Spirit Dancer Art

The winter months tend to be the time I clean up from the post-holiday rush, prepare my taxes, order new supplies, and come up with the new year’s business plan. It is also the time that I use to experiment and try new things.

For some reason this year has been more difficult to do the latter & I am not sure why. It could be that other areas of my personal life are sapping my energy, for instance, I am a first year coach for my son’s Odyssey of the Mind team.

I think my bigger fear, and probably any artist’s fear is that I have gone stale. I think we artists, regardless of our genre, ask “have I lost my ability to create?” At certain times during the year I get so into production mode that “playing” just needs to take a back seat. It is sometimes hard for me to switch gears.

I need to remember that it is okay to fail. I need to remember that I will ruin pieces and have kiln mishaps on the way to learning & discovering something new.

Yet I can be resistant to allowing that failure to happen. I wonder if it is the business person in me that sees each piece of unusable glass as overhead waste. I wonder if it is the organized, Type-A part of my personality that just won’t let go. I wonder if it is a sense of panic of whether I’ll have enough time for “production” if I spend too much time dilly-dallying & being wasteful.

And yet, I know that I MUST continue to press forward, and remind myself that failure it okay. Children don’t think about failing, they just create and play and “run” with whatever they produce.

And so today, in the spirit of a child, I have forced myself to do the same. I have allowed myself to set aside some glass and some time and just “play” regardless of what the outcome will be. Yes, I am a bit anxious because one piece of glass is just gorgeous. But today I hope that the beautiful glass that I put into the cocoon of the kiln will tranform itself into something even more beautiful and previously unimaginable.

Here’s to butterflies and tomorrow.

What a whirlwind spring & summer it was. I recently finished 5 straight weeks of shows, most multi-day events. It was great to be back out meeting customers, getting feedback & just enjoying the face-to-face portion of running this business.

While I was doing that I was also busy restocking my retailers so they were prepared for the summer buying season. In addition to my existing retailers I was happy to welcome a few more, thus making my jewelry more accessible to my customers.

Since returning home after July 4th, I have been busy with behind the scenes tasks. Bookkeeping, ordering supplies, cleaning my glass shop, kiln washing shelves, and beginning to fire the kiln once again to start the process of replenishing my stock.

I also hope this time is one of “regeneration”. That is my term for taking all those ideas that have been floating around in my head and letting them incubate in order to determine how to take a thought or idea and make it a reality.

To outsiders this may seem like an unproductive time for an artist. But I think it is one of the most critical elements to staying creative. This time of outwardly “non-doing” actually involves a lot of internal “doing”. It’s the time artists, regardless of their medium, work thru problems they’ve been mulling over.

I used to encounter this when I painted, and I encounter it now in my glass work. I can only hope this “downtime” allows me to come up with something new that is not only appealing to my customers but also fun for me as well.

I’ll keep you posted.

I have just finished packing for my return flight home from the annual Glass Craft Expo in Vegas. I can not wait for my new “toys” to be delivered and to let some ideas congeal in my brain after an intense week.

Here are some things I learned. First, regardless of your trade, find a great trade show in your industry and attend it. There is nothing more awesome than to be swimming in a sea of people just as enthused as you are about your trade.

Of course there will be deals to be found as evidenced by my need to ship multiple packages back home since I FAR exceeded my airline’s weight restrictions.

If your trade show offers workshops or lectures, be sure to attend. Both last and this year I attended as many as I could. It makes for an exhausting week but one to be sure to get the creative juices flowing.

Both years I not only attended classes specific to fused dichroic glass jewelry but also ones that touched on other aspects of glass art. On the surface this may seem like a waste of time, energy, and money, but at least for me it affords me the ability to cross-pollinate and possibly learn one thing that applies to one area of glass art and turn the idea on its head to see how it’d work for my applications.

Finally, in every class I attend, I make a new connection or learn a ” trick of the trade” that might not have had any direct connection to the class material.

It is with a fresh palate of toys and ideas that I leave Vegas and I look forward to my return at the 2010 convention.

Just a quick update as I have begin packing for my upcoming trip to Vegas for the annual Glass Art Convention and wanted to see if I could blog from my phone. I look forward to my second glass convention and will let you know how it goes.

I just completed my 1st home show of 2009 & I am happy to say it was a success in many ways. In order to market my wares, I have retailers that carry my jewelry line & I also participate in a number of juried art shows. At some point I will also sell on-line but there are many mental hoops I need to jump thru before I am ready to do so. If a customer emails me directly I will work with them to find them the perfect piece of jewelry. For now, that has worked just fine.

However, since I began this business, I have also marketed my jewelry thru doing home shows. I always find them to be fun, relatively stress-free events. Set-up is minimal compared to setting up a booth for a show, and the risk of shoplifting is extremely low. Plus, there is always a friendly crowd, most of whom are in the buying mood.

But most of all I enjoy doing home shows because most hostesses opt to donate their cut of the sales to a worthy cause. Some, of course, want to use their credit toward merchandise & that is just fine by me. However, many choose to donate their portion of the sales to a worthy charity, such as an American Cancer Society Relay for Life team.

I always leave these shows feeling like a win-win. I have made some sales, people have walked away with new jewelry either for themselves or for a gift, and a worthy organization has just been helped as well.

I try to use the slower months of the year to work “behind the scenes” on my business. Sticking with that theme, today I attended a marketing class offered by the PA Guild of Craftsmen in Lancaster, PA.

As an MBA, I have had a good deal of business theory exposure, but I figured it never hurts to have a refresher & possibly learn something new. Plus, this class was geared especially to artisans & crafters which is a unique marketing subset.

I thought today’s class was interesting & left perhaps not necessarily learning a lot of new material, but having my suspicions confirmed/affirmed when it comes to marketing art to the general public.

Especially in the tough economic times we are currently in, there is a definite hurdle to jump to get people to want to open their wallet and invest in handmade, American-made craft.

In my case, I am lucky because my price point is such that it allows folks to still splurge in smaller ways versus having to dip deeply to invest in, say, a legacy painting.

Perhaps I am an eternal optomist, or perhaps it is just the sunny day we had, but I do hope that with spring will come a new sense of confidence in the economy & a greater willingness of the public to once again invest in American handicrafts.

In the meantime, I will use this winter lull to brush up on business skills, work thru the necessary paperwork that comes with managing a business, and best of all experiment with the kiln.

On that note, the kiln is fired up now & I look forward to seeing the final result in the morning.

Hello World – My wonderful web designer uploaded Word Press for me onto my website so I have now moved into the 21st century and can blog to my heart’s content. It may take me a bit to come up the learning curve but I look forward to beginning to let you know what is going on in my world of creating fused dichroic glass jewelry. I will just need to learn to switch my brain from artist mode to cyber mode, but I look forward to beginning to walk down this new path. Stay tuned for more updates.