If you sell your own work…

Several artists I very much admire (I’m not naming them because I haven’t asked their permission) got into a recent discussion about the difference in some fees charged by the Square credit card processing system. A comment was made about this being higher than that … but the formulas were different. There had to be a “break even” point where they matched! So I immediately calculated those values for my own benefit.

And then this evening I just had to go back to some good old graphing software and produce this plot. This applies specifically to the Square system as of April 6, 2023. Other credit card processors calculate their fees differently, both in their formulas and any various categories. But Square is one of the more common ones you’ll see used at art fairs, so I thought some of you might share an interest in this..

Always the lowest fee (purple line): charged in-person, using their card reader.

Next lowest (red and green lines swap at the green circle): 

• Under $25, when you manually enter the information or a card stored in Square’s system is used;
• Over $25, a purchase processed online through Square.

Highest (red and blue lines swap at the blue star):

• Under $75, when you invoice the buyer through Square;
• Over $75, when you manually enter the information or a card stored in Square’s system is used.

I can understand the logic of a higher fee for an invoice: Square is providing an extra service that involves more steps through their system.

But I agree with the folks who started this discussion: I can’t think why the fee for using a card stored in their system creeps higher, relative to their other categories, as the total amount processed at that time goes up.

Can you? If so please leave me a comment!

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p.s., There are yet more fee structures, but I thought that graph had enough lines already! For instance, if you offer the Afterpay service, the vendor’s fee for that (at least through Square) is higher-still, 6% + $0.30. [Editorial comment: The pitch is that the vendor will get more sales and be paid in full. Since Afterpay has to both cover the float and deal with any problems with the later payments, the higher fee compensates them for all that. I don’t rely on an online shop for the bulk of my income but, as a shopper, I know that vendors are now factoring the possibility that “you” will use that service into the price that “I” will be paying even if I simply hand over cash, contributing its own little factor to increasing inflation…]

Three Hairpin Lace Squares for The Violet Protest

Another creative yet meaningful thing I did in 2020, one that just happened to end up taking place during the pandemic shut-downs, was to volunteer to make three squares for the Violet Protest project.   Personally, I am not happy with the way “politics” is handled by “social media” (and by others, but all that is for yet another discussion) so I don’t tend to say much about political topics online.  (I am not apolitical!  It’s more that only occasionally do I wear politics on my social-media sleeve.)  But this seemed like an idea that people from either / any side could support, which is why it interested me. Because I do believe that we have to stop talking at each other and re-learn how to converse with each other, to stop emphasizing our differences and start making progress for the future via the interests and goals we do share…

So what is the Violet Protest?

In short, makers from across all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and all American territories—without regard to their own political inclinations—are joining together in using their time and talents to make 8” x 8”  fiber and/or fabric squares using equal parts red and blue. These are, first, being exhibited in Phoenix, AZ; after about six months, the show will be taken down and the squares will be distributed to all members of Congress, of all parties, to ask them to find ways to come together too.

“Focused on the values we hold dear as Americans, rather than any political beliefs, the color violet symbolizes the literal combination of red and blue, long held as symbols of our nation’s differing ideologies. Our common goal is to send a physical message of friendly protest through this … visual expression to demonstrate that if we as citizens are willing to come together, so then must our elected officials.”

For more detailed information, you can check the project’s website, at violetprotest.com

Why did I decide to make three squares?  

Some people volunteered to make just one; others, scores!  The website is set up for you to easily choose to make one, or else multiples of five, but it was possible to assign yourself a different number of contributions.  I offered three.

Since the idea is that, at the end of the museum exhibit in Phoenix, the squares will be packaged up in groups and sent to each of the current members of Congress, I figured that, even though the pieces given to each recipient would be assigned at random, the fact that there were three people supposedly designated to carry my voice to congress (one regional state representative and two state senators) meant that three would be a good number to make. 

(Also, I made that commitment early in pandemic, when some supplies were scarce and lots of stores were closed to the public.  I did have a few small skeins in appropriate red and blue colors (among several I had “inherited” when the mother of some friends died a few years ago). I knew those skeins would provide enough to make three squares, but I really wasn’t sure if I could squeeze any more out of that stash!)

What Is Hairpin Lace?!

Before I explain the why of my design choices, let me show you a little bit of the construction process.  

The technique I used is called hairpin lace because, in the past, delicate, lacy designs were made by looping and then crocheting very small, fine threads on actual hairpins!  While I do dabble in a bit of miniature artistry at times — various kinds of clay, both ceramic and metal, being my favorites — I am not into working on mini fiber projects (though I have seen some made by others that have been truly stunning!)

I’ve used a larger-scale hairpin lace process to make, for myself and as gifts, a number of winter scarves and hats, and even one large blanket (with a second one that’s turned into a perpetual UFO…).  Most often, I will choose three complementary colors, or three different shades of a hue, and work with them in various pairs.  So I’ll use a big crochet hook and two strands of yarn at a time for each “row.”  I will make each one just a little bit longer than my final goal (because I find it easier to pull out a little bit if it seems to be shaping up to be longer than planned than it is to add a little more at the end.  The latter is possible, just not as much fun!)  Then the individual strips are hooked together to create the final piece.  Picking up an equal number of loops from the strip on each side will yield a flat piece, while differing counts will produce curves.  (And for more advanced designs than I’m showing here, you can also vary the width and counts within and across strips.)

