Rules for "Furniture Arranging", Decluttering -- Yeah, ME! -- & Some New Copper Chain Components...

I put "furniture arranging" in quotes because people who know me know that I belong to the "it lives where it drops" school of interior design. This applies to the room, the table or shelf of stuff, the clothes, the jewellery, everything in my life: for me, it's all one undifferentiated messpile. Constantly reading decluttering websites 'til the cows come home just doesn't do it for me.

However. Now that I am a one-third proprietor of a booth at the One of a Kind Antique Mall where the goal is to make OUR hundreds of tiny items leap out from the mind-numbing millions of items in the whole 80,000 square foot mall, thereby capturing the eye, mind and heart of their future owners in the three seconds or so allotted to us as they walk by our booth, I'm being forced to learn valuable lessons, if not about interior design or our taste in acquiring gotta-have-this items, then at the very least about how to turn mind-numbing clutter and junk into semi-organised collections -- not chaos -- that will result in constant sales and turnover. (And that is one brain-numbing long sentence. At least, I think it was a sentence. Sorry about that.)

Prior to this, as Lynn and Nancy Mac valiantly attempted to organise thousands of beads, as well as my market table, for me over the past two or three years, I wondered how on earth people did it: make a pile of junky and/or disparate things look clear and ordered. At what point does sick-making clutter of anything veer off the hoarding track onto an "Oh, wow! Look at that!" collection of reeeally cool stuff track?

Here are my short and sweet rules for the store/booth, where the rule is more is way merrier:

1. Gather together like items by picking a theme: colour, era, purpose...
2. Pick the focal piece for that particular vignette
3. Group like vignettes into a larger, overarching theme
4. Can't tell if it's working or not? Photograph your vignette, then step back and photograph the area it occupies: what's not working will leap out at you (this works for anything)

At home, where the rule is less and less is more:
1. Ruthlessly cull or regift (consignment or friends, thrift store, dump) then cull the cull: if you're weak-willed/lazy (I'm both), ask your friends to take everything away immediately for you. Boxes of stuff sitting in a corner are still STUFF IN YOUR HOUSE.
2. Enforce the rule: if something comes in, something goes out (furniture, junque, clothes...)

To the "at home" advice, I finally found out where the recycling depot hides here: I'm talking boxes and boxes of papers to get rid of that would fry any shredder's circuits: outdated and often unread magazines, old computer printouts, university papers that after 20 years I. will. never. look. at. again. Then there are the boxes and boxes of art books hiding out of sight, out of mind under my bed, about 20 of those at last count -- that's boxes, not books.

I think I'm finally starting to get the idea: despite adding a largish side table/magazine table and a box more of stuff to the booth yesterday, after we were finished moving stuff around Nancy Mac said in gobsmacked wonder, "Look at all the room we have!"

June 30

July 6

July 9

It may well be my imagination, but the booth really does feel roomier in the July 9th picture. Even though we've added more items and increased the space the island in the middle occupies, turning the display table 90 degrees really helped with that. The wrought iron screen gives us a see-through wall halfway along the length of that display table and things can pile up and against it on both sides. Overall, there's still plenty of room in behind for people to walk. The new deep green table against the blue seems to calm that whole wall down and rests the eye: there's not that bouncing between the teal blue wall and green as there was with the lighter wooden cart that can be seen in the July 6th picture. The lighter-coloured and lower cart being in the left corner also guides the eye down from the right corner to the left, yet you can still take everything in. 

Yes, there is an estate sale happening this weekend with our name on it!

Meanwhile, after roaming Pinterest and scouring it for ideas, I finally settled down to watch Hannibal on Netflix and bend copper wire. Tonight: hammering. 

These are the tools I use to make these items. I buy all my copper wire by the pound from The Ring Lord. I think this is 16 gauge. I use memory wire cutters on the heavier gauge wire, because it cuts it more easily, and gives a good squared off cut rather than the angled and picky/burred cut that the regular flush cutters give, the ends of which must be filed. For what I'm doing here, a single loop and little to no wrapping, I don't want an angled cut anyway. I want that blunt cut end to butt right into the wire it's looped around to.

I used the barrel of the orange highlighter pen to make the larger loop of the figure-8 pieces at the top (about 15mm diameter), and then the largest part of the round nose to make the smaller loop.

Next step will be a marathon of hammering and then, after a good swish in ketchup to make everything shiny, assembling them into bracelets, earrings and necklaces. One of these days I'll have to play with liver of sulphur to patina my chains, but so far people here seem to prefer the look of shiny copper.

