Barbara S Fernald Jewelry

I can’t help it. Island living is fine for buying jewelry supplies from a catalog, but when I actually get out of town I try to go through Freeport,  because it’s a blast to spend some time at the Beadin’ Path.  I usually have about a half hour to spare and my mind goes into design overdrive as I try to imagine what I will need to buy for future projects. Their inventory is  colorful and diverse, and I feel so much more creative in that moment of spending! It makes the rest of the drive, back to wherever, go very quickly. This time there were some resin beads that I had not seen before.

If only I had unlimited time to create,  I would love to try making my own funky shapes of resin beads. (and I would like to try lamp working, and I would like to know more about beading with seed beads, and I would like to get back to doing something really different with polymer clay….) I mentioned something to this effect as the sales person was ringing up  $200 MORE that I had planned to spend. She looked at me oddly and said, “you mean you’d like to know how to make every kind of bead in the store, and then use it?!” Um, yeah. In a perfect world maybe. Oh those ideas that percolate for “some day…”

I’ve already started a necklace of the orangey flat resin beads, the triangular shaped bluish beads and the deep rose round beads, mixed with some pearls. I think a double strand, knotted, would make a striking necklace to wear with a white shirt and jeans.

I’m ready to get down to work, but we’re headed for Baltimore on Thursday. We’ll get to stay with our son Robin and his fiancée Stephanie, and we’ll met up with her parents Tim and Cathy. It sounds like fun and I’m happy to go. (I’ll be bringing a sketch book for the jewelry ideas that come flying at me, knowing that I will really have some good time available in the studio at the start of February.)

Don’t forget a stop at Nomads on Commercial Street. My sister-in-law Kelly Fernald is having a great sale right now and she’ll be getting in some great stuff for spring. (Woo hoo! Click on the Nomads link in this post. Kelly took a dip on the island last week!)

During our recent weekend together, Susie and Cathleen bought new hats!

Brenda and I were wearing our very warm and stylish down coats, purchased recently right here at Nomads.

…if anyone else ever feels like they are in some weird application process to write copy for a J.Peterman Catalog, when they are trying to come up with descriptions for their Etsy page?

Making just a bit more progress today before going away for the weekend. Today’s posts on Etsy were easier to make than my first attempts last night. It helped to start taking photos earlier in the day and to have good light. As for the “J. Peterman” part…I have to admit, I kind of like it.

Etsy has been hanging over me for a while now. I kept putting off taking the plunge, due to self doubt about my ability to get just the right photos and my ability to still be excited about the work I did a month or two ago, or my ability. Period. I also felt like I had to have enough pieces to make them worth listing without looking like a lame little shop of three items.

Well, tonight I have fulfilled one of my big New Year’s resolutions, and my ETSY shop is underway with a whopping 3 items! Yes, it is a big learning curve. I realized that I have quite a few pieces to list and I worked on writing some descriptions this afternoon. Then I took some photos before the light was gone. I’m not especially happy with the background that I used, but hey, I don’t have to use it next time. I’ll learn. As I nervously listed my first item, and moved on the the photo upload section, again a photo snafu. My photographs were too big. Too many pixels. I needed to resize. WHAT?? I could find nothing in my iPhoto program that said anything about resizing. Argh. On to Photoshop, with which I am much less familiar, and I finally figured out how to resize my photos to fit the Etsy format. By the time I got to the third pair of earrings I was getting the hang of it. It was taking less time. The hard part now will be not to read and reread and judge every little thing I have written. To just keep moving forward with conviction.

It is a little like our Dip of the Month Club here on the island. You can’t think about it too much before going in the water, or you’ll never be brave enough to go in. Especially in January, February, or March.

These photos were actually taken in January, 2 years ago, but 4 of us just went for our January 2010 dip last week. The water was about 40º. Everyone in this photo has been going in for a dip, once a month, for over 7 years. It still cracks us up!

While I was busy jumping in to Etsy tonight, my dear friend Holly was taking the plunge into our “rivet challenge.” She has succeeded with a truly inspiring pendant using tube rivets. Wow, Holly! Bring on more rivets! Your designs never cease to amaze me.

One of the first things I did today was to finish sorting out and bagging up the scrap metal from my studio overhaul. It was like a treasure hunt going through bags like this:

Really old designs I had put high on a shelf, out of sight, out of mind. Unsold earrings from a different time in my life. What a relief to let them go!

In some of my “sort” drawers there were things like tiny sterling silver spring rings. Findings purchased ages ago, when silver was $7 an ounce. Like clothing in a closet that hasn’t been worn for  years, I was ruthless in ridding myself of things I no longer needed or wanted to find a way to use. The result was 40 ounces of silver scrap and 8 ounces of silver with some gold keum-boo. I also came up with one ounce of gold which included someone’s gold tooth crown (?!), a gold pin from a boyfriend I dated almost 40 years ago, and have not worn in almost as long, and snips of gold wire and sheet scraps I have saved over the years. I sent them all in to Rio Grande for refining and they will give me 75% of the value in credit. I know how I am going to pay for my next PMC order!!