What the process photo shows is this:  five complete rows already woven together, and a sixth complete strip that’s ready to be taken off its hairpin-substitute “loom” and added to those.  

The weaving together is what will tweak the size, both length and width, of the final piece.  Not a problem with a scarf where exact sizing is unlikely to matter, but trickier when your goal is to end up with a square that is exactly 8 by 8 inches!  The photo shows Melting Pot where I did hit it exactly at the 8-inch width but, yikes!, this first of my squares ended up being only 7 inches long.  

I set it aside to make the other two.  Lessons learned, I got those to come out to just the right size from the start.  In the meantime, continued forced closures of public gathering spaces meant the the exhibition dates for the Violet Protest show were pushed ahead by a few months.  Instead of opening just before Election Day in 2020, the museum show would launch soon after Inauguration Day in 2021.  I had plenty of time to fix up the size of my third piece and, when complete, I sent them all in!

My Thinking with These Three Designs

But why the three designs I chose?  Now that you have at least a little idea of how the rows are made, and how they interact, let’s take a look at my three offerings, from left to right, and I’ll describe the symbolism I feel in each one:

Top, left: How can anyone imagine simply staying in their own red or blue lane (even if they try to do so with civility and respect) when ALL OUR LANES ARE CONNECTED?

Center, bottom: Rather than divide by red vs blue, why not combine creativity, courage, compassion, and compromise as we all aim our efforts to be for THE COMMON GOOD?

Top, right:  Can politicians from across our country model, not selfishness and division, but consideration, collaboration and compromise … for all people but especially for the children of our great MELTING POT?

Would you like to join the Violet Protest?

As I write this, you still can!  A few photos from the exhibition can be seen online at https://www.violetprotest.com/vp-at-phoenix-art-museum.html.  It has been open for in-person viewing at the Phoenix Art Museum since March 10, and will remain open though September 5, 2021.  Squares can still be registered (in advance, to get the required exhibition tag!) and sent in.  Submissions will be accepted and added to the display through August 1. 

• To volunteer to contribute one or more squares:
  https://www.violetprotest.com/volunteer.html
• To offer a donation to help offset the cost of mailing squares to Congress:
  https://www.violetprotest.com/donate.html

After the show ends, all the squares will be evenly (and randomly) divided up, packaged, and sent to every member of Congress.  I sure hope that some of them get the message!

Do you think any / many of them will?!! Please leave a comment!

(Well, that is, please leave a comment that (even if it is controversial) shows respect, kindness, compassion, candor, and, perhaps, also creativity; any that do the opposite will be removed.)

Well, it’s been a while…

So … I haven’t posted here in a while, have I?  Then let me start with a question: How “creative” have you been during the pandemic?  

Background

Back when I retired from working full time at a university (plus taking on a range of consulting gigs), I was so thrilled to have more time for creative adventures.  I could keep all my other “outside of work” activities going, still do a bit of consulting and/or tutoring,  but start using what had been my regular work-time for new projects.  Wonderful!!!  

Though I had done some things like art-jewelry and gardening when working full time, I really appreciated having more time for those in particular and, through them (as I’d had as a faculty member), more outlets for continuing to meet and interact with new people.  So when so much shut down, instead of seeing it as an opportunity for more creative activities, for me at least it felt more like it shut down so many of the reasons I had expanded those areas.  I didn’t drop those balls completely, of course, just some.  But I went sort of back to the pace of when I’d been working full-time-plus.

(I’ve always done a lot of “creative cooking” and for the past year I have done a lot of very “creatively inefficient” cooking!  That is, instead of cooking “in bulk” to make food for dinner parties and several meals at once, I was making just enough for each meal.  I set the table each time too, with nice glasses and dishes, my good flatware and fabric napkins, etc. (I did often use my smallest plates so it would feel simpler to not over-eat!)  I tried new recipes and re-worked older ones (especially early on, when we were contending with various shortages) which I found to be easy when I didn’t have to worry about timing … beyond all those zoom-calls!)  

One Fun, New Creationf

Ah, but other types of artistry… With this post, I include a photo of one of the jewelry pieces I did make this past year, yet another in my “doorway” series, this one in brilliant bronze.  It was a combination gift for a friend “out west” when she: retired from her (self-employed) job; celebrated a decade-turning birthday; and, by coincidence, had just completed her 2-jab covid-vaccine sequence!  

When looking at a different doorway pendant I’d made on commission a while ago, she had asked for one (rather insistently, I might note) and it did seem a good choice now as she was stepping out into the next phase of her life.  

