I'm Back, have you missed me?

It seems that I've been running nonstop, full tilt, tiger-by-the-tail crazy with deadlines stacked one behind the other since at least last Fall.  I keep telling myself that as soon as I get past "X", (X being the next major deadline), everything will settle back out, and I keep running.  Sound familiar?  I'm guessing I'm not alone in this. 

Earlier this month my folks, who happen to also be some of my very best friends, invited me to tag along on a cruise with them.  Since we live about 1800 miles apart, we don't get to see each other nearly as much as we'd like. I jumped at the chance.  While cringing at another week lost in my schedule, I thought it would be a good opportunity to review what I've been doing and how I might get it to work better as I was definitely approaching burnout.  At least that's how I rationalized it going in.  :)

I hadn't anticipated just how difficult it would be to say goodby to the Internet for the week.  Out in the middle of the ocean, there are no cell towers, nor easy access to Internet, which I knew going in.  What I hadn't realized was just how much I counted on having that access.  Especially as I went into the trip knowing that I was way behind on my sadly neglected blog and my blog reading list. 

Then to top it off, I returned just in time to start jury duty for King County Superior Court, where I ended up in not one, but two jury selection pools.  With the second, I seriously started to think I might end up a juror on a criminal trial that could last several weeks.  Yikes!  All I could think of was my To-Do list, growing longer and longer as I fell farther and farther behind.  Self-guilt and recrimination building that I 'hadn't planned things right'.  That I couldn't do it all. 

Well, I'm not on the jury as the powers-that-be decided to postpone the trial and start again with a new jury pool.  Thank you!  But the vacation and especially the panic attack have told me I need to make some changes.   Since I know that I'm not the only one in this particular boat, I thought I'd share where I'm at. 

Here's what I've come up with:

1) Admit that this is my life.  I am an over-scheduler (do they have a 12-Step program for this?).  I plan for months at a time, starting with the deadlines and working backwards, figuring out timelines for tasks and expected bottlenecks.  But I tend to 'Error on the Side of Enthusiasm' and I've errored quite egregiously of late.  I get excited about an idea and throw it onto the pile.  Surely I can stitch three beaded beads, build a window screen, do the accounting, weed the garden and paint the hallway today?  As long as I keep doing this, my life will never be sane. 

Strategic planning only works so-so when there's simply too much work for one person to accomplish.  

2) Especially as life always throws you loops, good and bad.  Minor construction projects that spiral out of control (like replacing an old oil furnace and discovering the tank has leaked underground and now you have a pollution liability cleanup situation), having to find a new studio space, pneumonia, unexpected (and quite lovely) vacations.  The one thing they all have in common is they wreak havoc on a too-full schedule. 

3) I like to sleep.  Yep.  Sleep is one of my favorite hobbies.  I'm a useless zombie if I try to cut into my sleep schedule for more than a couple days at a time.  Totally useless.  Sleep is good.  I envy those people who can get by with five or so hours of sleep at night.  That's not me.

4) Don't automatically cut all my favorite things.  Just because they're 'fun' doesn't mean they're automatically less important.  Does anyone else do this?  If something's fun, then it's not as important as the not-fun stuff you have to do?  Only works in the short term, if even that. 

4) It's Okay to Say No.  (Or "Maybe Later" for those things I just can't say no to).  I don't know which is harder, saying no to friends or to myself.  I'm not terribly good at saying no.  In fact, I'm pretty awful at it; friends and ideas come to me all bright and shiny and hopeful and well...  You know what happens next.  Then I run behind because there's too much to do, people think I'm a flake and I start hating myself.  So I'm trying to learn to at least say "Maybe Later".  And if it's a really great idea, I write it down on my list for that mystic time in my future when I have time. 

5) It's Okay to Ask for Help. This last is particularly hard for me on several different levels.  'Asking for help = failure'.  Everyone else is too busy too.  Figuring out what could be parceled out. 

I've been giving this last one a lot of thought.  I have the nucleus of an idea here.   One of the things I really want to do is to put together beading kits for my Fancy Fish.  My current stumbling block is simply finding the time to stitch enough samples of the various color-ways so that I can photograph them for my Etsy site.  Especially since with my early fish I didn't give kit-making a single thought and used whatever beads caught my fancy.  Tracking down the same beads is a nightmare.  I know because I've tried.  And I've discovered that many people expect the kits to contain the exact same beads as my samples - close doesn't cut it.  Did I mention I hate disappointing people?  

