IT'S RANT TIME!!

I've talked about this a lot, because it's something I feel very passionate about. I'm going to talk about it more because it just keeps happening. No one seems to learn. Rantiness follows the jump.

I'M NOT MAD I'M JUST DISAPPOINTED

Dog 'stache!

One of the nurses my mom works with made a custom order! I got to paint a horse for the first time and I'm actually pretty proud of the way it turned out. Especially considering that the space I had to work with is pretty small and the brush I had to use was NOT the one I would have preferred. I'll snap some pictures before I send it out tomorrow! It's going to be a Christmas present for a 6 year old. I hope she'll love it.

I've got a gallon resin coming in the mail on Thursday! That's pretty freaking sweet. Also my mother is sending me a whole box of yarn, my ski boots, and some cash to do my Christmas shopping with. I'm so grateful I have a family that helps and cares. This might seem a little weird but I really appreciate that my mother is perfectly OK with giving me money to buy her a Christmas present. I do hope that this is the last year I'll have to spend someone else's money for Christmas. It means a lot that she understand how tight money is, but that I still want to give presents. I just wish I had enough yarn to make everyone in my family hats or something. I need to buy something for my friend who's coming to visit right after Christmas! I want to get her something that really reminds me of her. I'll do some looking as soon as I have a little $$.

Jon has asked me not to bake anything for a bit. He doesn't like having tempting yummies around the house all the time and I understand why. He lost 100lbs in a year and he doesn't want the temptation of cupcakes and brownies all the time. So I'm gonna cool it with the sweets. I should make some bread or something instead! I'll go back to baking sweets when my friend is here and we can pig out on cupcakes!

A pretty serious bitchfest follows so I want to keep that a little more optional...

NEW LISTINGS

I just put up a bunch of new stuff in my Etsy shop! Go check it out, tell me what you think maybe? Epoxyuponyou.Etsy.com

MORE NEW JEWELRY!

I just updated my Etsy shop with two new pieces! I've got some more waiting in the wings but I don't want to upload all the goodness at once. Gotta spread out the sugar consumption, yanno? check out the listings for more info on each! Here & Here

And now for some news: I've been SICK for the last three days! It BLOWS. It all started innocently enough with feeling a little dizzy and being all full of sneezes. It progressed to a full blown can't-breathe-head-hurts-gonna-die-nose-dripping-constantly viral ATTACK on my body. SUCKS! I'm starting to find my way out of the woods though. The congestion has moved from my head to my chest and I know I'll be coughing up all kinds of gross stuff any day now. I have that tight feeling like my lungs are stuffed full of mucus and it's getting in the way of oxygen. Not fun. But at least my nose has stopped leaking constantly! THIS IS IMPORTANT INFORMATION FOR YOU TO KNOW. Got it?

Thankfully I have an amazing boyfriend who made me tea and rubbed my very sore neck. He's been keeping me company while I've been couch bound. He hasn't even minded me whining and being all pathetic. It's so sweet and it's another of the many, many reasons I love him. Jon is a wonderful guy. So glad I have him! I would have been MISERABLE without him here. I was pretty unhappy and grouchy anyway but it would have been x1000 without my baby.

On a more random note our cat just turned one and he's been celebrating by being a jerk! He's always knocking shit over, chasing his tail as LOUDLY as possible and attacking the dog while she's sleeping. It's cute when he chases his tail but not at 4AM while crashing all around the house! He's also bee knocking things off the dresser/table/sink to bat them around on the floor. Always as loudly and early in the morning as possible. He's an evil little kitty. If he weren't so cute we would have turned him into kitty sausage by now!

Tomorrow we're going to our friend Jack's for football (BLEH! XP) and homemade chili (YUM)! Jack is a professional chef - and a good one - so it's sure to be some excellent chili. I'm going to be making cornbread to go with!

Speaking of baking I'm going to be making chocolate cookies with peanut butter and white chocolate chips. They're gonna be AWESOME! The cookie dough is chilling in the fridge. Once we're done dinner (which is salmon, fried shrimp, and mashed sweet potatoes, FUCK YEAH!!!) I'm gonna bake those bad boys up! :9 We always have such excellent food for two people who aren't trained in cooking or baking other than liking to eat! :9 :9 :9 :9

NEW JOB AND NEW JEWELRY!

I GOT A JOB Y'ALL! Urban Outfitters called today and offered me a job as a sales associate. So I'll be folding clothes, helping people find sizes and styles and probably doing cashier stuff too. WHATEVER I don't care what they have me doing as long as I get paid and don't have to change my hair! I get to dress like myself, my tattoos can be showing all over the place, and my piercings can stay in! I'm so thrilled. And relieved!

Now on to the jewelry stuff! I've been working on some newer ideas and they've been turning out great! Two of my pieces have already sold. How exciting!! I've been feeling pretty inspired lately. It's awesome. I'm going to be experimenting with these basic ideas and hopefully something magical will blossom from the seeds I've planted. I made these three pieces by painting the back of a resin layer with acrylic paint, then adding glitter, then another layer of resin to hold it all together. They turned out better than I had imagined and I'm so pleased with that! I hope I can keep pushing these designs to newer and better places. While Jon is out doing his stuff for grad school I'm gonna be here making things! :D

NEW STUFF!

