What happened?

Oh dear, I seem to have gone a little AWOL again haven’t I? It’s not for lack of willing I just haven’t done much worth writing about.

I blame winter – when it’s grey I don’t want to do much. Oh and Bioshock Infinite, I definitely blame Bioshock Infinite!

For Christmas I only managed to make one little hat (it’s become a tradition that I always make Tracey a hat for Christmas!)

It is Meret by Wooly Wormhead and you can get the pattern free from here. In fact, if you like knitting hats this is the place to look – there are lots of lovely designs for all difficulty levels, something for everyone!

Did you guys get lots of gifts made? Is it just me? I’m not really feeling it lately. I want to make knitty/sewey things but I’m having trouble not only finding the time but also getting going. I can spend my few free hours looking through patterns but never really making any decisions. Its a bit frustrating.

In other news I have opened a little shop on Folksy and in it I’m selling these little brooches:

I’ll be adding some other things shortly but for now I’m a bit brooch mad. They are porcelain and feature my (by now) trademark vintage patterns.

Only £10, get ‘em while they’re hot!

Right! I’m only going to play an hour of Bioshock, then I might get out ‘A Stitch in Time’ for a bit of a pattern browse. I’m due volume one in the post any day now – I can’t wait!

Beccy

Visiting galleries

As part of our making-work-and-selling-it-to-people plan, we spent the whole of yesterday visiting craft galleries… well, we visited four galleries in a round trip of 216 miles.

The reason we went so far is because you can’t just send information to every gallery willy nilly (or worse, just turn up on the doorstep with a box of stuff), you need to find the galleries that are right for you, where your work will fit and then approach said gallery like a proper business person. There’s no point sending information about your lovely ceramics to a gallery that only sells paintings!

We spent a long time doing research via the interweb and the book Craft Galleries Guide to narrow it down to 10 or so that might work for any of the three of us, but nothing compares to actually seeing the gallery in the flesh, so to speak. Since we already know what the galleries closest to us are like, we headed south (irritating satnav in hand) for a bit of a recce.

It turns out a few inches on the map is further than you think – that coupled with me being the only one of us with a driving licence and a morbid fear of motorways made for a long trip. 

We didn’t ask any questions because we didn’t want to seem impertinent - we just needed to look and see for ourselves how they display the work; how big they are, what the area is like, what they are selling and how high the prices are. We took lots of notes and covert photos to remind us later.

It was very worthwhile, positive and informative, and despite only managing to see four galleries in that time it wasn’t a wasted day. We found galleries where some of our work would fit; we ruled out some galleries we weren’t sure about, we saw far too many beautiful things that we wanted to buy and we have a lot more places to look at when we head west next week.

All in all a good day was had by all, but we’re very sleepy today!

Beccy

Insert Tab A into Slot B Syndrome…

Lately, I’ve been working on something a bit different to what I usually do.

For my last project I used bone china, I slip-cast, I used decals and intricate cutting, those plates were so hard to make I needed to make two for every one that looked great, and the surfaces had to be perfect.

I think (like a lot of creative people I’m sure) that every project has a natural mental life-span. At some point you get sick and tired of making the same thing again, even if people still like it. You need to make something new – not just something that looks different, but that uses different processes and materials too.

For this project I’m using a good, solid, groggy stoneware, I’m hand building, there will likely be no decals (but I’m not sure yet, I really love those decals), there are deliberately imperfect surfaces. They’re not as hard to make, but it will be just as hard to get them through the firings without warping or splitting – I am loath to make things easy for myself.

It doesn’t mean I’m not proud of the work I have done before, or that I don’t like it, but when something becomes a chore to make you no longer feel creative, and the workshop starts to feel more like a factory. If the washing up looks more and more attractive and procrastination rules supreme, you may have ‘Insert tab A into slot B syndrome’.

I’m not saying that I won’t ever use casting slip again, or that there isn’t a perfect surface in my future, I just needed a break – call it a holiday I’ll be taking for the foreseeable.

It’s amazing that that’s all it takes to feel creative again. I want to be in the workshop, I want to make things again - it’s frustrating that I have to go to work and I won’t get back in the workshop until Saturday.

Take my advice – if you find yourself with ‘Insert tab A into slot B syndrome’, stop what you’re supposed to be making, pack it away out of sight, and start something new. Totally new. Use different materials, different techniques - get some books from your library and learn a new skill you can incorporate. Experiment. Anything to break that cycle and get you out of that creative rut!

Never mind ‘slot B’, get rid of ‘tab A’ altogether and start from scratch.

Beccy