So, I'm thinking about ways to reach out and ask for help in a way that's fun and hopefully useful for everyone.  Expect to see more about this early next week. 

Since this post is getting way too long, I'll wrap it up for now with a question.   How do you decide what to keep on your plate and what to toss when life gets crazy?

And thank you for sticking with me!  

Why Make This? Telling Your Story

Steph Cortes with her fantastic 'nerdy' crossstitch - Venn diagrams anyone?

Last week I attended a fantastic Etsy workshop with Steph Cortes of nerd JERK entitled "Balls Out Branding".  I'd dithered 'til the last moment, whether or not I'd sign up.  I am so glad I did.  It was a small workshop - just six of us, and Steph was a total riot.

I came away with two key points, presented in entirely new ways.  The first is the title of this post - "Why Make This?"  Steph pushed us to explore why, out of all the myriad things we could be doing, we are drawn to our particular art/craft forms.  And to tell the story of our work. 

Sounds so easy and in theory it can be so very hard.  Blogging's one thing - here it's really all about story.  But as soon as I head to my Etsy store to write listings, I start thinking about key words and how will people find me and what details about the product do they need to know.  All the dry, completely necessary, but often boring things.

It's easier in person, where you can sort of hash through ideas. I realized that conversation is in many ways like a first draft.  In most conversational instances, your words aren't expected to be picture perfect.  Instead, if you're like me, you sort of feel your way towards where you want to go.

So, Saturday morning found me sitting at the computer, looking at my Etsy listings and thinking about how I can add to them.  Except, great procrastinator that I am, I decided to go out hunting for other artists with story telling abilities and see how they did it.  A reconnaissance mission! 

I made a treasury to record my findings:

My very eclectic, story-telling treasury

As I searched and searched for stories, I became more and more open to what that could mean. 

With two of the items in my treasury, their photography tells the story. 

Emma Sommerfeld's collection of photographs for her Cherry Red Scarf is a study in simplicity and contrast.  Her model, a cross between Snow White and Little Red Riding Hood, wears a dark dress and stands in a winter forest.  All of the colors are shades of black, white or neutrals except for the scarf and the red lipstick. 

I absolutely cannot wear that color of red, yet she makes me want to buy this scarf because it's so beautiful and romantic.  Her shop's on vacation right now, but the links above should still work.

 On first glance, I thought that CamilleDesigns made crocheted doilies, reminding me of my grandmother Lela as she used doilies extensively in her decorating and I inherited many of them.  So of course I had to check it out. 

I discovered - she makes rugs!  Somehow I'd managed to miss the two bare feet at the bottom of the photo.   What a wonderfully clever way of showing the scale and immediately letting people know what they're looking at! 

Here, it was simply the title.  Where most of the listings from my search started with "Felted Slippers" or more detailed, "Felted Wool Slippers".  Here we have "like a sunrise on the ocean" - almost a little haiku.  Or the title of a painting.  I could wear a bit of vacation and art every single morning if I bought these!

Search engine optimization recommends including your search terms early, early in your listings.  But what if every once in a while I let poetry take precedence instead? 

With others, threads of story ran through multiple aspects of their Etsy presence.  Callie Mitchell's beaded bracelet tutorial, Garden Rows, is beautiful in it's own right.  The story of her inspiration for the piece made it even richer (told in one short paragraph). 

Her artist bio continued her story as well; far more engaging than a dry recitation of dates and awards.




Don't want to bore you, so just two more call outs.

Since she inspired this treasury, I wanted to include one of Steph's pieces and her comic, A Girl Can Dream, Right? was a perfect fit. 

I love how her listing starts with the story of the comic's origins, segues to the comic itself, then back to it's creation.  All in three short paragraphs.  Nice. 

I caught her at Geek Girl Con and made her sign a copy for me.  She even drew a little self-portrait!

And then the pièce de résistance.  If you only look at one listing, you have to check this one out simply because it's absolutely over the top.  Be sure to take a look at Jimmy McBride's artist profile - that's where it all comes together. 

His entire Etsy experience is internally consistent, even if it doesn't quite match the world as you and I know it. 






So, there were some of the examples I found.  Do you have any amazing examples of storytelling to share?  Ways of connecting the viewer to the artist or the art work?  I'd love to hear them!  :)

And like an extra scene after the credits at the movies, here's Steph's signature and self-portrait.  