We don’t normally exchange gifts at the price-level of what I’d’ve normally charged for one of these.  Until now, I’ve always made these in silver.  During the pandemic, the price of silver has gone up even more … sigh.  The relatively few sales I have managed to make were fine for covering fixed costs like rent but didn’t leave enough extra to splurge on more up-priced silver…. But I was happy to see this as a chance for me to explore what it’d take to make doorways in this lovely golden bronze color.  Bronze does take more time than silver at several points in the process so, after balancing the cost across both materials and time, the final retail price would still be close to that of a silver one.  But in this case, I had plenty of time to spend on a gift for a dear friend while both saving myself the cost of more silver and testing for any issues in trying to make these in a base metal alloy.  I’m happy with this result, and she seems to be too!

Have you tried anything new, or modified any previous interests, during the shutdowns?

Studio: starting year ten!

I can’t believe I’m about to start the tenth year in my studio!

Which means I’m into at least my fifteenth year with metal clays.

It’s clear when I moved into my studio, and I now can’t imagine not having it. The other date is harder to pinpoint: from when do I start counting?!! While visiting my family home in Florida, when I first saw something made using fine silver metal clay and immediately became intrigued? While I was still teaching in California, when I first succeeded in tracking down some good information to learn more about it? After moving to Pennsylvania, the first time I actually opened a package of clay? In my friend Bonnie’s barn, the first time we each held a piece we had made and fired entirely on our own? At home in my family room, the first time I felt comfortable enough with every step in the process of a piece — design, construction, firing, finishing, assembling into its final form, pricing — to consider offering it for sale? The point at which I felt committed-enough to pursue this that I started looking for a studio? All of that (and more!) developed gradually, over some years.

But what I’m thinking about today, this week, at this time… is back to when I first opened my own studio and, specifically, to this day back in 2010 when I first picked up the keys to my studio and arranged to meet my friend Jeff at Ikea; we reviewed the options I was considering; and I bought the basic tables and shelving I started off with (all of which still use). We loaded it all into our vehicles, and he followed me back to this new location. After hauling all the boxes up all the stairs, we took a break a block or so up the hill (at D’s, including a stop in their “beer cave”!). Then we spent the rest of the afternoon assembling (almost) everything. It was a magical day for me, in so many ways, made even better by sharing it as we did.

Thank you, J.e.f.f…I.I.I.
Miss you!!!

What a great surprise!

This is just a quick “Thank You!” to the Cranberry Artists Network (CAN) and Artist and Craftsman (sic) Supply (A&C) in Pittsburgh.

A&C was the “presenter” at the semi-annual CAN membership meeting this month. Instead of a presentation, however, two folks from A&C spread out a wide range of paints, brushes, and papers across a line of tables, just encouraged participants to try them out, and were happy to discuss the results and suggest other things to try. There was technical information too if you wanted it, but mostly it was just a chance to explore and play for yourself!

They also provided us a with small sample-size tube or jar of a few items we were most curious about. I left with two different texturing media I’d never tried before. Well, to be honest here, I work mostly in 3D. I’ve done much less painting, so there are a lot of things I haven’t (yet) tried! But I love samples because, obviously, they give me a chance to explore a little bit in order to decide if I like that product enough to spend my own money on a full-size supply. Thus the evening ended quite happily.

There’d been a bit of confusion about the time of CAN’s meeting. I arrived for the earlier time, and enjoyed the chance to mingle with others who did the same. But that meant I’d thought it would end sooner, and had said that I could stop at a friend’s house to offer a quick extra hand on a little project there. So I had to leave a bit before the end. I said to the A&C folks that, should I happen to win the door prize, please don’t leave it with anyone in Cranberry (30 miles away) because I could easily stop by their store (where I do shop: it’s maybe 3 miles from my studio, at a corner I pass regularly). But it was just an off-hand remark, because I really did not expect to win.

But I did win it! What a great collection! Thank you so much!

It’s been great knowing you, Pat Catan’s…

We’ve seen it coming, as all sorts of brick and mortar stores struggle to compete against online shopping. (While there are times when I appreciate the convenience of online shopping, I do highly value both the touch and serendipity of in-store shopping…)

We knew it was coming, three years ago, when Michael’s bought Pat Catan’s … not for the few dozen wonderful regional stores, but for Darice and the other wholesale operations behind it. (Have you noticed that Darice products have disappeared from JoAnn’s? That’s because Michael’s now owns Darice…)

We’ve known it was coming, watching some of the changes in the inventory and pricing that have slowly but surely changed the feel of Pat Catan’s stores over the past three years.

But it was still a sad day, today, when Michael’s announced that they will be closing all the Pat Catan’s stores. (A handful will be reopened, rebranded as Michael’s stores, but we don’t yet know whether those will be the ones in less-urban areas where the loss of any store would be a big loss.)

