I walked into my studio the other day and found these guys on the floor, nicely arranged in a this perfect little lobster diorama. Maybe they got bored in the middle of the night and jumped down from their perch where I had stored them to party with each other.
Why do I have plastic lobsters in my studio? I have no idea. They were at a garage sale and they clearly needed a new home so they came to live with me. Why did I save the tree branch? ??????
I picked them all up and stashed them in their new temporary storage place until I figure out what to do with them.
The entire studio is always in a state of entropy. Here and there, are little pockets of organization, but, generally, there are far more areas of chaos. We are always undergoing some massive re-organization, or are involved in some major project. Or, we are just too busy to clean up, as was the case this week.
Organized or not, though, everyone who comes to visit our studio is always fascinated, because there is always a lot of interesting stuff to look at.
Maybe in lieu of an introduction, I will give take you on a little tour of my studio in the next few posts. All my stuff says a lot about who I am.
I think these lobsters are saying…clean up and find us a new home.
Back in the 80s, for 8 or 9 years. I was the proprietor of a retail jewelry gallery.
The 80s and 90′s were especially good for crafts people. The general public had a lot of appreciation for artist designed and hand-crafted goods. I guess a lot of hippies eventually grew up, got jobs and had money to spend. High-end crafts were hot. There were lots of good craft shows and there was a lot of money to be made if you were good at what you did, and if you made the effort to market yourself.
Some artists I knew of who were sleeping out in the street, in, or under their trucks, eventually went on to become highly successful designers and entrepreneurs. Many small time crafters with big ambitions became very successful jewelry designers; some of them still have highly profitable lines sold in major department stores. One such example is, Laurel Burch, who died recently. She started out as a lowly crafter and eventually became a huge name in the accessories world.
But I digress, this is really all about me…
With my husband and partner in the business, I did the big time fairs, too, and sold my work in shops and galleries all over, achieving better than a moderate degree of success. But that wasn’t enough for us. For some insane reason we decided the real road to easy street would be via the upscale jewelry gallery where we could sell not only our work, but also the work of all those other successful and talented jewelry artists.
In the beginning, we brought a lot of enthusiasm to the venture. We represented some really great people. We had some special showings for a few of our artists. The community made an effort to support us, and it was fun and good for a while. I got one or two of my all time best customers through the store. These great guys would come in and custom order very special items for the women in their lives, year after year. I was always impressed at the thought that went into these special requests.
Each of these jobs was a challenge and almost always provided an opportunity for me to stretch my skills. And my work did not go unappreciated. They really understood the special quality of the custom designed, hand made piece. And their wives and daughters did as well. I loved working for them. I loved knowing the secret of what thoughtful gift someone would be getting, and I was very invested in each project and I worked hard to make each commission a success.
I always felt a little bit special myself, a little like an elf, making the gifts.
As the years went by, though, the reality of retail set in. We were slaves to our store hours. Even though we had sales help, we had to work weekends, too. During the holidays we had to put in extra long hours, so our family got the short end of the deal.
Having employees all the time had it’s own set of special problems. Most of them were wonderful, but they all had their own paths to travel, so we were always training new people. Sometimes we felt we were working only to pay our expenses and their salaries and saving nothing for our own future,(and that’s pretty much how it played out, actually).
Although most of the customers were fine, a lot of them were not always such easy people to deal with. There was the lady who bought earrings one week, and because we had a very liberal return policy, she returned them the next week and exchanged them for another. And then the next week, same thing. After about a month of that, my husband finally said, “I’m sorry. You can’t just buy earrings, wear them for a week, and return them for another pair every single week. That’s just not how our return policy works.”
She drew herself up in a huff, and I swear this is true, she said, “Don’t confuse me with the facts!” Then she left, never to return again, thank goodness.
But there was always someone else to replace her. Like the lady who really needed therapy, but came in to try earrings on for two hours every other week so she could tell me about her deepest, most personal problems. Not only did she waste my time, but she also never bought anything! One day she complimented me on my haircut, and said she didn’t have a good hairdresser. I immediately saw the solution to my problem. I gave her the name of my hairdresser. It worked, she didn’t come back.