Book Review & Design Thoughts

Kristen reviewed my book, Freeform Peyote Beading this past week for the popular blog Art Jewelry Elements.  I've followed Kristen's personal blog, My Bead Journey, for some time and have gotten to know her online.  While she's a seed beader extraordinaire, she started out firmly in the "no way" camp towards trying freeform herself.  I think I may slowly be tempting her to the wild side, but in the meantime, her review provides a very different look at my book, focusing largely on my discussion of color and design.









Which has had me thinking more about design.

Sketches - translating coral to a design

In my book, I look at a number of the elements of design that I use most often in my work, then briefly touch on the principles of design.  Early on, those two really confused me - what's the difference between elements and principles?  I finally figured it out like this:

Elements of Design are like tools or building blocks you use in constructing your design.  The design element's I use most include:

• Value
• Color
• Line
• Texture

Principles of Design are more like a set of architectural blueprints or plans.  They help you figure out how exactly everything goes together and include:

• Unity
• Rhythm
• Balance
• Proportion
• Opposition
• Variety

And since I'm thinking about them, I thought I'd launch a weekly series; every Monday for the next several weeks, I'll focus on one of these in turn and whatever I'm doing with them at the time.

Six Month Overhaul

It's amazing the things one ends up doing as a working artist.  This past week it's been website redesign.  Turns out the last time I sat down and really worked on my website, skunkhillstudio.com, was back in January, so it was definitely about time. 

A screenshot of TextWrangler in action

I've been neck-deep in HTML and CSS (cascading style sheets) and even poked my toes at a little PHP.  Love the alphabet soup!  I always forget just how long it takes to make simple changes.  I spent three hours making little thumbnails for each of my classes and trying to get the markup and CSS to look right for my Classes & Workshops page.  Then I had to check on it in several browsers, to hopefully make sure there aren't any huge surprises. 

If you happen to have a Mac and are looking for some free text-editing software to work on web pages, I highly recommend TextWrangler by Bare Bones Sofware.   It does a beautiful job of contextual mark-up; color coding the code automatically so it's easier to read.  Looking at their website, it looks like I'm just barely touching the surface of its capabilities.  But back to my web redesign. 

My main goals for this overhaul were to:

my new Classes & Workshops main page

Update Workshop pages - for some reason only a handful of the bead classes I've prepped to teach were actually listed.  Now I think I have them all there, divided into three sections that at least made sense to me - Freeform Peyote, Mixed Stitches and Right Angle Weave.  Also now have my current teaching schedule on the same page, rather than a separate calendar page. 

Update my Gallery pages, adding new work from 2012 and dividing my bead work into similar categories as the single page was growing too long.  Also, put my older fabric pieces into gallery archives (they say never delete anything from your website - along these lines one of my most popular pages is on how to set up for freemotion embroidery with your sewing machine).  The main Gallery page is still a little stark - I expect I'll add something to it, just not quite sure what at this point.  Suggestions are welcome!

Make it easier to find my Kit & Tutorial listings. This was mainly a matter of playing with different names for the navigation link, and adding a few more pages to my website detailing out what I have available.  Right now, I have detailed information about my tutorials and kits on my website, but I'm only selling them through Etsy.  I have a Paypal account, so hope to sell through skunkhillstudio.com shortly, but I want to make sure I have all the various issues sorted out first.

If you do direct sales through Paypal via your website, I'd love to talk to you about your experiences. 


Redo my Home Page.  The main page is far and away the most difficult to design, at least for me.   Other pages have a specific purpose:  Galleries, Classes, etc.  The main page needs to be a little bit of everything to everyone, an introduction page and an easy path deeper into the site.  So I ended up trying several different home pages.

The old homepage for Skunk Hill Studio

Take one on the new homepage for Skunk Hill Studio - too much text?

New Home Page, less text, blog feed & gallery links above the fold

So there it is, my new home page.  I now have the RSS feed for my blog above the fold (and discovered that RSSinclude (the service I used to add my blog's RSS feed to my website) now offers additional styling options, so I took advantage of that as well.  Also moved the gallery page links to fill the space to the right of my Fall class schedule.  Reminds me a little of the front page of the newspaper, with a headline image, then lots of smaller links to other places on the site (Lacework Leaves, read more on page 3).  :)

I've tested it in a number of different browsers, but if you happen to stop by and notice anything really wonky, would you let me know?  It's amazing the differences that can happen when CSS is involved!  And thanks for letting me share!

