jeliza

So, having someone from a legitimate licensing company asking to license a random work from a website is one of those things that I thought never happened anymore, and certainly didn't expect to happen to me, but, well, holy crap.

And it's a piece that only appeared on my blog once on a page I don't think even works anymore. And I was gutted because my only file of it was in the catastrophic data loss that wiped out pretty much the vast majority of my photography career, and it was a weird photogram experiment that I expected to had faded into nothingness even if had kept said random pile of monoprints.

I found the prints, They are still intact, from being stacked in a dark place in twenty-fucking-ten.

 Given that I've sold pretty much nothing, especially not via licensing, in several years, it feels a nudge from the universe that I shouldn't just give up on art and become a office assistant.

Yesterday was the last day of the really hard core (apparently) chemo, and in two weeks I start on a weekly regimen of Taxol which is a less intense/less risk dangerous side effects drug than the two combined I've been doing. I am surprisingly lucid for the day after chemo, especially considering I basically slept two hours last night, but I'm not going to complain about it.

My only album client of the year now has their book in hand, so that's another worry gone.

Startorialist, which is a science (mostly space stuff and STEM advocacy) based fashion/accessories/toys enterprise that used to sell exclusively at astronomy conferences has gotten their online store up, and they still have some of my pieces left -- not everything they have is quite up yet, but should be soon, and what they have is mostly one-of-a-kinds. Almost everything they have is from indie artists, and is generally really cool.

My own online shop continues to languish in the land of good intentions, but especially as my health insurance *is* working properly with the out-of-pocket max, I'm not putting too much pressure on myself to get it actually work.

The kids hung out with me last night and peeled masking paper of that day's cuttings, which was nice on several fronts (I hate pulling off the masking paper, it's fiddly. The kids find it soothing.)

Ankle still sucks. Production is still slower than it needs to be for my upcoming shows -- I need to ship to Farpoint tomorrow, Pancakes and Booze is Saturday (and Tammy will be doing all my setup and teardown, thank goodness), NerdFaireCon is February 8th, and that's the one I need to do MASSIVE amounts of production for. I mean, I'm short on stock for absolutely everything, but that one needs ALL THE THINGS, and 75% of the things in question happen on the Glowforge. Which is really not meant to be a production machine. Whee!

The boot inflicts its own set of bruises, but the actual injuries bruises have faded.

I've got a completed prototype of a ring-style refillable journal/notebook that takes standard half-letter and Franklin Covey paper, and will have the FiloFax version done once I can get my hands on a sample piece of their paper to properly measure the holes. This one is MDF, but all the ones I actually sell will be wood. (MDF is $4/sheet. Laser-prepped wood is $11-$16/sheet. Scroll-saw supplier Baltic birch is cheaper, but I need to figure out what level of sanding and finishing it needs before I sell anything made with it, and that's not happening while I'm not allowed to stand for more than a minute or two.)



I'll probably switch to slightly smaller rings, but this is what I could access when a friend could take me erranding. The inability to go out and find things is possibly the most irritating thing about this (other than the pain, and the boot.) Normally to solve the filofax examplar problem, I'd just stop by the Goodwill after dropping Dan off at school. Now, I have to hope I find a friend who can mail me a sheet or two.

I did mail order a bunch of heavier paper and a heavy duty hole punch. Did you know you can easily pay $80 for a good, non-electronic hole punch? (I didn't. I did spend $40, though.)

I've got some hopes for the coming year, but I'm not setting specific goals/resolutions for the year. Instead I'm going to take my goal setting one month at a time - or maybe one fortnight, since that's apparently one of the magic numbers for getting a new habit to stick.

The entirely unflexible goal for January is getting the house ready for the puppy, which I expect will consume a huge amount of energy.

Business plans for the year, sure, but those aren't like resolutions, really, as how customers respond is a huge factor in where the plans should go, they are intrinsically malleable.

That said, in February I will be doing my first no-jewelry show in years (NerdFaire in Lynnwood; other people will have jewelry but I missed the cutoff), and I need to have a LOT of stock made to fill up my booth, and stock that will actually sell, so more coasters, and start getting jars done, and boxes and generally doing a ton of stuff with the laser cutter.

In retrospect I should have made sure I had good enough pictures to make a line sheet with before I sent the best of my current stock off to ConQuestKC. Uh. This may mean a couple of types of pieces aren't going to make it on the sheet, because I only have one left, or the ones that are left are ones that are slated for the clearance bin, and this needs to get to the folks I've been talking to, well, yesterday. Eesh.


Got a decent example set of bookmarks, though.

Even given the lightness of my show schedule, I clearly need to make a bunch of standard pieces, not just muck about with new paints and such.



