Justin Plays in Snow

Alas, our early music concert had to be canceled due to weather–I can drive in the light snow, but Atlantans can’t.

But there is a silver lining. Check out Justin Wigglebutt, my Labrakita, playing in the snow!

Shawl Pins

Recently a colleague who knits has been asking for shawl pins. The Universe works in strange ways, because just after I talked with J., Molten Muse posted a tutorial for shawl pins on Lampwork, Etc. Well, I had a couple of beads, and thought I would try it. Here’s the first one I did:

Here’s the second, a little shorter:

If this is what J is interested in, cool! I can definitely make her some.

From my Real Job

I don’t often talk here on this blog about my RL job, which is teaching history, among other subjects, to adult students returning to school. But last night was special. Last night we got very little done in my Crusades class. I spent a good part of the class showing the students how to put together a story from what they had read; as usual they were reading for facts, not connecting the ideas to an argument, and therefore feeling very, very lost. Part of the time they also prepared for a “TV NEWS’ style exercise in whcih one group compared the Second Crusade to the First, and another compared the Third tot he Second–not just events, but politics, motivation, purpose, etc. Most of my class time, however, was spent attending an authors’ reading from our new journal, Regeneration! A Journal of Creative Writing.

Regeneration! was a project generated by our adult students, and is the first journal in the country, we think, to emerge from an adult program. Some of the writing is raw, but all of it is impressive — and a lot of it packs a serious wallop. I saw my initially skeptical students start nodding their heads, some even crying. For our students to have discovered this kind of voice is truly powerful. These are people who have been told all their lives that they are stupid, or ordinary, or powerless. cut.”>

But here is their journal.

VARIATIONS on a HACKNEYED THEME:
Nature gets me once a month.
Husband gets me when he wants.
But Thursday mornings, I belong to Marcus.
Dreadful roar and hullabaloo!
Husband crackling, bristling, snorting:
Every manner of insult retorting,
Classifying my intentions
To ignore society’s conventions
among those same which, only latterly,
Motivated Lady Chatterley … (Karen Lacey; read the rest!)

WHO’S GOING TO TELL?

Who’s going to tell me
the joyous news today?
They proved my son is innocent
by testing DNA.

Who’s going to tell him
everyone was wrong?
I will go tell him myself
and change the flowers on his stone …

By Michael Ragland. Read the rest in Regeneration! A Journal of Creative Writing.

What SJ did with my beads!

I had a set of beads that I loved, but which languished unbought in my display, show after show. People were drawn to them, would pick them up and fondle them, would put them down slowly and regretfully–but never bought them. I was beginning to think that they were in fact made of chopped liver. This Friday, though, my colleague SJ saw them and fell head over heels in love, and so now I have my answer: they were waiting patiently for her, sending out subtle “I’m untouchable” vibes to everyone else while they waited for her birthday to come around. She’s had a particularly hard week, so I was so glad she found colours that made her heart sing.

And SJ made a beautiful necklace out of them, and loves them! I am so happy. You can see it here. It always makes me so happy–and humble!– when someone makes something pretty out of beads I have created. Thanks, SJ — you are such a sweetie!

Required Reading for Artists

People who work at home know that one of the biggest challenges comes from people who cannot understand that the teleworker cannot drop anything at a moment’s notice and visit a friend or relative. Because housework does have a certain degree of flexibility (though the idea that it is somehow not “real work” is wrongheaded in the extreme), the concept that anyone who does paid work at home actually has productivity quotas and fixed deadlines, and can’t be interrupted, seems impossible for many people to grasp.

I think some of it stems from the way work-at-home is popularly imagined, as consisting of “setting your own hours”, which to many seems to entail the work hours of Emerald City: “We get up at noon and start to work at one; take an hour for lunch and then at two we’re done, jolly good fun!” The perceptual problem is doubled when the work is artistic in nature. No matter how many times Stephen King publishes about his disciplined work hours, or artists write about the long hours, all people see is the latte break at two, and generalize from that to the artist’s entire day.