As I get back to work, the snippets, scraps, and rejects will start to gather again in the little dishes around my studio. But today, seeing the bare surfaces of these little plates and bowls was a lucrative treat!

I finally have room to turn around in my creative space, and show you that it really was possible to find some order in all of the previous chaos. It took all week (minus two days when I had to be off the island) but it was so worth it.

Behind the door, a spot for paperwork, box and mailer storage.

That poster on the wall is a satellite shot of the coast of Maine so I know where to find my tiny island home in case I ever feel lost. Little Cranberry Island is only a mile by a mile and a half, but it can still be seen from space!

The work area for stringing beads and assembling earrings, etc.

A clean surface to begin the 2010 metal clay work.

That’s it.  360º of improvement in an 8 by 10 foot room. Phew.  All of those little drawers? About 60% sorted and labeled. This is the only room in the house where it would be okay to be out of sorts.

Ugh!

But when I am finally done, I’ll have a sweet little workspace with lots of potential.

…but not yet, After.

A clean studio was not even on my resolution list, and yet in such a tiny room, tossing and organizing are essential to getting back to work.  I have not done such a thorough job in years. No wonder it has taken me three days to get 2/3 of the way through. I’ll be so psyched when I can finally post the results of this new year clean sweep!

Studio as closet/hiding place/catch-all during the holidays:

I clear one space, only to fill the area with temporarily put things from the other places I am clearing:

Maddening but solvable, kind of like this:

On the first day of the  year.

Past the last of the rose hips.

to the end of the island.

Happy New Year!

New Year’s Eve is one of my favorite days of the year. I transfer important dates from my old calendar to my new one, giving me a mini review of all the dinners, appointments, visitors, workshops, and other activities from last year. I can remember why it was so hard to breathe in July and August when there were so many things to do and people to see that there was no room to add more more without covering up the day’s tide chart. I look back at the good times and the bad. I take some time to remember the people who are no longer with us and think of something about them that makes me smile. I love seeing the news programs with their flashbacks. Like looking at last year’s calendar, the images compressed into 3 minutes of air time, is a memory vitamin.

On New Year’s Eve  I look forward to all of the things I hope to do in the next year. My resolutions this year are all art-related, exciting.  They do not feel like a weight to shed in the next few months, but a path to take with my eyes wide open. (Though I do plan to lose the holiday pounds that I so enjoyed putting on.)

1. I will make many, many of my own clasps for necklaces and bracelets, so I can abandon my habit of using commercial clasps on pieces that are otherwise all my own design.

I have been reading these books a lot in the last few days. So inspiring. Especially the Kate McKinnon book which has changed the way I look at working with metal clay. When I clean my studio this weekend for a fresh 2010 start, I will make my metal clay area so much cleaner than it has been in the past, stop relying quite so much on sanding before firing,  and I’ll wear a mask when I fire something with a torch. Now that I’ve learned to wait for results, from the longer firing times for bronze and copper clay, I’ll have no trouble waiting while firing my silver clay for 2 hours at 1650º, going for maximum density and strength. And, I’ll be fusing those fine silver jumprings.

2. Speaking of bronze and copper clay, I have so much more to try and to learn. I will be guided by the excellent books and generous blogs of Hadar Jacobson. (And by everyone else who so readily shares their metal clay experiences.) Hadar’s newest book is amazing.

3. I will take the time to photograph and write descriptions of my work so that I finally have my Etsy shop up and running. This is my only resolution with a deadline: A shopping link from this Website/blog by the end of January. Definitely. No excuses.

4. More writing. Maybe something on a daily basis so that it’s not so hard to come up with a column every month for the Working Waterfront. And more poetry. Just for the fun of it.

5. Follow up on the oil painting workshop I took from Henry Isaacs and Ashley Bryan in September. Color is calling to me via painting and polymer clay. On a whim, I ordered this book by  Linda Huanani and Maggie Maggio to inspire me to get back to some polymer clay ideas. Holy cow! I did not know how much I did not know about  understanding the three properties of color: hue, value, and saturation. This book is filled with exercises in blending colors of polymer clay. I stayed up very late last night looking through it for the first time. If I started at the beginning and worked my way through all the exercises in the book, I would have a wonderful source of color information that would apply to both polymer clay and oil painting.

Just the “pivot tile” exercise alone would teach me a lot about color. By taking one color of  polymer clay from the package, then mixing it with a warmer color and a cooler color to get hue variations; then taking those three hue variations and tinting them each with white and black to get value variations; and then muting each of the three hue variations with gray to get saturation variations, you make a pivot tile. The ratios are all described in detail in the book. I can try a similar exercise with oil paint.

Mixing color scales to have a sample of color flow is another enticing exercise.

From start to finish, my course in color could take a long time, but what a resource to have! There is definitely no deadline to this New Year’s resolution.