Kreativ Bloggers

While I don't have nearly as much time to read blogs as I'd like, I could easily name a couple dozen bloggers who have inspired me since I first truly discovered the blogging community.  Here are a few of my favorites:

detail of Shirley's take on Helena Tang-Lim's Nefertiti necklace

First up is Shirley Moore over at Beads and Bread.  She was the first person (besides my very dear husband) to hit the little "Follow" button on the side of my blog.  That nearly blew me away - someone I didn't know and had never met had actually found my blog interesting enough to want to return!  Following her profile back to her blog, I found an amazing woman and a great friend.  What strikes me most about Shirley is her enthusiasm and determination to try totally new techniques and make them her own.  And every once in a while she shares pictures of her amazing baking.  Really makes me wish we lived closer!

The next three have already received Kreativ Blogger awards from other bloggers, but they're at the top of my list too.

Sarah's beaded/sequined cuff

I am in awe of Sarah 'Sequin's' bead embroidery over at Saturday Sequins.  She's also gotten into freeform peyote, which catches me every time, and of course, there's the sequins!  Her blog truly is my regular dose of "sparkle and shine".

Beyond her beading, Sarah's incredibly articulate posts about the nature of creativity - including it's pitfalls and hurdles - remind me that while I might work by myself, I'm not alone.

From Bobbie's post "Packing Daggers"

Bobbie Rafferty at Beadsong Jewelry never fails to make me smile, and often makes me laugh outright with her warm humor and incredible story telling.  Wonder what I'm talking about?  Check out her response to receiving a Kreativ Blogger award.  And I can't end a paragraph about Bobbie with out mentioning hats - big, bold, lovely, Derby hats.  At least once a year, she feeds my hunger for all things millinery. 




Christine Altmiller's the one who gave me the Kreativ Blogger award (and handed me this challenge).  Even if she hadn't, she'd definitely be on my list.  Check her blog out at One Kiss Creations. 

Binary Dreams by Jim Downey

Taking a swing in an entirely different direction, there's Jim Downey's blog, Communion of Dreams.  As the author and co-author of two very different books (science fiction & a caregiver's memoir/guidebook for caring for family members with dementia), and a professionally trained book and document conservator,  Jim brings his unique perspective to his blog, sharing candid looks into his life as a writer, craftsperson, artist and independent author. 






If you've ever considered self-publishing, then I highly recommend Joel's Friedlander's blog, The Book Designer.  His extremely popular blog covers everything from the art and craft of book design, to publishing, marketing, promotions - you name it!  His archives are an incredible resource.

City Celebration by JJ Jacobs

I met JJ Jacob's a little over a year ago, when we were paired for Lori Anderson's Bead Soup blog party and we've been friends ever since.  Equally talented as both a painter focusing in abstract acrylics and as a glass artist, what I think I love most about her blog, Coming Abstractions, (besides the wonderful photos of her work) is her down-to-earth practicality.  Last year, she left her successful business career to launch her career as an artist, using every skill, contact and strength she developed over her years in the corporate world.  I am in awe of her drive and her ability to make her career a success. 

Since I just mentioned her above, now's a good time to name Lori Anderson.  As the instigator and coordinator for the Bead Soup Challenge and Blog Parties, Lori's responsible for introducing me to more beading bloggers than anyone else I can name.  Her blog, Pretty Things, has to be one of the most popular beading blogs out there, for good reason.  The generosity of Lori's spirit knows no bounds.  Neither does her creativity!

Andrea Donnelly

And last on my list is Andrea Donnelly over at Little Fool: (a small business romance).  I met Andrea at Penland School of Crafts back in 2008, where she took an 8-week Iron Working class.   Here's a blog post from my archives with her decked out in protective gear for an Iron Pour (there's also video of the pour).

Outside of Penland, Andrea is an incredible fiber artist, dyer and weaver and her blog follows her studio and business.  Her latest post, entitled Studio Textures, is a lush photo essay of fibers, textures and color.

Big Hole Hop Teaser

Last month I was one of the lucky winners of Kristi Bowman's drawing.   I won one of her copper big hole copper focals and a chance to participate in her design challenge and blog hop.

Kristi Bowman's focal & my sad little sketch

I'll admit, I'd not-so-secretly hoped to receive one of her more organic patterns - they're right up my alley.  Instead, my focal is paisley.  Oops.  Guess I need to stretch.