One problem with this perception that people who work at home, particularly those engaging in “art,” really do little or nothing is that art–rather like housework–is denigrated as a serious pursuit. Particularly if the art in question is craft in nature, it becomes something that “anyone” can do, and–again like housework–people feel that it is low-cost or even free. There is an added and fairly explicit set of gender stereotypes at play, as well. “Real artists”–often male–work in “serious studios” and can command large fees. “Crafters” are stereotypically female, working “for love,” with far less value being put on their work.

And these stereotypes carry over into the realm of pay. Over at Position: Relative there is a superb post, which takes articulate and pointed umbrage at the idea that artists, graphic designers, and (by extension) crafters should donate their work “for exposure” or just “for the joy of it” :

To those who are “seeking artists”, let me ask you; How many people do you know, personally, with the talent and skill to perform the services you need? A dozen? Five? One? …none?

More than likely, you don’t know any. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be posting on [C]raigslist to find them.

And this is not really a surprise.

In this country, there are almost twice as many neurosurgeons as there are professional illustrators. There are eleven times as many certified mechanics. There are SEVENTY times as many people in the IT field.

So, given that they are less rare, and therefore less in demand, would it make sense to ask your mechanic to work on your car for free? Would you look him in the eye, with a straight face, and tell him that his compensation would be the ability to have his work shown to others as you drive down the street?

Would you offer a neurosurgeon the “opportunity” to add your name to his resume as payment for removing that pesky tumor? (Maybe you could offer him “a few bucks” for “materials”. What a deal!)

Would you be able to seriously even CONSIDER offering your web hosting service the chance to have people see their work, by viewing your website, as their payment for hosting you?

The article is dead on target. Initially, I had some mildly snarky comments about the gendering implicit in this paragraph; neurosurgeons and mechanics do not have to be male. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that in some ways the famous, highly paid artists are often implicitly, though not at all accurately, popularly gendered as male, as are (still!) the highly-paid professions, despite a wealth of women doctors, lawyers, and other specialists. The lower-paid professions and artists are often gendered ‘female. How often does one hear men being referred to as “crafters”? In woodworking, yes (highly masculinized area, by the way), but not as much in other areas. In terms of the article’s comments on hiring a student, the one place where I would feel comfortable is in asking a student in an IT class to help on a website–IF the student was doing so as part of a class assignment. Even so, that student would get to use my website as part of his or her portfolio whether I used the site or not, and if the the student chose to withdraw permission for me to use his or her work, that would be acceptable.

Read the entire article, and if you are planning to buy beads, hire a graphic designer, ask for web services, have a chapbook made, or need any other artistic services, think about it long and hard. Crafters and artists, think about what your services and your skills are worth.

*Picture is a still from the 1939 MGM film, The Wizard of Oz.

Tales of Telephone Etiquette

I got a call this morning of a type that truly annoys me.  Someone called me, and when I answered, “Hello?” asked, without preamble, “How are you today?”  It was a male voice that I did not recognize.  After a startled moment, I said frostily, “May I ask who is calling?”  The man gave his first name only.  I replied, “I’m afraid I don’t know you.  May I ask your business?”  Finally the caller admitted that he was making cold calls from a list, trying to interest people in a new or used car–was I interested?  “No, thank you,” I said flatly. After requesting to be removed from his call list (he claimed that my number was on a list of numbers that had done business with his car sales company before, to which I replied that it must have been the previous owner of the number, and many years ago, as I did not recognize the business), we hung up.

Throughout the conversation the caller seemed off balance, as if he had expected the call to go another way.  He even suggested that I was not being friendly and cooperative.  No, I wasn’t, but I was being polite.  If you are a total stranger, and I know neither you nor your voice, and I can neither see you nor assess your purpose, why should I initiate a personal relationship with you merely because you have called me? I think people who do that think I will answer “Fine, and you?” reflexively, which sets up the expectation of a connection, and thus makes not listening to their sales pitch awkward. Sorry, guy. That approach may work with many people, but not with me.