And, from here in Pittsburgh, I will admit that it hurt even more that the best article I could find on the whole thing came from Cleveland: https://www.cleveland.com/business/2019/01/michaels-to-close-pat-catans-nearly-three-years-after-buying-local-craft-store-chain.html

We knew loss was coming. I’m just trying to be thankful for the roughly three extra years we had before it did. So I’ll close with a photo of one of my “serendipity finds” from Pat Catan’s: I still remember the time I went to grab a quick roll of vinyl and found the clear, flat-bottom card-holder ornaments from Darice that I’ve been happily decorating (as a fun, back-porch, summer project that later helps to boost holiday-season sales) for a number of years now…

The Most Important Election….

I am writing this on the morning of the 2018 “Mid-Term” Election.  Here in Pennsylvania there is no early voting: soon after I’ve posted this, I’ll walk down the block to my polling place and cast my votes.  Then I’ll head the mile over to my studio for a day of sorting my wares into the groups that I’ll start delivering to the various shows where they’ll be available this holiday season.  (I’ll be posting more about those events soon.)

But for the past few days I’ve been thinking about the claim from both sides, Democratic and Republican, that this could be the most important election [of some time-frame].  In some ways I would agree, with both, that it is.  But not entirely.

I am going to date myself here: when I was 18 the voting age was 21.  Soon after I turned 21, the voting age was lowered to 18.  I always felt a bit cheated by not having been eligible to vote during the elections in between those birthdays.  Maybe that’s part of why I’ve voted regularly since then, including even the years when I lived overseas (pre-Internet and phone-less!) and had to travel to the local embassy to apply for an absentee ballot.

I will admit that, even into my early 20s, I was still a bit naive about elections.  I did vote in both “general” and “midterms” but sometimes I felt frustrated: while I was happy with some of my choices and voted eagerly for certain candidates, in other races I didn’t really like the choices and felt forced to pick between the lesser of two … well, not necessarily “evils” but at least “less than optimal choices.”  Sometimes I was thrilled when candidates I’d voted for won; other times I tried to find ways to understand why a particular race had gone another way.

What to do?  By the time I was 26 (why that age is another story entirely) I had figured out that “the most important election” is not the General or Mid-Term ones that get a lot of hype.  It is the PRIMARY that preceded it.  That’s where the decisions are made about who will even be on the ballot in November!

Since then, whenever anyone complains about either the results of an election or the candidates on a November ballot (especially anyone who says they don’t vote in November because they didn’t / don’t like the choices) my first reaction is, “Did you vote in the Primary?”  I try to avoid getting involved in (over time, increasingly angry) arguments over the November slate.  Sure, I’m happy to have intense one-on-one conversations (i.e., not via social media) about the issues and the candidates.  But angry arguments, when people talk at each other rather than with each other, and often in mere sound-bites, don’t help anyone….  Informed and respectful debates, combined when necessary with elements of compromise, do help us all.

Whatever the results from the election-season ending today, I am going to continue my campaign promoting the idea that the PRIMARIES are THE MOST IMPORTANT elections.  Unlike the November elections, primaries are held with different rules and on different dates in different states.  So outside one’s immediate community, they are a sort of moving target.  No matter: please find out when yours are, and VOTE in them!  Extremists do, and everyone else should as well.

If you haven’t been an active participant in primary elections, they may seem a bit intimidating.  It’s often harder to find good sources of information about all the candidates; for that matter, sometimes it’s even hard to find out for sure what will even be on the ballot and who-all is running!  Don’t let that stop you. Here’s a hint: voting is not like a school exam: you can leave some slates blank!  That’s the same as what you were doing when you didn’t vote at all, except now you can at least make some progress by voting in select races to start with!

That is, if necessary, you can build up your primary-voting response slowly.  Simply pick one or two races, research those thoroughly, and go vote on them!  Once you’ve figured out the process, you can expand your knowledge, support, and voting for more races in later primaries.

And start right away.  Now!  OK, the holiday-season is coming; if you must you can wait until January, but that’s all the slack you should allow yourself.  Make it a New Year’s resolution, and stick with that one!

And NOW means 2019.  Don’t wait until 2020.  2019 may not be as “big” an election, but there will be lots of local races, and that can be an easier place to start.  School boards, city / county councils, mayors, and so on often hold their elections in “off” years.  Ease slowly into the primary-voting process by getting informed at least, and perhaps even actively involved, in races like those.  Those are important too: not only do they involve races that are likely to have a direct impact on your life right where you are, those are often used as stepping-stones to the “bigger” positions later on.  If you get to know (know about or even know personally) those folks now, you’ll be a step ahead in knowing what to expect of them when they’re ready to move up the ladder! Here’s another hint: If you don’t know what races to expect in your 2019 primary, go to the website of your state’s election services and look up the results from 2015 primaries and general elections, the year before the last (2016) general election.  While there may be a few minor discrepancies (propositions change, a few votes are held on a 3-, 6-, or even 10-year cycle, etc.), that can be a great starting point for discovering the races you can, and should, monitor.