First thing I discovered? I'm rather terrible at drawing paisley.  See what I mean?

I'd noticed that the heart of each of Kristi's paisley designs is a multi-pointed star.  Thinking I could work with that, I played with ways to incorporate some of my stars from my Snowflakes & Stars pattern into the design.

It still wasn't working, so then I went searching for further inspiration.

I thought I might have found it in the patterning of my favorite sundress.

Turns out it's not actually paisley.  And didn't go with the focal worth a darn.  I did like the dark background, however.

A dark blue would be better though, whispered a little voice in my head. 

Dark blue night skies, paisley stars, comet trails.....

Starry Night by Vincent VanGogh

And then inspiration truly struck.  What if my focal was a big, fat lazy moon in a starry night sky?  Vincent,  I think you might have saved me!

The patterning in his painting even reminds me of the paisley in Kristi's design - wonderful comet trails of brush strokes.

So now I finally know where I'm going.  Curious how it's going to turn out?  So am I!

I'll be beading this coming week, then I'll share the piece with you here at the 'reveal' next Saturday, June 30th.

I'd better get cracking!  And in the meantime, check out the other participants.

Blogging Away from Home

I have this dream of blogging while traveling using only my iPad2, rather than having to lug around my antiquated and heavy laptop.


It seems like it -should- be a simple dream, but Blogger's web interface for the iPad leaves much to be desired. I'm forced to work in HTML mode to type my posts (no visual editing) and in many cases I'm forced to add coding by hand.   Even where I don't have to add the code myself, I find that all the markup makes it difficult to see what I've actually written.

The image at left is a screenshot of the Blogger interface on the iPad. 

But worse than dealing with the HTML mode has been finding an easy way to upload and place photos from my iPad. This is impossible through Blogger.  The screen looks like it should work, but doesn't.  Back in the spring, before our Alaskan cruise, I purchased a camera connection kit to easily load photos from my camera and iPhone to my iPad. That worked, but Blogger on the Internet could not find my camera roll. It simply didn't work like a laptop. I finally figured out that I could upload the photo to Flickr, then link to it from there, if I could figure out the exact web address for the image (not the page), but that's too complex to be easy!

Last week I used the iPhone app 'Blogger' in writing my last post for 2011.  It allowed me to add an image directly to Blogger from my iPad or iPhone, but with only the most basic formatting, and no control over placement. Once it was placed with the Blogger app, I could bring it up in the Blogger web interface on my iPad.  There I could at least move it to where I wanted it in the text by copying and pasting the code, but I couldn't change its alignment (default is centered, with text above and below).  Nor could I add a caption without doing a lot more coding or copying and pasting from other blog posts (more than I was comfortable doing).  

So then I tried out Blogsy, a $5 app for the IPad. It does have a visual editor, as seen in my screenshot at left, though it's quite quirky when you start adding images. This paragraph ended up embedded in the image link and I had to go into the HTML code and copy, cut and paste to dig it back out, for instance.

I'm supposed to be able to able to drag and drop images around once their placed in the post, but that seems to do terrible, terrible things to the code, which I then have to fix.   Also I can align photos to the left, but when I try to align them to the right, the surrounding text follows suit. Not so good.  And I still can't add captions. (I added the right alignments in Blogger borrowing my parents' computer - cheating a little.)

Blogsy does indeed link to my camera roll as promised. Sort of. Turns out you have to set up a Flickr, Wordpress or Picasa account, then when I open my camera roll I can drag the photos I want over to Flickr. Not ideal, as I don't necessarily want these screenshots in my Flickrstream. Why can't it simply upload to Blogger?

On the plus side, I have figured out how to transfer photos between my iPad and iPhone using iCloud, so that's a win.  But blogging on the go using my iPad is still not an easy prospect! 

So I'm still hunting for a better solution.  

A silly, but fun addition to the plus side: during the search for blogging software, I've found FrameMagic Lite, a fun photo app which lets me put together photo collages very quickly and very easily.  It took me a minute tops to make this collage of photos my niece Emme took of herself using Photobooth.  The longest part was choosing between the slew of images! 

FrameMagic Lite is free.  Their paid version would give me more layout options. 


So now, do any of you have favorite blogging software for the iPad or iPad2?  One's that let you add and manipulate images from your camera roll without uploading them first to Flickr or another online site?  Especially for Blogger?