Unrelated-ly, did you know that to apply for a passport, they want you to provide your ex-spouse's birth info plus your marriage and divorce dates? Which I only have the vaguest idea of. I mean, half the time for weird questions like this, I can just look back in my LJ, but I didn't start my LJ until July of 2001, and my divorce predates that by at least two years. My "proper" blog/journal at that time was on a domain that I let lapse long long ago, and don't know where I would I have an archive of still. The wayback machine had a little bit of it, which means I have retrieved this hilarious picture. I look like such a girl, OMG. I am not sure, but this might have been taken during/coming off from the therapy project of "It's freaking me out that people keep reading me as a guy, so I'm going to learn how to project femininity"

Which. Yeah. That sucked, both in the before and the after.

I'm putting together my box for the Arisia art show, and their database asks for the date of creation for the pieces. With the jewelry, that's easy -- all 2017 (even if I had much left from earlier, I won't send a jewelry piece to the same show twice.)  But I'm sending almost all the cards, because of how Arisia handles prints, so I had to look up the dates (by file time stamp, mostly) when the originals were completed. "How cities are born" was completed in 2009. I didn't show it at all until 2011, and that only once. 3 years ago, I printed it on metal for a lark, and now it's reliably my best seller. That's not the only work that lurked unseen for years, just the most egregious example of work I *should* have been putting out there. Remembering those years of just blankness in my art-making is making me melancholy. 

On a happier note, I was granted TWO panels at Arisia this year, so I am sending ALL THE THINGS. As in, I currently have 29 things entered into the database, and am pretty sure I can fit 15, maybe even 20, more. I've got a tray full curing upstairs that I will pick from tomorrow morning, and I might go back into my show stock and grab more bookmarks. I sadly only got one really dramatic necklace done, but for a while I thought I wouldn't even have that, so I am trying to be content with that.

Oh hell, how did it get to be 1 am? I still have cards to bag and jewelry to card.

I got imminently due album #2 90% done today and then the client stuck 5 more images into the source folder, but without a note as to what she wants done with them. Gah. I really, really, want all my album designs out the door by Friday morning, so they aren't on my mind when I go into art mode. 

I know I also did other things today, but other than driving O to and from Japanese I can't remember what they were. Bookkeeping? That there is still too much to do, and not enough brain to do it with.

Meetings with the school have been set up about getting O better set up with , so that's moving forward yay.

A set of weight "bars" that are between 1 and 5 pounds have arrived , which means I can properly start the kids on some strength training they both desperately need. Even unloaded, overhead pressing my (not full-size) barbell turned out to be just not something they can safely do yet, and it's too heavy to be useful, even if technically possible, for starting the other major lifts.

I have a sketchbook full of new statement piece designs but no time/place to even crank out more of the basics at the moment, though I have plenty enough stock that no one else could look at my table and think there are gaps. I am still hopeful I will have some done in time for GeekCraftExpo, though. Definitely I should have at least one spectacular thing to send to Arisia, in the worst case

This weekend is the first of my 5 holiday shows, with 4 being in a row and then there is one "off" weekend before the last:

• November 11: Artisans Harvest Fair, Snohomish (Thomas Family Farm)
• November 18: Pancakes & Booze, Seattle (El Corazon)
• November 24-35: GeekCraftExpo, Seattle (Magnuson Park Hanger 30)
• December 2: Cascade K-8 Winterfest, Shoreline (which includes a Scholastic Book Fair!)
  (pause for breath)
• December 16-17: Punk Rock Flea Market, Seattle

I'm probably not, given especially the last minute addition of PRFM, going to be getting stuff listed on artfire/etsy, so if you want to ask about what I have, just e-mail me. I have pulled all the earrings that are nickel-free alloys off the table now that I have enough stainless steel ones made, so they will go up online for sale in some form... sooner than the rest? Perhaps another instagram sale...

Lulu is starting to show her age a lot more; jumping up on/down from the bed has become a much more careful, multi-step process, and we are not convinced she still actually has much in the way of hearing. She is 18, so this isn't unexpected, but is also sad. She'll go in for her "super senior" checkup soon. In silver lining department, this does mean that I could actually get an aquarium now if I can just figure out a good place for it, since her jumping up on top to try and catch fishies clearly isn't going to be a thing anymore. (Scare them by sitting next to it, staring, and tapping on the glass is still well within her capabilities, though. Maybe the aquarium should wait some more .... )

( I am wibbling about Etsy. Feel free to skip. )Business is annoying. Marketing is stupid, I just wanna make stuff.

It's going to be a busy spring! I hope I see some of you at my local shows; Boston and Chicago will be only my work and not me, sadly. (Someday I will have a travel budget. But not this year. :) Pancakes & Booze and GIrls' Night Out are both evening shows, with booze and a festive vibe. . . .



Oh sure, my insta->LJ via ljmailpost fails silently for weeks and right after i whine about it publicly it starts working again? Hmph.

New! very small pendants and a fresh crop of rings, which will be appearing at the Cascade Winterfest this Saturday!


It should not be this hard for me to get through my skull that most people like small jewelry. Maybe it's because it's such a pain in the patootie to paint small (note paint-daubed toothpick.)