Fishy Legs

Today is raining and anticipating that it would get a little colder at night when the sun set and that I would have to be here a little later today I packed a pair of tights in my bag. The same bag that I use to carry my lunch, my lunch that was fish soup. My lunch that has leaked a little bit in the bag.

So the question is now, is it going to be better to have cold legs when I go home or have legs that smell like fish.

I think I'm going for warmth. I might get a seat on the buss as well with my fishy legs.

One of those days

You know one of those days where everything you touch breaks, everything just goes pear shaped. Dropped stones, cut yourself while cooking, everything just builds to huge mountains of frustrations. I've had one of those this evening when I was trying to set some stones. So I give up...I snapped 7 leaves and 2 stones and my tooth hurts. I'm gonna go and watch project runway and eat Anzac biscuits instead.

Here is a pair of earrings I made earlier. I like the ear wires. They are good..the wrapping, well maybe I need to do some more practice.

Pitch

I have not been posting much lately as I have not been producing much lately as all I seem to have done is work things.

I did however sneak 10 minutes today at lunch to read this very interesting article about designing products that stick written by Megan Auman who designs and creates a range of different products, one of them being jewellery.

The first thing mentioned is how to work an "high level pitch" about your product. The basic statement of what you want your product to say and be. It gives you tips on how to achieve this.

I have such a problem with these kind of things. How can I make a high level pitch about my jewellery. What do I want it to say, communicate etc. I can't think like that. I feel stupid. I don't know what I want my jewellery to communicate, except that I want people to like it and think that the craftsmanship is good. Craftsmanship is probably the most important and good design...

how do you high level pitch that...

"Something that is well made and looks good", not so high level and not really a good pitch at all.

Round Kicking

They say that sometimes your greatest strength is your greatest weakness and for me that is so very true. I take things that I do very seriously, work and fun included. When I do things I like to think that I do them very passionately and I take great responsibility in the result.

At work this is good most of the time, except when I take things far to seriously and find it hard to focus on other things than just work.

This is my greatest strength but also my greatest weakness. In my free time the same rule prevails as I proved when I round kicked the clothes rack on the weekend because I wasn't able to wrap a present as nice as I wanted to be able to. (I told you I take things seriously).

I will now have to buy a new clothes rack as well as maybe rethink my serious strategy and mix up a little fun within it. As for this weekend I'm off to the country for a conference and who knows maybe my round kicking skills will be usefull in the team building events.

One of those weeks

I has been a very busy and slightly confusing week, a lot of things has happened and I've not got a lot of stuff done except work. The work week culminating with me going with my boss to a gig in proper feral pub in Balmain. The music was good, Even I could tell that technically the guys who where playing (the name I can't remember) where very good. They had a hugely loyal fan base, it was some kind of 10 year reunion thing happening. The music was some kind of blues rock, I had to leave after a while, once I had heard one to many songs about sad women and driving cars I was out.

There where so much singing about driving in a car. I find these old men bands quite disturbing. It's all songs about leaving, being left and driving. Not very environmental at all, if you ask me.

Fun things I entered into a advertising space competition last week, and I won some add space at another blog which was really cool. Here is the link to my entry.

you can see my little add square that is at the top on this entry to the right, half way down the page. I think I'm going to have to ask someone I know who is good at design to help me make a professional looking ad.

I'm working on a ring for Mr T:s mothers friend, the ring is all but finished. All that is left is setting the stone. But I'm not gonna have time to do that until 2 weeks from now. Next weekend I have an conference with work. I have to go to out of the city and participate in team building activities. I don't know. There will be bugs there, I'm really not keen on bugs.

Music musings

I've got around to list two new things in my webshop this week. I was going to try to list something every day but I got very busy on Monday night with work dinner and such things.

Tonight Mr T put on a music channel on TV while cooking and I realised it such a long time since I've been watching music videos. I love music videos, I actually really like music. Eventhough I have quite appaling taste according to some.

But I realised I lost music in my daily life since I stopped going to the gym. I don't have a radio, spotify doesn't work here and I just haven't got around to focus on it. I hardly ever update my Ipod if it's not songs suitable for running.

Good music makes you really happy, I had totally forgot that. How scary is that.
Good music and good coffe qualify as things under 3 dollars that make you really happy. But now a band came on the tv which was rubbish that makes me remeber that shit music is enraging. Tricky business this music malarky.

