YOJ Entry for Week 16

SPECTRUM - this is a short entry and I don't have that much to say about it, not because I don't like it as much as my other stuff, but because...well...it all happened so QUICKLY! It's like somehow managing to date a guy for only a week and then afterward trying to reflect on the relationship...it happened, I don't know what to say. This is what came out of it, anyway. It took me less than an hour to make and until it was done I wasn't sure what exactly I was making. It actually started out as a bracelet, true story.

Picture Jasper in a muted rainbow pattern suspended on hammered copper. When the pendant is hung, it balances itself out so that both sides have stones in a curve...how to explain it? The center is where it should be, where it was designed to be. I can't describe that any way other than "I might have been afraid it wouldn't work out, but it did." Maybe I ought to call it Harmony instead.

Something awesome for YOJ

This week's theme was "double-duty" - I hadn't really had any intention of following the themes, but this one piqued my interest. So I made a pair of bracelets that transform into a necklace.
The pictures are terrible...the copper looks like brass in them...but in person, it's very coppery and lovely and warm. Sigh!

You see, I made one big chunky bracelet out of fire agate, and one light and delicate one from handmade copper chain and carnelian. I made two different sets of toggles...one fancy clasp and one simple clasp. Then I put one fancy and one simple half on each bracelet so that they could be closed; the fancy one on the light chain is the whole point of the bracelet, being the biggest and only notable thing on it, while the fancy toggle bar on the chunky bracelet just goes with it and adds a touch of fanta carnelian to its fire-agatey glory. But when you match up the halves, fancy bar with fancy loop and simple with simple, they make a necklace with two neat clasps to transition between sections. And the delicate part of the necklace can go behind your neck where it won't bug you, and the chunky part can go in front where it was always meant to be. Lovely!

My pictures are terrible and taken with terrible lighting against a terrible background, but please bear with me.

I'm rather proud of these pieces.

However, the bracelets are very long and tend to fall off (though some bracelets are just designed that way), so I may do some reworking, taking out either a bunch of the smaller findings or a whole section. We'll see, I haven't decided yet...but right now the length is about right for a necklace, so I can't make them THAT much shorter. Regardless of the length, I'm happy with my work, here. I got bruises on my hands, though. Gotta toughen up.

A new aspect of business

I was recently approached by Bloggerdise, which is a free site where bloggers interested in doing product reviews and people who have products they'd like to have reviewed can sign up and contact each other. They simply offered me (as a small business owner) basically some free publicity. I haven't looked around on it much, but I posted up an ad with a picture of some of my crane earrings (the people on the site are very nice, by the way, and will create an ad for you if you'd rather not make one yourself...they did for me, but I made one because I wanted a specific picture in it and such). But it's really, really easy, and free, so there's no reason not to if you've got a business. What they wanted in return was for me to spread the word...so here's MY review. Five people have already contacted me, and it's been like two days. If you've got a business, it's massively worth the two seconds it will take you to sign up and make a little ad thing for free and see where it takes you...and you can make more later if you like how it turns out. Go to www.bloggerdise.com.

I've been contacted by so far, one offering me paid advertising on her blog (not up my alley at the moment, nor probably ever, I've gotta say - if I want to pay for advertising I'll pay Google or someone) but the other four wanted to do review/giveaways. That is, I send them a product and they talk about it on their blog (hopefully raving about how awesome it is) and then one of their readers can win a similar one (or in my case, I'll probably offer custom orders, since my most unique pieces are my origami ones, those are the ones people will want and they're the ones I can afford to give away anyway). The reason I'm doing this when it will be a LOT of work for me (5 minutes of folding per crane plus prep (cutting into squares) time and sealing time...I've got a full workday's worth of work to do on these already) is that in order to win the item, the readers have to do things like "like" me on facebook, or "heart" my etsy shop...anyone who enters, not just the winner, will do these things, and if they really like the prize enough, the non-winners might just buy one. Not to mention the fact that just getting my product seen by more people, even if they don't enter, and sending more of them out to more cities where people will see them on the street, will drastically increase my visibility online and in the real world. Basically, like all advertising, this is my losing money hoping to gain it in the long run...that is, hoping to gain money and a chance for jewelry to be a bigger part of my life, and a chance for my business to stand on its own legs.

Honestly, if I had a reliable way to know I could sell my silver and copper and gemstone wire-wrappings, I would want to make them more, because they're more fun, though less unique. I probably wouldn't be able to do giveaways just because my pieces would require so much more overhead...I would need to gain something tangible in return. But I don't know how often my peers enter such things, and since my angle at the moment is "eco-friendly" (emphasis on friendly) I need to be as friendly as I can. I wonder where this all will take me. It's getting very exciting (and time consuming).

Speaking of which, some future update will have to detail how awesome my summer is going to be. On a related note, next Monday is Marathon Monday here in Beantown, and I have a DAY OFF. Where I don't have to be ANYWHERE or do ANYTHING. I haven't had one of those since I got my part-time job. I am almost embarrassingly excited for the chance to do whatever I want...don't expect productivity, it will probably be spent reading.