I just added some new items in my Etsy Shop! OOOOH I hear thunder! And it sure got dark outside! It's a good thing I took pictures of my stuff earlier when the sun was out. I hope it's not raining like mad when it's time to walk to yoga! Not having a car can be such a pain.

PROBLEMS SOLVED

HUZZAH! That's me shouting with glee. I was having this weird problem see... A number of my resin pieces were coming out soft. By soft I mean SQUISHY soft. Totally not like resin should be at all. Resin is supposed to cure as hard as any other hard plastic. There's not supposed to be any squish to properly measured and mixed resin. I was measuring my resin properly! I was mixing it for the full four minutes, pouring from the first cup to the second in between. I was doing everything right and still some pieces were coming out soft. It didn't make any sense and I was getting really frustrated! Eventually most of my mixing cups broke so I bought a new batch of mixing cups.

The new cups came and after looking at them for two seconds I realized that the measuring markers were different on these cups. The line marking 1oz was in a different spot (higher up on the cup) on these cups than my old ones. To be honest with you Dianne, I was surprised. I had no notion that the reason my resin was coming out squishy might be because the cups THEMSELVES were wrong! Seriously, who buys a measuring cup with the thought or care that the actual measurements might be wrong?! I'm still kind of astounded. With the wrong measurements how could I ever mix resin properly? And it's not like just one cup was off. All of my cups were wrong. The only reason I ever got resin that wasn't totally sticky is because sometimes I accidentally over poured the amount of part A and didn't compensate properly for part B. Good thing I made that "mistake" otherwise every piece I ever made would have been totally squishtastic!

There weren't just any measuring cups either. They're meant specifically for resin casting. Everyone who has ever worked with resin even once knows that the measurements have to be as close to 1:1 as humanly possible. Defective cups make it a lot harder! Those cups are gone now though, so no more concerns about that. A whole batch of cups that were pretty much useless. Wow. I'm glad they started to break!

The new pieces I cast using the new mixing cups aren't even 72 hours old and they're rock hard. I'm really pleased about that. It's also really good to know that I wasn't fucking up somehow. I was actually kind of embarrassed about the whole thing. I thought I was screwing up somehow, that people would think I was an amateur. I'm really glad to know that it wasn't me, that it was something totally beyond my control that I had no hand it whatsoever. Good things to know! Now I can get back to casting without worry...

At least until I have to pack everything up and go to Utah. I have no idea how I'm gonna cast stuff in 107º heat. Resin needs to be at about 75º to work and we don't actually have any a/c in the middle of the freaking DESERT. Yeah, my mother is insane. No, I'm not looking forward to sweating my tits off and being thirsty 24/7 but I go anyway. Anyone have a blindfold and a cigarette?

SCHOOL IS A KILLER

AAAAAHHH!!! I have 3 weeks of college left and I'm excite but also freaking out because I have all this obnoxious work to do and only a little bit of it is actually FOR my major. All the other work is for stupid liberal arts classes where the teachers don't seem to understand that no one cares. Granted I would probably enjoy these two classes if they weren't at 8:30AM, but they ARE. So it doesn't really matter what they're about. I knew I wasn't going to learn a thing from them when I signed up, but they were the only classes that met the requirements and fit into my schedule. Ringling is retarded like that.

In a lot of ways I wish I had gone to a bigger school. Not a university, but a bigger school with more reverence for Fine Arts and their contribution to world culture. I wish I had gone to a school with enough enrolment to warrant a few different sections of each class. Most of the classes I'm taking are only one section, so that means you can either fit that one section into your schedule or you can't. If that one section doesn't work for you then you don't get to take that class. A lot of the interesting classes, like Dangerous Ideas and Ethics for Artists are held during my classes for my major. All in all Ringling College of Art and Design is never inflexible when it comes to scheduling. All classes (accept one or two of the freshmen level English classes) are 2 hours 45 minutes long, most of them are one section (I don't remember the last time there was more than one section to chose from), and most of the one section classes seem to only be held at 8:30 in the morning! I have no idea who decided this was a good idea, but I would like to personally punch them in the nose.

This Week in Resin:

In other news, I've been pouring more resin stuff! I've started on a whole bunch of littler hearts that will have stickers and insults embedded. I think the right price for them is $10-12, maybe $13-14 if they have a whole bunch of sweetness in them. I've been doing my Etsy research and I have to say I'm really disappointed in a lot of the other sellers of resin cuteness. They price their pieces WAY too high. They do this because epoxy and polyester resin are pretty mysterious and unknown. People just don't know that liquid plastic exists and they certainly don't know how much it actually costs. Let me demystify this for EVERYONE. 8 oz of resin at Michael's costs $11. That's it. I've found a gallon kit for epoxy resin for $50 online. There is NO REASON for a necklace that has maybe 60¢ worth of stickers, 50-60¢ worth of glitter and $1.30 worth of resin to cost $22 just because it's in a cute heart shape. That's ridiculous to me.