To-Do

Last weekend I went to the library and borrowed another batch of books and I found a book by a very entertaining author calledMike Gayle with the Title the To-Do list. I didn't at the time that the book was a non fiction book as I didn't read the back of it. I choose cause it fit the colour theme of the week (white cover) and I recognised the name.

Mike Gayle has written loads of books, they are good books, entertaining books. If you want books for entertainment you can not fault them.

The To-Do list is a non fiction book about when he made a To-Do list of 1277 items that he needed to get done to become a fully fledged adult and the year that he took do it. The items differs from sorting out junk drawers to loosing weight and making a family tree.

I am myself a list maker, I make lists for everything, shopping lists, food lists, training lists, things I want lists, birthday present lists for me that I want, birthday present lists for what to buy for others, send card lists, activity lists etc etc...if anything that is to be done is not on my list, it will not get done. Ever. Hence the list, and the ticking of items.

I start every Saturday (most often Friday afternoon) a list of things that I want to get done this weekend. And this weekend on my list there was
1.Finish all photographs of jewellery
2.Edit photographs - you can see I have done this as I've added them to this post.
3.Write Item Descriptions for web shop.
4.Buy groceries
5.Recycle
6.Buy a treat, Jeans...
7.Make earrings

So far I've ticket everything except 5 and 7.

So in fitting with this list making theme, I was thinking maybe I should make a master list. One big list of all those things that I want to do, finish off or start. And keep that list handy,





I think I will investigate if you can put a to do list on the blog, That will go on my list of things to do on Monday lunch time.

Perfect – when done is better then perfect

I have a tendency to want things to be just perfect. This causes some issues since wanting things to be perfect has a way of making things take a lot longer. Take yesterday for example, I was going to photograph all the new jewellery I have made so I can list them in my webshop. So far I’ve taken 600 photographs, there are only 7designs and I haven’t photographed the last 3 pendants yet. That is 600 times I thought that the photos I took weren’t good enough.

Now I understand that this is a few to many photos of each thing. I get that, but I just really want to take photographs. Or more like it, I want the photos to be perfect, I want them to look like they are taken by a professional. Completely ignoring the fact that I am not a professional photographer, I do not have a photo studio (just a little home made light box), I do not have a graphic design degree or a proper photo editing software program. But still I want my photos to look like they would fit in on the sites of the famous jewellery houses.

I guess the problem is not that I want it to be perfect per se. The problem is that the requirement leads to procrastination. It took me about a year to get the first lot of photographs up. I think I probably took a couple of thousands photos that I’ve discarded but not deleted (thank good for the 1 terabyte of external memory my dad bought me a couple of years ago)

So I have to have a new strategy, the old one doesn’t work. It takes to long to get things put up in the shop, and if it’s not in the shop I guess I can’t really sell them hu!.

So I’m giving myself 1 more hour to take the rest of the photos, and then another 2 hours to edit, crop and white balance them. Then I give myself another 2 hours on Saturday to write the descriptions.
And I also decided that I have to decide that it’s ok that I’m not a perfect photographer and maybe instead look for a friend who are.

I will have to see that DONE is better then perfect sometimes.

Other more exiting news. I sold another Pendant. This one, and that made me a very happy bunny.


I also decided that I will give first time buyers a voucher for 10% of their next purchase as a swag. I have even made lite vouchers I send in the parcels. They are very sweet

Remember Green

Remember this green wax mould that I made for my first wax carving class. Well it looks like this now. It's all grown up and made of silver now.
And it got a sister ring, that I actually prefer to the first one. This one was actually just me trying out filing straight lines in wax. The technique is quite different as wax is so very much softer it's hard to get sharp edges. But here you go, one ring full of edges.
Here they are together. They are both rather solid pieces, and I haven't decided if I want to polish them all shiny or leave this course texture they come in when they come out of the casting. I think the matt finish kind of makes them a little different.
I wont be making many things this week. I have developed really bad RSI in my right arm/wrist so I can't use it properly. Everytime I try to grip anything it feels like someone is pouring hot fire inside my right arm. So this week the arm will rest and I will focus on photographing the things I made. I far better quality then the above photos I hope.