Also, I am continually astounded by what colors people pick for custom crane orders. Yellow and purple and teal and green just don't look good to me as a combination, but I've gotten more than one order for such a pair...I guess that's why I OFFER custom orders, because I would never dream of making what those people would want. At least I'm getting to the stage where I can look at my creations and not think "gross, she's going to hate it" - to see it from the buyer's point of view, and not judge it based on my own color preference.

Year of Jewelry 3rd go, and psychology

My third week into the Year of Jewelry Project:

A lotus pendant. I like the way this one turned out...the more gems I put on it, the better it looked, so it's definitely a step up for me, since I'm used to making smaller, subtler and less gaudy (and less expensive) things. It was also quite a learning experience in "use twice as much wire as you think you'll need". This includes bright and oxidized copper, peach moonstone, pink garnet, fanta carnelian, peach aventurine, picture jasper and sunstone. It looks nice with a dark green shirt, with its dramatic contrasts and fall colors.


In psychology class we are learning about the science of motivation. It's well-known (but little practiced in the business world) that incentives for something decrease performance...the higher the incentive, the lower the performance. At least, that holds true for things that require even rudimentary cognitive work...tasks that are purely mechanical are better accomplished with incentives than without, but nowadays, not that many people have jobs that are purely mechanical work. The best work is accomplished with "autonomy, mastery and purpose" - being able to do what you want went you want, being able to become better and better at something that matters, and feeling like you are contributing to a cause bigger than yourself, whether only a little bigger or world-wide. This rule has been noted by businesses like Google, whose employees are free 20% of the time to work on whatever they feel like working on...and about half of Google's most awesome innovations...gmail, for instance...were born from employees puttering around working on their own projects that turned out insanely good.
This is also what my boyfriend is going through, and struggling with, right now...the conflict between his class demands for code and his desire to make his own game. Google says: What kind of email client would you want to use? Could you make it? Go for it. Jeff says: there is a game that I want to play that doesn't exist yet. Can I do it? The fact is...he can, if he puts enough work into it...but no amount of money is going to convince him to do so, only the doing itself can do that.


The Year of Jewelry is giving me my non-incentivized rewards. I am not doing this for the money, though of course that is my "aim" - making jewelry started being less fun when I had to go through all sorts of rigamarole to do it...*had* to being the key word. Now, I still go through rigamarole, but it's a challenge! I made two pairs of earrings on a ballroom dance floor. I put six kinds of gemstones on a pendant because it looked best that way. I ran out of wire halfway through a pendant, and started up with another kind of wire, adding a cool vine effect at the bottom. I have ALL of my pictures formatted to go up on Etsy...my least favorite part. These things are obstacles to be overcome, not to complain about and use as a reason to not do any work.

Long story short: my productivity has SHOT UP over the past few weeks.

The reason for this is that now I have a different aim - to do work when I can (autonomy), to get better at jewelry-making (mastery), to get feedback(purpose), and of course, though most other people's YOJ contributions are far superior to mine, to show off. Granted, that "purpose" is only a little bit bigger than myself...but I envision things for it that are bigger than I am. I'd love to support myself on jewelry, though I know it's unlikely to ever happen that way. I'd love to learn until I master it and then to teach. I'd love to create things I can look on with wonder and not understand with anything but rationality how something so beautiful could have come out of me. You know, just the usual.

So thank you, Year of Jewelry, for putting me back on my track.

Another week of Year of Jewelry - Quick Earrings

I'm copying this from my post on the YOJ site:


I was quite determined to not fail the challenge in my second week of YOJ, but I had an immensely busy week and a two-day ballroom competition on the weekend…and right now I ought to be studying for tomorrow’s midterm, so we’ll see how that goes. I apologize for the quality of this picture, it was taken with my camera in horrible light in the middle of the MIT gym…I made these sitting on the floor in my ballroom dress and shoes! I’m proud of that (and of getting this up only one day late…I was proud of myself for being on time until I remembered that the week actually starts on Sunday. Oops.) :] We did reasonably well in the competition, too. My partner’s a good sport.

These are from the same hammered spiral frame, one version big and one small, but I went in completely different directions with them. To one I added a clear red garnet briolette to swing freely, and accented it with pinky garnet chips along the outside…the difference in color is hard to see in this picture. To the other it was rhyolite and carnelian and overlapped the frame…very different color schemes, there.

Sadly, I think I might have to redo them. I didn’t have 20G wire with me, so I made them with 16…not unheard of, but it hurts me to put them in my ears and a lot of people would not be able to wear them. Maybe I can avoid having to redo the whole thing if I take the hooks and shrink them into little loops and attach them to normal, thinner hooks. What do you think?

P.S. “Call the Law” by Outkast is a great quickstep song…for the first 2 minutes and ten seconds, anyway. My whole team loves that song now.