I'm just about through the big first-of-the-year administrative duties in the club. There are some leftover duties with a longer deadline that I have been putting off. For instance, purging jewelry. Just mine, of course, as everybody with stuff for sale in the store has to take care of their own. We have a club rule that items get two years being in the store, all other obligations being met. Between Jan. 1 and Feb. 28, everything unsold dated 2020 and earlier has to be pulled out by the artist. (Hey, we're artists! Who knew?)
I have a lot of stuff in the store. so for me I go around to the different cases, find things I recognize, and check the items' numbers against my cards for before/after the OK date. Right now, any of mine with an item number of 475 or less goes home with me, after some paperwork and a witness. (I'm in the upper 600s now. Busy year last year.) I pretty much know what styles I was using back then, so I look for those first. If the numbers are in that range, it gets pulled. If not, I put it back in the case, displayed to its best advantage of course. I've made it through the revolving earring cases, the front window, the back wall cases, and the far end where copper hides out. That has taken parts of two days. It's labor intensive. It's always done during a day when I'm there for other things as well, so there's a limit on my energy and patience for the task. It's one of the reasons we don't demand everybody does it in a week. Another reason is waiting to the end of February gives our snowbirds a couple months extra in the few months they are here.
Sometime this next week, if given time because of another busy schedule, I'll go through the silver jewelry cases. After that is when I'll finally pull the last of the cards for old stuff and go through them, one item at a time, trying to match my often incomprehensible description with the specific piece needing pulling. It's the hardest part, so that's why I start with recognizing my own stuff first. Those cards then go to the person in charge of deleting the items from inventory on the computer.
With all that needing to get done, I haven't been teaching any workshops, even after completely recovering from the "December virus", whatever is was (not covid). Part of me has been itching to make new stuff, play with new ideas, put in new stuff to sell. Once everything is back home of the old stuff, I can go through it and see what changes / improvements are possible before resubmitting it to try again. No sense wasting it all. Some pieces are set aside for giving away instead. Steve is now wearing a leather and copper cuff that either didn't attract anybody or not the person with the right sized wrist. All my other ones sold. Some things in retrospect were priced wrong, or poorly executed, or just plain embarrassing as a bad idea. Some will have parts recycled and others tossed as scrap, though sterling scrap is meticulously collected for exchange/sale to the company which sent it originally. That bottle is getting pretty heavy now.
Most improvements have to wait. It's not just time and energy. Some of it is simply cost. I tend to use up supplies needed to make multiples of a project I'm fascinated with for a while. New sterling ear wires are an example. I tend to make earrings till I'm out of ear wires, and even wholesale they cost by the pair. I have lots of copper ones left but I don't use those much any more.
Perhaps I should. I taught a workshop a couple months back on a particular style of earring, made two pairs along with my students, both because they needed to see it being done, and becuase one pair is never enough to really teach some techniques. Mine were submitted for sale and didn't make it into the cases for display but got sold within the club first. Copper, green "seaglass" beads and dark green crystals on handmade headpins sure were pretty in the herringbone wrap over the large bead. I'd been sitting on those parts for a couple of years, used some in the workshop, getting no pay for them, so it was gratifying to get such quick sales for mine. I have enough supplies to make more pairs.
Sterling wire is another story. It's way more expensive than copper, and I tend to buy it by need-plus-extra for mistakes. I get more for a pair of earrings but sell fewer of them. Meanwhile what isn't getting used and sold promptly tarnishes quickly down here. Everybody says it's all the sulphur in AZ air. Whatever the cause, unused sterling needs to be in a sealed plastic zipper bag. If I buy a lot ahead, it just costs me money to let it sit.
Ironically, the wire I need a lot more of right now is copper. Really cheap. I've emptied two full spools in less than a year, and am nearly out of a third. It's been getting used both in my Christmas Tree Challenge (1st place!!!) and in wind chimes. I tend to make a lot of mistakes in wire wrapping the separate glass pieces, have to cut it off and throw it away because you can't re-use tightly curled wire and have it look like anything good. The first thing one learns in working with metals is that they cannot be unbent. So don't bend them wrong, or just toss and start over. It's the main reason we teach in copper and hone our skills before graduating to sterling.
In my case, certain of my skills are pretty good. I've developed better ways of wiring each piece of glass as I've made the wind chimes so they hang and swing freely, as well as looking reasonably decent. But the problem, or at least my problem, is that I get distracted. It might be the TV. It might be nothing at all except my concentration on making the pattern just so and have it all wound around perfectly... except for the part about forgetting it's supposed to hook into this other piece of wire in exactly this place and order.
Oops. Snip. Toss. Cut another piece.
That's going to be an issue again when I'm teaching that workshop. The glass cutting and getting the wires in the glass as an alternative to drilling holes in the glass... all that's the easy part. But I will also be showing different ways of hooking pieces together and to their top piece, whatever they choose for that to be. I even will teach a way to make a glass top piece. In that process I'll be distracted by everything: conversations, questions of every step of the process and what other possibilities are, and interruptions by everybody else in the club at the time because we do not have a separate room with a door that closes that we can hold workshops in, since those classes can use any and every other bit of equipment and procedures used in the entire club. Everybody is constantly interrupted, whatever they are doing, more so if you are a club officer who's supposed to know everything. However, if you are using a rock saw or the torches, people do tend to hold back and wait for a sensible time to interrupt.
I've still got several wind chimes to make for myself and lots of glass pieces to do it with. I'm really going to need more wire!
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