Another reason to not wait until 2020 is that, if you’re in a state that holds its primaries later in the cycle, the decision on who will be on the 2020 presidential ballot may have been made before you have a chance to have your say.  Do not let that stop you!  Make sure you’re informed about, and vote for, candidates for the checks-and-balances seats of the House and Senate!  (I would hope that you would vote, not for the obstructionists who think balance means only opposition, but for the collaborators who are able to compromise just enough to make things work for the better for us all!)  And go ahead and vote for the presidential candidate you wished to have as the nominee, even if someone else already has the lead: that way your candidate can still have some effect on the final “platform” for that election, and the parties may get a better understanding of what folks seem to have truly been seeking with their votes. In the meantime, however, please go out and VOTE in the election that’s upon us right now, today.  If you do, or have done so already, you have my sincerest “Thanks!!!”

A little heat wave surprise!

And now for a different kind of note… With a particularly large number of keep-cool items in my cart at Trader Joe’s last week, as I walked past the large insulated carrier bags they sell I thought, “If this heat wave keeps up, I may have to spring for one of those. But, not today: for now I’m still holding out until I win their bag-lottery. Though if I should ever win that, one of these bags is the very first thing I’ll get!”

What’s the TJ bag-lottery? You may already know, but I’ll explain it for anyone who doesn’t. Different stores (TJ’s and others), in different parts of the country, at different times, handle the issue of “shopping bags” differently. Some expect you to bring your own bags and, if you need them to provide one, they charge you for it. Others provide bags for free (or, more accurately include bags in the “overhead” part of their basic pricing!), but give you a small discount if you bring your own bag. What a few of the Trader Joe’s around here do (and only TJs) is that, if you bring your own bags, you can fill out a little slip and, according to some schedule (I’ve no clue what that is though), they will select a “winner” and give that person a gift certificate for their store.

I take my own bags, regularly fill out one of the raffle / lottery slips, and deposit it in the “treasure chest” box by the exit.

So, there I was on Monday of last week, thinking, “I’ll get one of those insulated bags if / when I win a TJ’s gift certificate.” And, on Tuesday of this week, I got a call from “Shelby” at my local store saying I had just won a $15 gift certificate! I made a special trip over to claim it and pick up one of the large insulated bags. (With tax, that was nearly half of my winnings! I so am grateful I could use it that way, and not feel I had to use it for food!) While I was there, I used the rest of it to grab a couple things I’d missed from my list when I was there this Monday. Those could’ve waited, but the bag was actually helpful for taking my contribution to a Fourth of July picnic.

And, finally, now on Thursday night, I’ve found a few minutes to tell the tale. Has anything gone surprisingly well for you recently? Let’s chat about it in the comments!

This Saturday, and next!

This Saturday, June 9, is a “Second Saturday”! So I am, once again, planning a little Studio Open House. For more reasons than it’s worth listing here, this month I’m shifting the time a bit later than usual: 2 to 6 pm. I’ll have pieces for sale, along with information about the various workshops I have scheduled for this summer or might still add to the calendar.

The main reason for the slightly-later time is that the Regent Square Civic Association’s Second Saturday event will be at my building, and that’s scheduled for 4 to 7 pm. So I tried to plan my Open House to overlap: you can visit me from 2 to 6, if you’re able to come later in that range you can check RSCA out too, and I can still join them from about 6 until 7.

Follow either link above for a little more information on what each event offers. Stop by for the full effect!

Next Saturday, June 16, is my first workshop of the summer, where The Artsmiths of Pittsburgh will offer my reversible hollow silver bead class.

Some people call these “lentil” beads, because their underlying shape is similar to a very oversized lentil. Others call them “saucer” beads, though I never imagined flying saucers that looked quite like these. Long-time readers of this blog will know, however, that I love making lentil beads, and I think they make a great class projet too. The photos with this post are meant to show that even a complete beginner can master the making of a relatively simple one that is still impressive! Those with some prior metal clay experience can work a few more advanced techniques into their designs, but you’ll have to come to class to see some samples of those!