And some were completely crazy. There was the guy who occasionally came into the store wearing a long black cape. He’d walk up to the full length mirror, stand in front of it admiring himself, stick out his tongue and move toward the mirror and begin to lick his reflection. Jeez! Each time we waited patiently until he did the tongue thing, and then call the cops to escort him out.
Most of the rest of the annoyances were not all that terrible, but rolled in with a lot of other issues, it all just became more than we wanted to deal with any longer. The truth was, we were not cut out for the daily retail grind, so it was time to call it quits. We closed the store and went back to selling wholesale and doing shows again, which we continued doing through most of the 90s. I did manage keep some of those really great customers and still did some special commissions for them for a while, so that was nice.
Slowly, though, I cut back, dropping more shows, and keeping only my very best accounts. I found other, newer things to pursue. The great customers have moved on to patronize other artists, and that’s OK by me. But there’s always been a little something missing in my life since we cut out most of the retail, and I couldn’t quite figure out what it was.
With the advent and success of the internet marketplace, I finally decided it was time for me to give this new form of retail selling a try. A couple years ago I built myself a little website featuring a very limited number of items from one of my most popular production lines. All simple stuff, no complex commissions, just stuff that is easy for me to produce. Stressless. I haven’t promoted it too much, and I don’t get a ton of orders, but there have been just enough. Although this year I’ve had a lot more orders, so it is keeping me busy but still not overly so.
Last week, I finally figured out what it is that I’ve been missing from the old days of retail. I don’t have a shopping cart on my web site, so it is necessary to contact me directly to make a purchase. I talked to several different customers last week. They were so enthusiastic. They were all thoughtful people, who were really happy to have found just the right gift for someone they knew. Their enthusiasm was contagious. I wanted to help them make someone happy, go the extra mile and offer the special touch. Whatever it took —gift wrap, enclose a special note, make an out of stock item today, right now, to assure that it would be there in time for Christmas.
I realized what it was I had lost, and now found —I’m finally getting to be an elf again, and I love it!
All the uncharacteristic relaxing over the past couple of days must have gone straight to my head. For when I returned to the studio today, I got a bug up my ass to rearrange my space.
I wanted to figure out a way to do some woodworking where I could use a flexible shaft to power sand and carve some boards, without getting wood dust all over my jewelry bench and tools. So I figured by simply switching a cabinet and an extra jeweler’s bench I had, I’d be able to easily set up a separate area for the woodworking and other messy tasks.
Well, that’s how it worked out in my head, but reality is never that simple. It required removing all sorts of stuff from drawers and shelves to make things light enough to move around. And then I realized I’d have to reorder just about everything for efficiency. The final straw was that my perception of size failed me completely, and the pieces that needed to be moved turned out to be larger than they actually appeared based on my eyeballing the situation. Measure first, you say? Me? Uh, uh.
We carried on anyhow and finally had to face the fact that I needed to get rid of a desk entirely in order to fit everything into place. Of course, that desk was filled with stuff I needed, and I had to find a way of redistributing all that stuff to fit it in somewhere else within the designated space.
I wandered from one area to another, and from one piece of furniture to another, trying to figure out where to start to make some headway so I could proceed with the rearranging. But, by then the task had become so complex and overwhelming that I had a complete meltdown, right down to the point of collapsing in a chair and sobbing that it was all just too much and I couldn’t deal with all this crap anymore and that I’d just have to just throw it all out. That may sound stupid and childish but I was truly devastated and totally at a loss as to how I could possibly ever get things back in order.
To his credit, C. came to my rescue and instead of getting mad at me, he helped me look at the space in a different way and helped me see where to begin, and started moving things around for me. Once he got started, I could see that a solution might be possible, if not immediately attainable. So I calmed down and started to move stuff. We actually got the desk free and moved it out into the alley, and by the time we left things started to look better, but the job is still overwhelming.
This shows just one view, from one angle. In this small picture it doesn’t look nearly as daunting as it does large as life. I am so not looking forward to going in tomorrow to face what awaits me.
Studio Mess