Thanks for looking!

Copper-Wrapped Pearl Necklace Experiments...

The robins have decided not to move in. I can't figure out if this is normal, that she would build the nest and then not lay her eggs immediately. Is it because it's too cold out here? Guess I could check online...

Here's my blue flowered back lawn... I LOVE these flowers, and forget-me-nots, too.

Meanwhile back inside the ranch sitting at my little TV dinner tray parked in front of my stoopid computer, as a lot of you have already discovered, holes in pearls typically are frustratingly tiny -- 24 gauge wire being about the only thing that will get through them. Unfortunately, at the moment all I have is dead soft wire in that gauge and it makes wrapping incredibly difficult and floppy. I have to say that it is almost impossible to do a decent wrap with dead soft wire. Most of the larger pearls I can use hard temper 22 gauge wire I buy by the pound from The Ring Lord, a great source for wire in bulk, carrying the full range of wire gauges and tempers across all the common wire types. I have no idea why I didn't buy 24 gauge hard temper. Or maybe I did and it's just lost in my messpile.

Anyway, these pearl chains are what I'm playing with these days. I will dig out my wrapped seed bead chains and start seeing about adding them, as well, but I've always wanted to play with the pearl colours. I watched the first season of Orange is the New Black on Netflix while making these this week.

I haven't quite sorted out how I'll join up the different colours on this fuschia, white and deep teal blue pearl necklace. FYI, the two burgundy-ish brown segments really tone down the red, white and blue direction this was going in. Very interesting, the difference with and without. By using jump rings, I can easily balance out the beads if someone requires a different length or if I decide to make it a double choker length.

A little dish of pearl soup. I need more colours. Sigh...

Alas, there was only the one season of Orange, so now I'm watching Once Upon A Time In Mexico for the umpteenth time and hoping that there are plenty of other Rodriguez films to get me through the weekend.  

Thanks for looking!

Memory of Max & Getting Hammered...

Yeah, it was around 1:00 a.m. in the morning, one year ago today, that Max started to die. The day itself, like today, was sunny, Max's favourite kind of day to go running around burrowing and playing in the snow.

Still cannot believe how much I miss my little fuzzy boy every single day.

Wire-wrap chain:
On other fronts, I got a commission on Saturday at the market and put it together yesterday. I had made the chain during one of my Netflix marathons back in the fall and Winter brought me the pendant. Since the pendant is provided, I figure this length of chain (about 44 inches) would cost $50. These are vintage 100-year-old greasy blue Venetian glass seed beads that I got from Naomi at Black Tulip Designs wrapped in hard temper copper wire which I buy by the pound from The Ring Lord. Using the hard temper wire is murder on my fingers, but I find I have a lot more control over the shape of the loops. Soft copper is really mushy for this type of chain. In the closeup photo you can appreciate the depth and lustre. These beads are wonderful. New beads don't hold a candle to them.

Getting hammered:
I'm subscribed to Lisa Yang's jewellery blog and lately Lisa's been posting a series of tuts on basic jewellery-making. I'm always a fan of going back to the basics, if only to find out about new tools and new materials to play with, not to mention the chance that someone somewhere has come up with a new and improved way of doing some simple thing.

I haven't done any hammering for at least two years -- mostly because I was doing other things, but also this past year I'd been living where hammering wasn't feasible. If you've ever lived on a river, especially bounded by cliffs on either side, you'll understand how all sounds are magnified like crazy up and down the river. But now I'm out in the country again and, while I have neighbours on either side of me, we're also bounded on three sides by gravel pits and manufacturing facilities all making their own assorted noises, and a vast golf course to the west. Therefore, I feel free to whack away... although maybe not in the middle of the night.

Lisa has been demoing so-called "bone" connectors, and I made two batches yesterday, trying to beat her time. I'm down to about 2 minutes per "bone". I've said this before: I'm no jewellery designer; I'm a technician. I love to figure out ways to do things easier, faster and more efficiently. Since I would like to sell my stuff, the more efficiently I work the less time it takes me to make things and the greater my profit margin; the less I can sell an item for the better my chances of selling something. Plus I get bored really quickly and like to do repetitive stuff fast.

I used to work in newspaper and printing binderies and know about optimising papers and envelopes on a table in order to stuff envelopes and newspapers. It's no different when one is hammering wire. And I get a production line going.