At Artsmiths, we will cover ways to make yours so it can be worn all by itself as a pendant. Or, if you’re into beading, we’ll cover ways that are ideal for stringing it with a bead selection of your choice. Hint: the pieces in the photos here are designed for beading, but can be worn alone as pendants, as shown. Follow the class link, above, to see some more basic samples and to find out how to register for this session.

~~~~~~~~~~

And one miscellaneous musing…

Again, I’m really sorry I haven’t been posting much here lately. (I’m apologizing both to myself and to you!) Facebook is such a thought-sink! I’m not talking about how it can be a general time-sink; I miss all sorts of posts because I don’t spend much time browsing there. But I do spend some participating in a few relevant groups (on specific techniques and on art and jewelry in general; not all the possible ones, but a few!) where I oten find myself anwering questions or making comments there that, pre-Fb, I would have written up as posts here or on public blogs by others.

This bothers me: the class-link above goes to a public page I’ve written, while the two event-links above go to publicly-available Facebook-page events (perhaps with an annoying banner asking you to sign in / up to Facebook, but at least visible). But there’s no way for me to link here to something I’ve written in a “closed” art / jewelry group. I do understand the use of “closed” groups to help reduce the risk of spam, trolls, etc., but I’m still struggling with the idea of spending my time writing up useful information that is then limited in how far it can be shared.

If I’m going to write it up, I want it to be available to anyone who’s interested! Well, of course, I could copy my comments and post them here, but they’re often part of a thread, and I wouldn’t feel comfortable copying all that from a private to a public space; so that would mean re-writing everything to build up my own context. And that’s just more effort than seems worth it when I’d rather be making than writing in the first place!

Have you solved this dilemma? Do you know anyone else who has? Your thoughts (comments, links, pointers, whatever) would be much appreciated!

I took the challenge, and read this one too!

The last time I noticed some shorthand in a “classic” Peanuts comic strip, a little over two years ago, I found it easy to read as soon as I relaxed and noticed places where the “code” matched the “text” next to it. So I began to just focus on reading the symbols before I’d confirm my reading by looking at the text. And then, once my brain was back into reading that, it was easy to also decode the opening and closing parts that were not duplicated in text.

This week’s strip (which I finally got around to reading tonight…) posed a little more of a challenge: none of the shorthand, though brief, was translated in the text! But, after a few false starts, I did decode it.

After many years of not reading shorthand regularly, when I encounter any now I tend to start with the simplest words, just to get my mind back into that groove, and then go back to fill in the gaps. I was thrown by this one, at first, because what I initially read as “took” turned out to be “to the” and what I was trying to read as either “ear” or “year” turned out to be “your” …. Yes, part of reading shorthand does involve context!

My key to this one turned out to be the “w” sounds, which I found particularly funny because, the last time, a missing “w” sound was the one place that threw me (what I saw as setter made more sense if read as sweater). Here, it was the presence of three “w” sound symbols that kept me on track. (In my paper, the first one had even been printed with a bit of a blur, but nothing else made sense. That had to be what it was.)

Can you read the shorthand? If so, please let me know … just because it’d be nice to know if anyone else still in my life now also has that skill set in their background! If not, don’t worry, I’ll transcribe this bit at the end of this post, after you’ve seen the comic:

Snoopy dictates:
… your recent repairs to the roof of my dwelling are quite inadequate …

And now, I must get back to doing something productive…

I knew who Marjory Stoneman Douglas was! Did you?!

As a (long ago) graduate of a (different) high school in the Broward County Public School System, while I was traveling in California and then after returning to my current home in Pennsylvania, since mid-February I’ve been asking people, “Do you know who Marjory Stoneman Douglas was?”

Answers have ranged from, “No,” to “Oh, I just assumed she was some local philanthropist who gave a lot of money to that school in Florida.”

And I’ve been saying, “Well, no, and you really should check her out! She was an environmentalist and a journalist. Here’s one place you could start! (Though that’s from Florida International University, where they’ve had their own problems lately…) In her 90s she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for that amazing combination. Especially in SW PA, where Rachel Carson is so well known (whether via praise or condemnation!) for her work in the 60s, you should take note of what MSD started doing decades earlier, and continued for a much longer lifetime!”

Not even one person in my personal circle that I’ve asked recently has had any clue. The answers of my generally intellectually curious and politically savvy friends didn’t surprise me in the first few days after February 14, but as I’ve continued to ask that question in subsequent weeks, I’ve actually been surprised that not even one of them seems to have made any effort to find out, that none have seemed to have registered the occasional reference to her that has been slipped into media coverage. (And neither do they seem to remember the second-season episode of The Simpsons that referenced her! Though I’ll admit that even I had (a) seen and then (b) completely forgotten that one until I went looking for something like that “place to start” link above…) In this era where people pull out their “phones” to look up anything, are my dear friends suddenly so distracted that they cannot take a minute to question who she was? I have been truly baffled.

So, despite all the complaints circulating these days about how challenging it’s become to talk about so many topics, maybe this quotation from MSD (that I have noticed circulating online recently) will help inspire some curiosity, and some action(s):

“Be a nuisance when it counts. Do your part to inform and stimulate the public to join your action. Be depressed, discouraged, & disappointed at failure & the disheartening effects of ignorance, greed, corruption & bad politics — but never give up.” —Marjory Stoneman Douglas

