My much-loved but un-inspiring studio table…

From this Photo that Adam took of my Violin and Guitar together:

I made one of these candle holders from some discarded glass pencil holders a while back and gave it to Emily (people around me usually end up with the over-spill of my creative adventures) and I decided to make some more this weekend to take a break from burning. I printed out the script on paper and taped it to the inside of the cup, then used a dremel and a diamond point tip to engrave the script using the printed paper as a guide. I took the paper template out, popped in a tealight and Voila! I actually really like the way they turned out.

This is a cute little design that reminds me of Dr. Suess. Horton hears an Elm Tree. I still have to do some touch up and fix some minor scorching, but it’s almost finished.

The blog has been quiet over the holidays due to the holiday rush, so I have some catching up to do. So, in the spirit of fourth grade english essay assignments, here is what the holidays had in store for us…

Orders from the shop, the majority of them custom designs, started coming in near the end of November and did not stop. It has been fantastic and horrifying and certainly a learning experience. I had completely underestimated the holiday rush for Sixth & Elm but that was very good news for me and I was able to buy some Christmas gifts for myself too, including the shiny new laptop I am now typing on. Running on 4 hours of sleep a night, cleaning out the supply of 8×8 boxes in the greater Toronto area and finding out what the couch cushion looked like with ebony black wood stain were some of the things I would liked to have skipped, but despite the rush I enjoyed it all.

I especially liked being touched by the stories each custom box told between the gifter and the receiver. The shy and sheepish requests for cute, silly, sweet and nonsensical (nonsense to me, anyways) phrases or images burned onto the boxes each told the story of a bond – a sweetheart, a daughter, a friend – and it is rather nice to be surrounded by these stories at this time of year.

For sanity’s sake during the rush I did take a few breaks to make some pieces for my family and for the shop. My sister Tia has liked the copper tree sculptures I have been making this year, so it seemed only appropriate that I make her a tree in her favorite colour for her favorite time of year. I have a listing up at the shop of the Christmas tree I made her if anyone is interested in commissioning a similar piece. I also finished a decorative wall map I made for her of Middle Earth from Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Hers was unstained, as per her wishes, but I will be posting the version I stained with a Cabernet stain in the shop sometime this week.

We gave Mom a hand-etched wall panel of an elephant (Mom’s crazy about them) but the poor thing did not make it all the way to Mom & Dad’s. Staring at the cracked pieces of my hard work in the backseat after a fateful attempt to calm Chuki’s in-the-car panic attacks was really heart-breaking, but kitty didn’t get hurt on the glass and I can make Mom another.

I also played with copper plating a few items (using the electrophoresis tank at work – don’t worry, Yanming – it will still work for proteins), but I need to find a better conductive paint, and I made a few roses and other small clay items to fire sometime this year.

Next year I am already set up to explore origami and leather tooling (yes, it was because of Into the Wild, so what) along with some glass – slumping and maybe getting into lamp-working. Looks like it’s gonna be a busy year, but I can’t wait.

Year after year I lament not having a classy way to display our incoming Christmas cards, especially since we have some pretty creative family & friends, many of whom make their own card designs that are worthy of a gallery showing. Last year I finally did something about it and now I have a place to display the cards and I have spruced up one of those annoyingly random pillars-in-the-middle-of-a-room thingies like we have in the rec room. It’s exceedingly easy, colour customizable and takes about 5 minutes.

1. Confuse or con your friend named ________ (insert gullible friend’s name here) to drive you to the craft store near your house because your sorry butt is too broke to buy a car.
2. At the craft store, spend waaaaaaay too much time browsing the stamps and eventually wander over to the discount ribbon bin. It doesn’t have to be the discount ribbon bin, that’s just where I found mine. If I had not had this ribbon already, I would have bought some of the beautiful ribbons in the new Martha Stewart line that have been highlighted on Black, White Bliss and Try This At Home recently. The ribbon I used is 3 inches wide, velvet and quite sturdy. The edges are wired, but that is not required. Any ribbon will work, as long as you like it.
3. Place the ribbon in a large plastic bin and forget about it for about two years.
4. Pull out the ribbon again and dust it off. Tie a nice puffy bow in one end of the ribbon and cut from the main roll so that both tails are even. I just used a shoelace bow, but if you are a professional bowtie-er or a Marine you might know some better bow knots to make. This one seems to work.
5. Take the remaining ribbon off the roll and let it hang. Tack one end of the ribbon strand to the back of the bow using tiny safety pins or thread. I sewed the ribbon strand onto the bow with burgundy thread and the back of it looks a little like Frankenstein’s neck (sorry.. Frankenstein’s monster’s neck) but it really doesn’t matter as long as it holds. How strong the tacking has to be depends on whether or not you have children or animals who will play the “let’s pull on this and see what it does” game.
6. Buy a roll of cork WAY too large for your project. Not sure why you need to do that, but that’s what I did so I am just writing it down with all the rest. Line your cupboards with the leftover cork.
7. 
8. Cut a long strip (or many smaller ones) equal to the length of the ribbon strand, from the bow to the floor, if you want it that long.
9. Affix this cork to the back of the ribbon strand with hot glue or some other adhesive. Don’t sew it on or the cork will just crumble. In my pictures the bow is already on the wall for this step, but only did that so I could use one hand for the pics. You can do all this on your workbench, of course.
10. 
11. Place your bow at your desired height on the wall with a tack or one of those sticky hook thingies. I don’t think “sticky hook thingy” is the official name for those things, but maybe it should be.
12. Trim the ribbon (and cork) with a V pattern at the height to which you would like it to hang under the bow. Tack the bottom of the strand and cork to the wall to keep it straight and against the wall.
13. Use tacks to tack up cards as they come in, as below. I didn’t have any cards yet, so I hung up random stuff I found for the picture. We have a lot of random stuff.

