I’ve got a few interesting photos but I need a pretty big stock of truly reliable ones before I’ll feel confident in actually trying to sell them.  The stuff I take looks good on greeting cards but I feel like the subject matter has to be more deliberately artistic for prints, whereas it can be more ‘cute’ or just simply pretty for cards.  You can see a couple of my photos below, too. Just a few…

Anyway, I’m very busy right now!  Soooo much work to do, so little energy to do it with…

These are VERY simple but I think it’s better to go with simple for a first attempt.  These are also problematic for making more complex anyway so if I wanted to do it I’d have to solve a few technical  problems first.  But here is my first pair of tassel sticks…’Between the Lines’:

So please visit The Far Grove’s Deviant Art site.  If you want to remember the link so you don’t have to come back here to click it, it is simply http://thefargrove.deviantart.com.  That’s pretty easy, isn’t it?

I’ll show you.   Here is a set of three hair buttons…followed by a picture of a flower-button combo.  The hair buttons are floaters and the flower is a clip-in that I will do other versions of, later, including wire shaping and beads.

I’ve also moved 32 items to a SALE section, all of them reduced more (sometimes quite a bit more) than 10%.  I just don’t have room at home to make more stuff if I don’t clear out some of the older items!  Disorganization is the enemy of productivity, and having too much stuff around makes me very disorganized.

If you’ve been waiting for a sale in my shop, then go take advantage of the reduced and sale prices. 

I clearly need to diversify.  I’m investing in half a dozen books, all on different techniques, and plan to make a piece in each, even if I don’t immediately fall for it…I need to think of new and interesting ways to do hairsticks, and more than that, I need to come up with other exciting hair accessories…I REALLY want to develop a sexy/cute line for short-haired women.  And when I say short, I do mean even SUPER short, right down to a pixie cut.  Even little pixie girls want cute hair accessories, you know!  So, starting January 1 I will be ordering those six books, and hopefully they’ll have something workable that appeals to me, that I can use to develop these new items.  Hairbands, snap clips, folding clips, hairsticks, hair floaters…maybe even a few new and unusual earrings or necklaces (I have no use for bracelets or brooches so I just can’t dredge up any interest in them.)

I may even have a go at rings, after I get the 2009 supply order…I think I’ll be getting some metal clay along with it.  That should be an exciting new turn.

Once I get some new stuff on the go I hope I’ll be able to think of things to write here (and show in photos!) more often.

1. Move my piano.
2. Buy 3 bookshelves
3. Assemble the shelves
4. Buy a melamine shelf (8 feet by 2 feet) and 2 white lacquered spindles.
5. Cut shelf to 73 inches by 20 inches and take 4 inches off the spindles.
6. Attach spindles to shelf and shelf to the top of the bookshelves.

And the result?

Then I left two shelves for books and the central one for supplies.  Said supplies before I unpacked them, yesterday, and then after they were unpacked and organized:

I’m glad that’s done!  It was a huge job, putting away 80 strings of beads!  It may not sound it, but it’s actually very fussy work, getting them off the string and into the little containers without letting them spill all over the place.  Then this morning, I took one of the supplies I found most interesting…a bag of wooden discs in different sizes…and made a pair of hairsticks.  I call them ‘Groovy’.  Take a peek!

So all things considered, it’s not going too badly.

But this still means I’m forking over a very large chunk of money all at once…and I’m poor.  (Seriously…I get by just fine and have a comfortable life, but if we go by numbers, I am distinctly below the poverty line in annual income.)   So even though the money for supplies is set aside in advance (it’s good to have at least six months to prepare to make an order), it still makes me uncomfortable, hitting the ’submit order’ button on the final page of the checkout.

But then, I’m always really eager to get my order, so one makes up for the other.  Mostly. :D  So in about three weeks, I should be opening a lovely, exciting box that will rejuvenate my desire to make hairsticks (and possibly other things as well.)   In every order, I order findings and other necessary bits such as head and eye pins, chains, earring posts and wires…the ‘nuts and bolts’, so to speak.  Then I order the common-use beads…usually round beads at 8mm or under, that I get in ropes and use over and over.  THEN there’s the focal items.  They’re usually the exciting bits.  Large beads…ceramic, painted, glass, etc.  They usually serve as inspiration for finished pieces.

And there are always a few items I’m especially excited to see in person…some of which always surprise me.  This time, it is the black beads pictured last, below.  Sometimes I can’t even explain why I liked an ordered item…but there it is.  I just had to have it.  Here are a few things I ordered this time, none of them glaringly fabulous, yet all compelling to my creativity.

I may just go back and make a few more hairsticks instead, with the overlapping wire wrap, such as in Trespass (below).  I really like that look…and I think they’ll do pretty well.  Though anything with Meri’s leaves DOES, of course.

I finally got my hair chopped off to a VERY short cut again (not that my hair was ever longer than just-above-the-shoulder) and it has increased my desire to make more short-hair accessories. Also, I turned 30 at the end of May this year, and though I have thought all through my 20s that the 30s would be the better decade, it does make me more aware of the fact that some women don’t like to be ‘cute’ once they consider themselves grown up…especially as mommies and career-women. Some women prefer sophisticated or classy…and adorable short-hair accessories like ‘clippies’ don’t lend themselves well to that, being almost exclusively made of cutesy flowers and bows that I personally love to wear, but admittedly were originally intended for children.

So, I’m working on some floaters, and a some clippies…but I don’t have a lot of the supplies I need. I need many colours of thread, and some high-quality silk leaves, and so on. I’m going to try to get at least some of those today, so I can get my first set of each done.

Hopefully this means I’ll be back with pictures in just a few days.