If you have any thoughts on MSD, please feel free to share them in the comments for this post.

Be well.

Hexagonal Eighth!

I keep telling myself “Don’t Panic,” as shown in friendly yellow-on-orange letters on the button illustrated here (and in friendly orange letters, below) but I can’t believe how oblivious I recently was. Had I just come back from California sicker than I’d realized? Otherwise, how did I completely miss all the connections until this weekend?!!

I mean, there I was, on March 8 of this year, among other things in a sort of hexagonal phase, nattering on about Kepler and his various hexagons, and I totally missed another connection to them.

OK, so the hexagons were merely a side-comment on a note about planetary motion, but that means I missed connections to both hexagons and intergalactic travel for that very date, March 8, 2018: it was the 40th anniversary of the first broadcast of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy!

Even worse than that, I had missed that the BBC was celebrating their anniversary with yet another installment from the HHGTTG’s “canon” (or whatever you want to call the mix of radio, print, TV, film, and video game variations, all of which have things in common but also include huge deviations!)…

To be fair to myself, there’s no reason that exact date should mean anything specific to me: its introduction into the USA was slightly later. I don’t have the exact date of that, but I still distinctly remember the moment that I heard the very first episode: I was driving home from a Gold Circle store (miss that chain!) and just by chance caught it from the very beginning on an NPR station in my car. I mean, how improbable was that?! That drive took under 15 minutes, but I sat it my car in the garage and listened to it through to the end, then ran into the house and started calling friends to ask if they’d heard it. (I would’ve had my first ARPAnet email account by then, so I probably wrote a few colleagues, but what I remember most is calling friends from my kitchen phone.)

One of the Don’t Panic buttons shown with this post came with my copy of the old IBM DOS game. But maybe I should back up a bit: I’m a huge fan but I’m definitely not a complete HHGTTG geek. (Well, those who came to my big HHGTTG Hallowe’en party back in the mid-80s may argue that point, but I know others who’ve gone far deeper into it than I ever have! For example, both the individual button and the game that included the other one shown here were gifts from folks who’d enjoyed that party.) My primary affinity has always been to the radio / audio pieces!

Those of you who’ve only known me since I started down this art jewelry tunnel may have no idea how infinitely improbable my going this direction would have seemed several decades ago. I’ve mentioned here on occasion that my “history” contains work in research on the teaching of mathematics, especially in aspects involving visualization, and how my sense of design has evolved from that rather than from a traditional arts background. And I had taken some metalsmithing classes, ones that I now realize were just terrible, but I didn’t know that at the time and had simply been so massively discouraged by them that I could not imagine continuing in that direction…

But the thing you may not know is how the HHGTTG led me to spend years and more years (nights and weekends, on top of my “day” job) ensconced in windowless rooms involved in an art form with ZERO visualization. Yep, the HHGTTG led me to a side-career in Radio Theatre, with the WYEP Radio Theatre Company!

I joined with the very first production as sound man (sic); within a year I moved on to technical director; eventually I added the roles of producer and occasional acting director too. Our half-hour shows ran on Sunday nights from somewhere in the mid 1980s through around the end of 1992. We produced both single-night shows and multi-week series. The folks at WYEP were incredibly supportive, alternating the airing of purchased shows with our series, thus giving us time to research, rehearse, record, add effects, edit, mix, and finalize our productions, all in our “spare” time!

A couple of older actors (then probably around the age I am now…), ones who had actually worked in radio theatre in the 1940s and 50s, started the group at ‘YEP. This was a few years after the HHGTTG first aired. The first call went out in December (of the month I am sure: I was supposed to be back home in Florida then but, unexpectedly, had been forced to skip that trip over a work deadline, which is the only reason I caught the call) in I think it was 1986 (which sounds right: I first volunteered at ‘YEP in 1976, where I learned and then taught production techniques to new volunteers, but I had to cut back when I started a job I held in 84-85; ‘YEP was off the air for a while then too, part of which involved a move from Cable Place to Chatham). After a year or two, for various reasons, those guys gradually moved on. There was a diehard crew from the beginning that helped keep it going, bringing in various other colleagues both to add range to our company and to help increase our flexibility in scheduling. It ended pretty much when I decided to move to California. (And a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon who taught script-writing for the drama department and provided me with a lot of moral support in addition to the occasional script decided to move to a different part of CA at the same time…) While others would have continued to participate in it, and the friend who helped me with the technical director duties would likely have continued that for at least a while longer, no one stepped up to take on the overall production management that I’d also done.

The whole thing had been a labor of love by a great team of volunteers. I tried, without success, to obtain some major grants to support our efforts. But I did manage to get the station enough money to cover our direct costs (e.g., rights, tape reels, snacks, etc.) and to provide any volunteer who wanted one with a cassette copy of a program on which they’d helped. Yeah, this was back in the dark ages of splicing recording tape with sticky tape, and distributing copies on cassettes!

Later, my reaction at the moment I first heard about Apple’s music download service, was, “If I only had a place to create Radio Theatre now, could this be a way to try to distribute and fund it?” Producing audio theatre was, for years (until I started doing this art-jewelry thing!) my alternative-career fantasy. I don’t have plans now to go into podcast production, but I am delighted that all this is continuing in one form or another. Such fun!

