She's a Beaut

What a terrific visit we had over the last month with our kin in Canada! I collected some fun animal stories for the blog, too. : -)

So the etsy shop is open for business and i'm back in the workshop creating pretty glass beads. Stop on by and see what's new.

I'm an entomologist in one of my personas, and here's a picture of a cool critter that we collected last night in our New Mexico neighborhood. Littleknown fact: beetles are the dominant form of life on earth. One of every five living species is a beetle, and one fourth of all animals in a beetle. The Order Coleoptera (beetles) is the largest order in the Animal Kingdom, containing a third of all insect species.

This particular beetle is called the Palo Verde Borer (Derobrachus geminatus). Some sources site this species as reaching 6-8 inches, but i'll have to see that to believe it. This female is therefore a wheenie at 3.5 inches but it's the largest i've seen. Around here it is a pest of elm trees. The larvae, which must get enormous, feed on the roots of the tree for a couple of years and then dig a tunnel up to the surface and emerge to mate in late July.

flower photography

We had a wonderful time camping in the Pecos Wilderness of the Santa Fe National Forest. But when it rained we realized that we need to do something about either waterproofing our tents or replacing them...

We live in such a hot, dry and barren part of the state that it was nice to be in trees, have some cool moist air and topography.

Brief Hiatus

Taking another small camping trip. Back in 4 or 5 days.

Photo/Wallets

If you appreciate photography/ like to accessorize/ are looking for a really unique and affordable gift for someone, I strongly recommend that you visit mmsomewhere's etsy shop: Photo/Wallets. The artist/proprietor offers her very good art photography in the form of fully functional wallets. (Click on images to go directly to her shop.)

"approximate wallet size = 8"x3.5" (standard size)
graphics printed on double sided premium photo paper.
(paper will crease)
graphic is sandwiched between clear vinyl. sewn."

Walking through her shop is like spending time in an art gallery. She travels a fair bit so the subjects of her photos often have a subtle exoticness. There is a dead goldfish wallet that I'm quite fond of. The wallets with images of bikes leaning against walls have classic appeal. But i think it is her montage type images of architecture and urban subjects with their vivid clolors and intriguing compositions that i would most like to pull out of my purse when i'm buying a gallon of milk down at the corner store.

Poppy

I photographed this poppy in my garden the other day.

That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone, that we are more deeply inserted into existence than the course of a single life would lead us to believe.
~John Berger (English artist)

My next entry will be about a maker of unique wallets/photographs i've come across.

PIF: Spreading the Good Feeling

They say the most meaningful gift is the gift that someone made for you. I guess that's why we are all fans of the handmade marketplace, etsy. There are tons of creative people there, and every one that i've had the pleasure to communicate with has seemed to be warm and friendly: the sort of people that enjoy not just making things, but probably giving things they've made, as well.

I'm pretty cynical and pessimistic, but I'm a genuinely "nice" person (imho) and i firmly believe in the ethic of going out of your way to be nice to others, it will affect them, and they will in turn go out of their way to be nice to someone else. I try to instill that in my three boys. And i've come across many examples of it while talking with etsy sellers i've had the pleasure to blog about. This is what PIF, or "pay it forward," is all about. I visited today's featured artist's etsy shop and was introduced to PIF etsy style.

As well as other things, etsy seller noneoftheabove makes lovely starburst polymer clay pendants (click on photo to go directly to her shop). They're nicely proportioned and i like the off-center crystal surrounded by the tonal gradation of clay dot spray, like a fireworks flower. noneoftheabove explains the reason why she PIF's: "I have been very lucky to have received much kindness in my life and I would like to pay it forward!" In her shop you can have one of her "PIF"-labeled items for the $0.20 listing fee, plus her reasonable s/h fee, and the promise that you will list a PIF item in your shop or perform some other act of kindness for someone. Now that's the true spirit of PIF!

So then you do a term search on etsy to see how widespread the PIF movement is there, and you get 1800+ hits! And get really excited! And then you start looking more closely at those PIF listings and discover that an awful lot of sellers have their own peculiar definitions for "PIF". Some people apparently use it as a tag just to get people to their shops, and don't even have any PIF items. Others say their PIF item is "marked down," but i'll take that with a grain of salt. I found people who might sell a very cheaply made pair of earrings for $1, but charge almost $4 for shipping, which kind of cancels out any real sense of PIF since you know the seller has covered their expenses and made a profit in the bargain. Others sell the leftover scraps from their craft for a few bucks. I'm sure fabric bits and tangled yarn would be useful to someone, but we don't really want to pay forward our garbage, do we? (Sheesh, offer that for free if you want and just feel good about recycling.) Another seller's idea of PIF was to ship your 2nd item for only $0.20 more... Does that make you pause for a moment and reflect on how affecting an act of human kindness can be?

I like noneoftheabove's definition of PIF best. She's offering an item she took significant time and effort to make, and is essentially gifting it to you if you feel you need a pick-me-up; a pretty piece of handmade jewelry. That's really a warm fuzzy. It's a hug, not a business ploy. And i will follow her lead, and her definition, and PIF in my shop starting this weekend. :-D

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.