietnamese countrywoman, to be toting double my own body weight around, though I was pleasantly surprised to wake up next morning with only slight sensation in my upper abs and triceps (the latter from hoisting up the pack to take strain off my shoulders.) The compressed-spine sensations took me back to my days as a paper carrier, and I truly be