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

Here’s the second, a little shorter:

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

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.

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!

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.

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.

Gator and his new family will get to learn about training each other   I think they will be very happy!

I’ve had Gator since October, though … and the house seems very, very empty.  Gator has a lot of personality!  Justin is moping around.  On the one hand, he gets all my attention, and all the bones, and he can have his plushie toy basket down on the floor again without worry that every toy will be ripped to shreds within hours.  On the other hand, he and Gator have dog-piled for months, and Justin is missing his friend!

Then we (me, Gator, and Justin) went on to the Brook Run dog park.  There Justin found other dogs happy to chase him around the park, and Gator found every tennis ball and had me throw it.  He behaved well with the other dogs, and several people commented on what a handsome, happy young man he was.  Finally I tired him out … for a while.  You know, when I first saw these plastic ball throwers I thought they looked like such a waste of good money.  With Gator, though, I got one … just to see.  Oh, they are worth every penny!  I can throw a lot farther with them than I can without, and have another ball ready to go the minute Gator gets back with the first one.  I can also throw balls a lot longer, and (miracle of miracles!) don’t have to pick up the nasty, dirty, filthy, slimy, slobbery ball.  It’s good for both of us.

Gator, however, doesn’t just want to play.  He is a total lovebug, and sticks close to me.  Justin goes off and does his own thing much of the time, coming in to check on me now and then.  Gator has to be *right* with me.  After we came home I settled in to work, and while I was setting up the Blackboard sites for my classes, Gator lay quietly at my feet, now and then chewing his Kong.  When I was cooking dinner, of course Gator had to be in the kitchen.  When I was torching, however, he was still right next to my chair.  I cannot go to the toilet without canine supervision, and he lay curled up in my tiny bathroom while I took a shower.  He’s now on the bed (I gave up) sleeping right on my feet.

Young labs are energetic, and they take work — but I can tell you that Gator is going to give whoever adopts him a wonderful reward, in the form of a happy, loving, sweet-tempered boy.  If the last three months are any indication, I can tell you that Gator will  just become better and better.  When I first began to foster Gator, I had to feed him in his crate–he would eat anything at supersonic speeds, and would not leave Justin any food at all.  Now, Gator polishes off his own bowl, but as long as Justin is eating, he lets Justin eat in peace.  Gator is a good, sweet, smart boy.  He may not have pretty feathers, like a Golden, but he is a beautiful, elegant boy in his own right, and he so desperately wants a real Forever Home.