TA DA! Done. Now send me a card so I can put it up there. Um… please.

So…

I had planned to write tonight about my first experience with my new Gocco screen printing system. Well, I guess I can still write about it, but it will be seriously lacking in Gocco content due to the fact that I didn’t use it very much at all.

I spent an extra hour at work today designing 5 sweet little notecards that I planned to screenprint in pink and black. They were pretty good, if I do say so myself. I’d buy them. Anyways, I did it at work so I could take advantage of the carbon based laser printer since you can only make Gocco screen masters with a carbon original. I came home, went across the street and helped set up Em and Colin‘s new sound system (they think I am a wiz at sound equipment since my Dad was a DJ, so don’t tell them that I pressed a random button on the amp when they were out of the room and it started working magically), then settled down in the dungeon studio for a night of print-making magic.

The instruction manual was less than useless. Well, that’s not true, I am sure it is VERY helpful, just not to me, since it is Japanese and I opted to learn “ou est Paul, Paul est dans la bibliotheque” instead of the Asian literary arts. I guess I should have gone with Japanese in highschool, thinking back. I mean, the french I know will only help me if I happen to met a guy named Paul, and then lose him in a library. (more…)

The flavour of the week. Yes, for all you ducks that keep correcting my spelling on Etsy I spell it flavour. And humour. And colour and jewellery and neighbourhood. Why? Because the queen said so and she’s on my money so that makes her worth listening to. Anyways. I have a flavour of the week, but sometimes it is only the flavour of the day or maybe it lasts as long as a month. The point is, I have “phases” that wax and wane in every aspect of my life. Three weeks ago I wanted cottage cheese for every meal. Now it makes me gag. That kind of stuff.

So the reason I make so many things isn’t because I am particularly talented, or eclectic, or even well-rounded. I just start doing something, then get bored, and learn something else. I hate to admit that because I was kind of liking the “she can make ANYTHING” reputation I was fostering, but really I just had trouble staying with something long enough to get a name in that trade. I am deeply jealous of those who have a name. Adam is a photographer. Emily is a designer. I’m a … yeah, can’t even think of anything that fits there. I can tell you a lot of things I WAS. I guess I still am, as I still know how to do them, but I no longer do them so I don’t know what that means for my status. I know I may do woodcarving again, but is it like being a catholic who doesn’t go to church? Can I still be a carpenter when I haven’t even powered up my circular saw in half a year?

(more…)

I can’t really explain why I am so restless lately. Not in the large sense, the “what am I doing with my life?’ sense. On a smaller scale, “what am I doing at this exact second?” Most women “putter” and that’s fine, but I interrupt my puttering to putter with something else, and so on so at the end of the day I have started 82 projects and finished nothing.

It’s getting to be that way for my art, too. I am so excited about so many new techniques I want to try and many new pieces of equipment I have bought, (against the advice of my credit card) that I can’t sit down long enough to actually do anything. Case in point – yesterday. I was making a clock by dismantling it and flipping the plate to make it run backwards.

In the middle of this, with half the clock gears scattered around my workbench I noticed a bead on the floor – a pretty expensive lampwork glass bead and perfect choking size for the cat. I picked it up, got out my bead bins and put it back in its compartment. I was about to close the lid when I noticed some really nice clasps I had from a necklace I took apart a few weeks ago and I got an idea for a new design of collar for Chuki (the aforementioned cat, who does not like collars, but will proudly wear his tags if I put them on a nice beaded necklace for him.) so I pulled out the supplies and started beading. Partway through THAT I remembered that I was going to make a homemade bead spinner and this would be the perfect project to try it on. Out came the glue guns, dowels and a margarine tub (Okay, yes, I did throw away ¼ tub of margarine for this, but I really wanted to try it and had no empty tubs) and off I went. At the end of the day my workbench was littered with clock parts, beads, a beading tray, my wire storage box, 15 handmade wire beads I had just finished and three books on woodworking that I had found while looking for the fire mountain catalog. I had started a total of 9 projects and finished a total of none.

At this rate, it will be 2008 before I have anything to sell on ETSY.