The first thing I became aware of yesterday was the height at which I was sitting at my folding table. I have a wicker chair I sit at. There was a HUGE difference in ease of hammering when I put the cushion back on the chair as it raised me up 3 inches. I've found I like to sit lower and hunched over with my nose closer to the table top when I'm stringing or wire-wrapping. I found the hammering went much easier, more efficiently (and therefore faster) and I had better control over the effect because I had more arm control when I was sitting up higher in particular because I was using hard-tempered 14 gauge copper wire. I also found I could only hammer three or four "bones" at a time and had to take a couple of minutes' break in between each batch. Even though I'm ambidextrous most of the time, I'm not good at hammering using my left hand. I'm going to look like a lopsided Popeye when I'm finished this. Muskles on top of muskles.

Remove anything you don't need from the table. In mid-whack, a big bin of beads sitting on the corner landed upside down on the floor... absolutely everything jumps around when hammering. Using a doubled over beading mat keeps the noise level and the bouncing down, but I'm still working on figuring out how to keep the bench block itself as well as the mat from moving. The bead mat helps, and I noticed if I hammer wire in the middle of the block, it tends to stay in one place, but when holding short wire "bones" I'd be forever hammering my fingers to a pulp so this time I was stuck hammering closer to the edge of the block. I'm wondering, since I've seen other people use it in tutorials, if using a piece of leather would keep the bench block in place. I'd love to hear from someone if that is true. Makes me wish I hadn't been so hasty throwing out an old purse that I could have cut up.

Note that I use memory wire cutters for the thicker, harder wire gauges and always when I'll be hammering any wire as it cuts off truly square and 45 degrees to the length of the wire, rather than angled as with the regular cutters. I really appreciated the pure efficiency of this punch that I bought a while back and used for the first time. I also have one of those gizmos that you screw down to punch a hole with, but this is way, way faster. Note also the diamond file. I used that to clean off the burrs from the punch, as well as cleaned up any sharp edges around the hammered ends. I thought the pack of diamond files to be really expensive when I first bought them, but I use them all the time for so many different things.

Lacking a tumbler (and having to live with the fine scratches from the file), I opted to use ketchup to clean my finished bones.

Smooshing the pieces around. Takes only seconds to clean them.

Finish with some dish detergent and rinse. A scrubbie and soap got rid of any Sharpie marks. I have filtered well water with unknown mineral content so I'll need to get some distilled water. 

A New Toy for Ruth & Me:
Every show I do I try to upgrade and/or buy one item to make life easier in an away venue. For the March 14th, 15th & 16th Gem Expo in Toronto I bought a dolly. Since hotel luggage carts are at a premium (let alone unavailable in some venues) waiting for half an hour or more to unload and load up my truck is not what I want to be doing especially at the end of the show when I'm looking forward to a two-hour drive home.

Even though this dolly is all-metal, it is still about the same weight as the mostly plastic one that cost $10-$15 more, and is less bulky/bulbous. Plus this one can be used both vertically and horizontally. My trick will be to keep track of those cotter pins that lock the handlebar in place. Since I'm basically hauling bins of rocks, I need the sturdier all-metal construction and the big wheels, essential when moving heavy loads on dirt paths, grass, snow, uneven road surfaces and humping up and down steps which, if a dolly is going to collapse on you, these are the exact places.

I also bought some half-size bins with the flip-flop locking lids -- I'm forever misplacing lids -- so that everything not only stacks, the smaller sizes will hold more-reasonably-easy-to-heave-around quantities of beads and jewellery. My goal is to get everything into two sizes of bins, ditch the open top liquor store cardboard boxes, and anything else will fit into Tyvek shopping bags, still stackable and portable/easy to heave around.

Hammered Tinned Copper Earrings:
I promptly lost the first batch of copper bones I made. Zero idea where they got to. Made a second batch. Then I made these using 14 gauge tinned copper. Very soft wire. See how wiggly and bendy these got compared to the hard temper copper wire that really held its shape, but the tinned copper does goosh out a lot easier.

This morning I was contemplating them and wondered if the "waterfall" effect looks better (the earring on the right). I think it does. My online pal Joanne over at Nelson Gemstones agreed, but also suggested these would look better with the large jump rings in a silver colour. She just got back from Tucson: go check out the new beads she scored on her Facebook page. I'm so jealous!!! Next year!

Now to get off this computer and go make a chain out of the "bone" connectors and make more of these earrings and figure out a necklace variation.

Hope everyone is having a relaxing Family Day here in Canada and President's Day down in the US.

Went to Bulk Barn for the first time in over a year, and since they renovated.
This poster made me laugh. Yummy!!!

Thanks for looking!