Bumble-Boo Handmades

There is a fresh new shop on etsy that i suggest you visit: Bumble Boo Handmades. You will love the dear buttons, the book marks, and now the prints, of this very talented artist's original illustrations.

Her penwork is exquisite and her subjects are designed with a sensitivity and detail that proclaim an enormous natural talent when you consider that she is still a struggling student at art college. She manages to harmonize contrasting yellows and blues, reds and greens, in her beautiful watercolor and guache illustrations, available as professional prints. The images on her little pins are perfectly composed little vignettes, that are often very sweet, but seem to have a hint of humor, too.

You are invited to take a walk through Bumble-Boo's growing gallery and enjoy, and of course, keep your Christmas list in mind. One of the most humane things you can do is support the arts and buy homemade!

Spaced Out Beads

A little bit of eye candy for you today.

I've got a couple of sets of beads to stock in the shop tomorrow. I did a set of my old standby, Aqualith. The subtle green gleam that comes through here and there on the blue band is particularly nice in this set.

And the other set is of some beads that i've made for use in collections of bluegreen transparent bead that i've put together for bracelets, but i've never put a set of them in the shop before. So check them out: i'm calling them Orbits. They are made with reduced silver foil so they have a slight metallic sheen.

I don't know if i showed you the calendar i made using my bead photos! Talk about your eye candy. I'll give you a peak in an upcoming blog entry.

Made-to-order "Love Spikes"

The crazy awesome pink transparent spiky beads are now available on a custom request basis. Yay.

Latest News in the BirthBones Biz

The BIG bone has arrived! My original ivory glass and silver wrap BirthBones are now available in kingsize. This is a much better size for the medium or large dog. So far i only have one listing in my etsy shop for the BIG BirthBone, and will just custom make it for whichever month is required. If i can find the time, i'll make an amethyst one for myself as a zipper pull or a dangle on my bag. They are very handsome in this size.

I've also made some listings for a crystal version of the birthstone bone charms. They don't seem to be drawing hits in the same proportion as the original design. But they are pretty and i'll keep them on offer for now.

I've had several customers tell me that they bought their BirthBones for their own use, not to hang on dog collars. I'm trying to figure out how to tag my charms to take best advantage of the kinds of search terms people would use to find charms for human jewelry use, and pendants.

Glass vs Clay

While flitting through etsy offerings, i couldn't help noticing that artisan polymer clay beads are usually being sold for much less that handmade glass beads. I hope our sisteren don't hate us glassworkers for this inequality. But let's look at it, shall we?

The artist of etsy shop sigaliot (click on photos to go to shop) grabbed my eye with these bead designs. (I'm liking the retro dots thing, and the pink and green color combos, and i love the shapes!) IF, and that's a big if, i could make a bead like this in glass, it would take me at least 20 minutes per bead, i'm thinking. And for me, that makes it a $6 or $8 bead. (I'll explain my pricing system sometime if anyone cares.) Sigaliot doesn't charge that much, and if you look at other clay workers, their prices often look ridiculously low.

So using these beautiful beads as an example, a clay worker would first need to spend a couple of hours to make the canes to get ready to assemble this set of beads. Then there is the cane slicing , the assembling, and the shaping of each bead. I'm guessing, but this step alone might take about 20 minutes per bead. Then after baking, there is the laborious process of hand sanding and buffing to get the lovely, glassy surface shine. I think polymer clay is at least twice as expensive as a similar amount of glass, so there is the added cost of materials, too. Sure, the lampworker has to have a rather pricier oven to "bake" (or anneal) the glass beads, and the gas used in the torch costs something... Okay, so i can' t factor it all in, but it still seems to me that most clay bead makers are getting a bum deal.

At the end of the day, the clay artist has invested hours of labor into one set of beads and it would be nice to see that expertise compensated. I used to tat, and i loved using that classic knotting technique to make a doily, but no one wanted to buy it for more than you would expect to pay for a machine-made, Chinese produced, doily that you can get down at the Dollar Store. There are so many arts and fine crafts that suffer this fate. I'm sure it's a labor of love for the artist, but i wish the buying public could see their way to putting a fairer monetary value on such beautiful little works of art, a value that better represented the time and expertise that goes into the creation of the piece.