Online Tools for Artists

Over the weekend, I relaunched my online jewelry store…sort of. It’s still at Etsy, but I’ve gone back to my original name: Eleventh Midnight. I was never happy being JewelryNiche. It lacked character.

I even have a plan to make sure the shop has some life to it this time around. It has a schedule, a somewhat strenuous to-do list, a spreadsheet, and a GNotebook all to itself. It probably needs its own gallery, but for now, I think I’m okay with what I’ve got.

In the week or so leading up to the launch, I had the chance to sit down and talk with other artists about completely unrelated things. Naturally, I was asked what I was up to myself, and I told them about the shop and the work I’d been doing to get ready. They were both amazed. One has a website that she could never get herself in sync with, and the MySpace she pretty much gave up the website for. The other has never really been online much, but would love to explore oit once her home office is up and running.

I ended suggesting a few things to both of them, and thought you guys might enjoy seeing the list.

• deviantArt- Don’t let the name put you off. dA is a great place to show off completed pieces and works in progress across a number of artistic discipline and get feedback on them. It’s a thriving community of very supportive people who love to share and talk about their craft. (Just avoid the drama trolls.)
• Etsy- Etsy is an online center for artists and crafters to sell their work. Nearly every you find on the site is made by the person selling it, except for supplies and “vintage” items (which may or may not be made by the artist). Etsy allows you to search by category, type or item, and even color. For artists, it’s a nice, low-cost way to put your creations before a wider audience. It’s very easy to set up and use.
• Google Apps- None of us really wants to talk about it, but there’s more to creating than just creating. Personally, I use GCal to keep track of when I’ve done things so I know, GMail to handle my email needs, Google Docs to keep an inventory of what I’ve got and where (that I’ve just realized is out of date at the moment), and Google Notebook to record patterns of what I’ve made, ideas for future projects, lists of where to shop for certain supplies or of where to check out for supplies.
• Todoist- This time around, I have a to-do list dedicated solely to my jewelry shop. It has a “production schedule” of sorts, along with ideas for new pieces, tips for keeping myself focused, ideas for my classes, the custom pieces I’m currently working on (which as of today is only one because the main part of it is totally vexing me).

(The list accidentally came out alphabetically. That’s funny.)

There are other great crafting sites out there. You just have to look within your own crafting niche(s). Great ways to share, to get feedback, to sell, to just participate.

Geek sneaks farther into my crafting

Last week, I shared the joys of using a d20 for a few non-gaming tasks. Today, I’d like to share the next geeky item to fall victim to my need to fill a quick gap.

I design jewelry. (Those curious may visit my deviantArt account. I’ve slowly been creating new pieces again.) I haven’t figured out how to work my dice into that yet, but I did recently find a fantastic use for the mouse pad my favorite jewelry component supplier sent me.

I normally design my jewelry in a lined shallow tray that both keeps my pieces from rolling around and from rolling off the tray when they won’t stay put. But the tray is large, and my design bag I carry around to class and such is tiny. It’s awkward to carry both.

This has bothered me for some time, but this mouse pad got me thinking. A mousepad is typically designed to not slide around, and it’s small. In fact, it just happens to be the perfect size to slide into the back of my tote. I’ve only started experimenting with it, and while I miss having walls, it does seem to work quite effectively.

If my classes ever actually form, I’m going to recommend it to my students. Nearly everyone has a spare mousepad lying around, or can come up with one quickly.

Changes

While it’s been fun logging my life for all to see, the simple fact of the matter is that I don’t have the time to sit here and compile what many of you have no interest in reading.

I’ve decided for now to discontinue this Notebook, and am now using Twitter. It doesn’t lay things at so neatly, but I have found I am a bit more likely to note something as it happens than at the end of the day when I’m dead tired.

I’m trying to preserve as much of this site as I can over there. Accomplishments and things learned can be followed by reading the tweets tagged [TIA] and [TIL]. Books I’ve just read will be noted with the tag [Books]. I haven’t committed to keeping the best line of the day yet, but I’m thinking about it. I’m also not doing either the “100 words” or the blog post links. What I’m doing instead is trying to keep people up to date on my projects and linking to things as they go online. For example, I’ve started posting to eHow, and I link to every new article when it’s published.

It’s like a Kiry news feed, as Kiry’s life happens. And you can subscribe to its RSS feed. Isn’t that handy?

(For those wondering, I finished Book 1 on December 13, and never got past 10,000 words on Book 2.)

The design narrative

I have a couple of jewelry orders going right now, and thinking them out was something I think others could have a good times with.

I keep a notebook where I capture jewelry designs running through my head, and where I write out pattern notes for pieces I’ve already completed. (The idea is that eventually I’ll actually print off the pictures of completed pieces and stick them on the facing page for their pre-thinking and patterns.)

For these two pieces, I pulled out the book and literally started talking out each idea. I drew a sketch of the design behind a description of the thinking behind it. It created this very interesting narrative experience that is both creative and reflective, and is going to help once I wrap up these pieces.

I’ve been trying to get comfortable with the concept of storyline in the designing of my work (jewelry or otherwise), and I think this accidental design method that took over my notebook last week is a first step in that direction. Know where a design came from, talk out the thinking process. I think the piece will take on its own life, and will hopefully catch people’s eye more easily.

Knotty, knotty

Anybody caught selling macramé in public should be dyed a natural color and hung out to dry.- Calvin Trillin (Source)

Oh, drat. And me without any of my sought-after macrame jewelry pieces on hand…

One of my first businesses (along with selling a self-published short story and my very profitable babysitting lifestyle) was making friendship bracelets for classmates. After discovering macramé as an adult, I’ve been known to have a little fun designing pretty wearables with everything from hemp to embroidery floss!