The only reason resin jewelry is expensive is because of the time that goes into making it. While creating each piece doesn't take THAT long, there's a lot of waiting that has to be done. Making a heart pendant that's just solid glitter takes at least a day and a half, maybe more. First the resin must be mixed then poured. You let that gel, and that can take all day or all night if you poured later in the day. Then you have add the eye-pin to the back of glitter resin and pour a layer of clear resin to hold the pin in place. That has to cure for several hours (depending on the temperature wherever you're pouring.) Once that's done you can pop the piece out of the mold, trim the excess off the edges and hang it from a chain. While you're doing all of this you can't really make more pieces because all your mold cavities are filled with half finished and curing pieces. That's the ONLY reason resin is expensive.

It upsets me a little to see all of these high priced resin pieces on Etsy and the Internet in general. I can really understand someone not wanting to pay $20 for a plastic pendant. I can even understand someone not wanting to spend $18 on my pieces. I started them all at $18 because I wanted to be competitive but still look serious. If i price everything at $12 I thought people might worry that there was something wrong with me or the pieces. If nothing else sells at that price I'll think seriously about bringing it down. I want to have jewelry in everyone's price range. I think anybody who likes what I'm doing is a potential customer and shouldn't I want to please them? Shouldn't I want them to feel like they're not throwing their money away?

The more I learn about resin casting the more I think most people's prices are pretty outrageous.

Anyway I'm going to be posting some more pictures to my DeviantART and I'm going to be posting a new listing to my Etsy Store sometime tonight (if I can get some homework done before it's time for yoga class that is!)

Wish me luck getting everything done!

UP AND RUNNING

These last few weeks have been spent putting together my Etsy Shop. I've been uploading photos of the jewelry to DeviantART too! I'm really excited to get off the ground with all this stuff! Money is nice, but mostly I just want to know that people out there, somewhere, are wearing things I made. I squee every time one of my friends wears their necklace, or whenever someone stops me on campus to talk resin. It's really awesome. It gives people an opening to talk to me (apparently I'm a little intimidating... maybe because I'm the tallest woman in the world?) and it gives me something to talk about endlessly so there's no awkward pauses and all that stuff.

That's right, this creator of cutesy, glittery goodies is actually pretty shy and awkward in social situations. I've been doing a lot to get over my social fears but many of them are still lingering. Doing all this resin stuff has really opened me up though! I know that if I have to keep interacting with strangers on a customer/seller basis my social skills will improve! I'm already much more comfortable talking to Etsy people, and I've only done it a few times.

RANT TIME!

Another thing has been bothering me and that's how closed the internet art community is. No one wants to share their secrets, everyone is so worried about who's copying them. Everyone seems to think that they did it FIRST and anyone who does anything similar after them is therefore a copycat, or just an asshole. Sure, tracing someone's art and calling it your own isn't such a good idea, but does that mean nothing is learned from it? Why can't we learn from each other? Why can't we share our secrets with everyone in the hopes that new and better ways of crafting and creating will be invented? Nothing ever changed by hoarding knowledge!

I know a lot of this attitude comes from this: "I learned on my own so everyone else should have to learn on their own too! No one taught ME how to do this so why should I help anyone else out? What if they do it better and they steal ALL my customers/fans/friends/spaceships/etc...?"

We need to get over this kind of thinking! In Fine Arts one of the biggest topics is that nothing is new under the sun. The only way to be original is to do things from your perspective. No two people see things exactly the same, and sometimes you learn the most by taking an idea and changing it, making it better, expanding on it. It's about the evolution of ideas. How can ideas evolve if we don't talk about them? How will techniques improve if we don't discuss them? If no one knows how to do something then no one will be able to come up with new and innovative ideas.

I guess what I'm trying to encourage here is a more open market, a more open attitude, and more open communication between artisans and artists on the web. And not to sound preachy, or like I know everything, but the contemporary art world that artists like Tracey Emin, Mike Kelley, Annette Messager, David Altmejd (and other people you would see in prestigious galleries and curated museum shows) don't hoard ideas. They don't gaurd their art making processies like Cerberus guards the gates of Hell. They speak openly about how they work and think because that's what art IS! It's the process, it's the materials, it's the IDEA!

Also, those secrets you guard so jealously aren't really secrets. There are so many people in this world that eventually someone, or multiple someones, are going to invent the exact technique you invented without ever even knowing who you are or that you "thought of it first". It just doesn't work that way and it's silly to think that any idea is ever completely yours.

I am not advocating copying someone else's design verbatim. I'm not advocating tracing as anything but a learning tool. Creativity DOES exist, you can be creative and unique, but there are going to be people just as creative and unique as you. Just be yourself and you'll be golden. No one can ever be JUST like you. So don't be afraid to share! If someone rips you off, so what?! If someone does something similar to you, don't think that they're copying, be amazed at how intricate this world is and how we're all connected in some way. Be fascinated! Not angry or upset! Be happy!

Share! <3

Rant is over :D