The approach sometimes seems to assume that we are all sistren and brethren who only lack an introduction that can be remedied by the phone call; while we are all equal humans and on many levels *are* all sistren and brethren, the reality of the world is that I can’t see you and so you may be the local rapist for all I know. You may be a wonderful warm human being that I would be proud to know, but in a large city with personal crime on the rise, I also need to be wary.

I wonder if the caller had ever been trained in basic telephone etiquette? Did he not read the Richard Scarry books about manners as a child, or (if old enough) read them to his child?   I was raised to use the following conventions for making contact over the phone with people I don’t know, and I expect others to be similarly polite to me: “Hello, my name is X from [Insert either rescue group or university]. May I please speak with Ms. So and So?” Sometimes one adds [Short business], such as “I’m so and so’s foster; may I please speak with … ” or “I’m returning your call about Class #, may I please speak with … ?”  It may be formal, but it establishes who I am, how the person might know me (and how I got their number), and why they might want to listen to me.  Mind you, if I am calling a friend, all bets are off–but a cold call is not the same as calling a friend, and should not be treated as such.  But even when I am calling someone I know, but am not on a good-friends basis with, I identify myself.  “Hi, [Person X], this is [my name]; I’m calling about X / retuning your call, do you have a minute?”

Maybe I am a dinosaur, but I appreciate those people with lovely telephone manners!  If someone is trying to make a sale, phone manners are even more critical.  I am much more likely to listen to you if you are polite.  In the worst case scenario I will say “Thank you, but no thank you,” leaving you free to move on to your next call with dispatch.  If you display poor telephone etiquette, however, I will not only not purchase from you or donate to your cause, but I will boycott you for a year.

Buttons and Dots

I have been under the weather, and ironically though I have had time to torch, I haven’t felt like it — what energy I had was taken up with getting Mr. InvestiGator settled in his new home. He is doing very well–when I checked up on his new family, they said he has behaved well and is learning new rules. Apparently having three people all playing with him has worn him out!

However, I have decided to spend some time on skills building. Specifically, I thought I would use the example of Amy Trescott’s wonderfully precise rainbow beads as an inspiration to practice dots, which sound terribly easy but which take skill and practice. (Click here to go to Amy’s website, where you can buy these wonderful beads!)  Amy’s beads are basically stacked dots, transparent laid over white.  While she has written a specific tutorial for making these beads, she also was generous enough to post her basic method on Lampwork Etc., in message #74 on this thread.  (Please note that you must be a member of LE to see this thread.)  I haven’t purchased the tutorial, so I worked from Amy’s directions on the LE thread, plus what I know of stacked dots.

Here’s what I got.  By the way, I seem to have bunged up the settings on my camera, and keep getting too much noise in the finished picture.  I’m working with it, slowly!  Anyway, the first picture shows my dots in Moretti transparent.  I need to work on my dot placement and evenness.  The dots aren’t all the same size, and I am not completely covering the white base of each dot.  Time to get out “Passing the Flame” and do some of Corina’s basic exercises.  I don’t think I ever want to be a dot-bead person, but trying to become more precise and intentional will only help me improve my skills overall.

The second file is my attempt at dots with Gaffer Chalcedony, which has been described as “raku on steroids”.  Forgive the passive–I don’t remember who said it!  Anyway, it is one silver glass that I do plan to use a lot of.  Here I tried doing stacked dots with chalcedony.

Finally, I tried buttons. Anne Ricketts has a lovely tutorial on using Jelveh’s key mandrel to make buttons.  It is dead simple–the sort of thing you look at and say DUH — yet would never think up on your own!  Anne does fantastic buttons.  However, I made my first shanks too short, and instead of wasting the wire, thought that I could improvise with some locking haemostats.  I have plenty of them, thanks to my sister, That Frit Girl.  The advantage of haemostats is that I could make more than one button at a time, as I only have one key mandrel.  The disadvantage is that they are hard to twirl evenly   So I used a round marble mold to help me size and shape my buttons … voila.

Off to torch some more and practice.