It’s a great way to pass an afternoon and completely fascinate random strangers. Almost better than knitting chains, actually.

A jewelry designer’s toolbox

There are so many reference guides for the all-around crafter, but I have yet to find one I like for the organized jewelry designer so I thought I’d kind of share what my own looks like.

Actually, my “jewelry designer’s toolbox” is scattered across a couple of areas because of storage issues, but that really hasn’t proven a hindrance yet.

My kit

• Sketch notebook
• Mechanical pencils
• Colored pencils
• Wire in various gauges and colors
• Jump rings, grouped by metal, gauge and inner diameter
• Findings, organized by intended use of finding (all my clasps live in the same bin, all my earring findings like in one bin)
• Beads in various shapes and colors, mostly grouped by shape than anything else
• Wire components that I use frequently in my designing
• Wire jig
• Two pairs of round-nosed pliers
• Two pairs of bent-nosed pliers
• Two pairs of needle-nosed pliers
• Two sets of wire cutters
• Cleaning cloths
• Display tray (I use it as my workspace. It’s great for keeping components from escaping.)
• Tape measure
• A travel beading bag that is filled with components for pieces I’m currently working on. My tools live in this bag for the most part.

I keep nearly everything organized in large fishing lure boxes and then move what I need to the bins in my travel bag when I’m working. It’s been great, and helps me get a lot done, even if I just have all my boxes open and lying around me while I work.

Feeling riffed

I guess derivative work must really be on my mind these days. I treated myself to a bookstore crawl last week, and in one of them I made the strangest find.

In a book on contemporary designs for chain mail, I found a picture of one of my very first designs…except the chain had amethyst in it, and I definitely was not the person behind it.

It was a bit disorienting.

I first created the box chain with beads embedded in February 2002. It was my second attempt to modify a chain pattern I had just learned. In mid-2004, I wrote out an instruction sheet, intending to use it with students in a hosted jewelry class that never materialized. In late 2005, I even put it online.

The picture was dated 2004.

It just amazes me that someone else came up with the same idea, although it really shouldn’t. The modification is a pretty simple one, a natural extension of the original box chain.

But it’s left me feeling unoriginal again…

Derivative works

In thinking about Creative Commons and derivative works, I started looking toward my own jewelry.

I don’t mess with the copyright on my jewelry designs. Given my love for the ease of encouraging others to build on a theme, it really seems hypocritical to not want to share my jewelry. This actually ate at me for a couple of days, and then it occurred to me why I’ve been afraid to lighten up on these pieces.

My pieces are, to some extent, derivative works themselves. I saw a pattern or a real piece of jewelry and thought, “That’s pretty cool, but what if…” For whatever reason, I decided that if my work is derivative to a point, then I probably had no right to offer it to be further derived from.

This is silly. I’m one step in development by deriving, by inspiration. When I don’t open my pieces to be derived from, I break the creative chain.

That just doesn’t match with the artist I want to be.

It’ll take a bit, but I’m going to work toward sharing all of my jewelry and instructional guides under Creative Commons licenses.

My new toy

For Christmas, Santa left me an interesting little gadget. As I happen to love gadgets, I had fun exploring this one.

Over the past several months, I’ve complained ad nauseum about not being able to find consistently made jump rings. It’s rather painful to be partway through some great project, run out of rings, get the exact same rings form somewhere you’ve bought them from repeatedly…and discover that something has change.

I’ve run into everything from rings measured across the wrong diameter to a company deciding they want to reinvent traditional gauge settings.

It’s been so frustrating that I’ve almost walked out on knitting chains, which is what originally brought me into serious jewelry design.

Santa must have heard my cries, because my new gadget is a travel-sized jump ring maker! There are four mandrels (that I still need to measure) and a weird shaped hand-crank base. As long as wire companies remain consistent with their wire gauges, I’m set!

I can hardly wait to give it a try!

Customers as audience

My mom once worked in a restaurant where she had to do her work right in front of people walking in. I then volunteered in a museum where the paleo lab was lined with windows so people could watch them from the dinosaur exhibit.

There’s a bit of fascination in watching people work. In a way, we enjoy it because we feel like we’re being let in on the secret. We get to see how it’s all done. Then again, for certain professions, it really ruins the mystery.

Most days, I feel that way about jewelry design. I spent a couple of months as a demonstrator for a craft store. Twice a week, I sat behind a box of crates and made jewelry. Not the worst way to pick up some extra bucks, but being on display like that made me feel more like a performance artist and less like a jewelry designer.

It was great to watch people marvel at pieces I’d completed, or to have them ask me about the various pieces on my table. But someone would invariably walk in right as I forgot how to do something, and there I’d be with my nose stuck in a book. Sadly, rather than seeing me as a resourceful woman who wasn’t afraid to rely on a book now and then, they would ask me in a rather disdainful tone how long I’d been making jewelry.

Honestly, they had no business looking down their nose at me for looking up the answer to a question when they couldn’t even string a bead onto string; and I had no business feeling guilty for showing off my status as a learner when I needed to know how to do something. Truth be told, we’re all learners, regardless of how long we’ve done something, or how proficiently we do it. The master has as much to learn as the novice, especially in light of trying to stay current or to be innovative in the field.

It’s hard to be the one being watched…but there’s so much to learn as both the watched and the watching.