At last, here’s a link to the newest production in the HHGTTG universe, where on March 8, 2018, on BBC Radio 4 they aired Episode 1, titled (note the connection that started this rant…) Hexagonal Phase! It seems to be available without geographic restriction, but only for 30 days from air-date: so if you’re a fellow HHGTTG-fan, do catch it while you can!

Cranberry Artists Network Double Feature!

Kepler’s Dream	Spring Thoughts on a Gray Day

I wrote about Kepler’s Dream on Thursday. On Friday, I learned that Spring Thoughts on a Gray Day had been accepted into a second Cranberry Artists Network event, their 2018 Spring Show this year with the theme of Drip, Drizzle & Splash (DDS).

Now, to be honest, I’d wanted to submit both these pieces for consideration for DDS. Except I was in California for the second half of February. How is that relevant? The invitation to submit one piece for the International Womens Show arrived while I was in the air on my way there: ’twas the first message I saw when I turned off “airplane mode” on my phone upon landing. And that is when I saw that the deadline for submission would be the day before I’d return. So, um, I was going to have to submit for that something I’d have ready before heading home! So, as I described in my March 8 post, I decided to enter Kepler’s Dream for that show.

I could still hold onto Spring Thoughts on a Gray Day for Drip, Drizzle & Splash! (And another big “thanks!” to Hadar Jacobson for the recent workshop and also for this photo.)

The prospectus for Drip, Drizzle & Splash, which allowed us to submit two pieces for consideration, had encouraged us to consider “the emergence of new beginnings and the way our weather and environment makes this happen.” While I didn’t have another piece ready that complemented Spring Thoughts, I did have a shamrock piece from my Urban Flowers series that I’d just made in December that seemed to fit the theme. So that was my second entry. And I was delighted to learn that my Metropolitan Shamrock has also been accepted! That show will be hung on the night of March 12 and officially open on March 13.

Metropolitan Shamrock

Both shows will be on display through April 5, 2018. There will be a public reception for both of them from 6 to 8 pm on the evening of March 22. If you’re in the area, I’d love to see you there!

March 8: International Women’s Day

I call this piece Kepler’s Dream, and it’s the one I chose to enter when I was invited to participate in the Cranberry Artists Network‘s show in honor of International Women’s Day.

Now, IWD is March 8, and the show is only being “hung” that evening. The official dates of the show are March 9 through April 5.  It looks like there could be as many as 33 pieces in the show.

There will be a Public Reception from 6 to 8 pm on Thursday, March 22.

Question: Why enter a piece named after Johannes Kepler for Women’s Day?

Discussion: Well, I was in high school when I first learned of his discovery that planets moved in elliptical orbits around the sun (not the earth!) and the sun itself was not even at the center but at one of the two focal points of that ellipse.

That was also when I first heard about his conjecture from the early 17th century on the efficiency of packing spheres. That was not really proven until early in the 21st! I actually worked for a few years late in the 20th century with some folks who were involved in trying to find the proof!

Anyway, the readings I had been inspired to devour back in high school were key to opening my mind to being able to “think big” about the seemingly-mundane topics we were covering in school. Did you know, for example, that Kepler also published the first description of the hexagonal symmetry of snowflakes?! And he looked at the efficiency of hexagonal packing: think beehives! There’s more: go do some explorations of him yourself!

And so after decades of doing formal mathematics using accurate visual representations of what IS, here I am now doing artistic explorations of what COULD BE. I had no thought of Kepler as I began this piece: it would look rather different if I had! (And such a piece in this line will likely come to exist eventually.) But as I finished it, and looked at the combination of shapes I’d created (sort of oval and round), and thought about the colors I’d chosen (with their references to the skies above), and talked about it with some friends I was visiting at the time, I just began to wonder if Kepler might ever have dreamt anything like this.

Answer: So I named it Kepler’s Dream to honor him for being one of the influences (indirectly and centuries later) on this woman’s life!

Also, re technique: If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you may think that this piece doesn’t look typical of my work. And you’d be right! This piece was made using Hadar’s Low Shrinkage Steel (metal clay powder). The back is plain, with just the bail for hanging it. (I do have ideas for other designs, with my usual make-it-reversible approach, but this one was part of the experience of simply perfecting this technique, so I kept it simple!)

After firing so it would sinter, the steel was treated to help it resist rust. Then I applied three different enamel colors into the openings of the embellishments. (Yeah, the mathematician / geometer in me had fun figuring out how to space out three colors among ten spaces, when ten is not an even multiple of three.) Because of the way I applied the enamels, it was easy enough to fire several different colors at the same time; to get good coverage, on the other hand, it took multiple applications of the enamel powders, and re-firing each round, until it came to look like this. As a final step, I applied a light coat of wax which helped to even out the color of the steel and should also help to further protect its finish. I made several others at the same time which I’ll try to remember to discuss in a later post. But I am including a tag with each one warning a buyer that, because steel can rust, I recommend some common-sense precautions: don’t wear it while bathing, showering, or swimming and, if it does get wet, try to dry it thoroughly as soon as possible.

Finally, a big “thanks!” to Hadar Jacobson for the recent workshop and especially for the photo, so I’d have it in time for the show!

December 22, and I can’t believe I was out in my PA garden again this year!

Last year, I reported on mowing my lawn on December 27. This year, predictions are that we will have snow on the ground for Christmas, with highs in the high 20s (Fahrenheit) and lows in the mid teens then and into the rest of that week.

But yesterday, December 21 (aka Winter Solstice), the temperature reached around 50. Today it headed well into the mid 50s. Even warmer than last year! I’d planned to go into my studio but couldn’t resist the urge to spend both afternoons in the back yard, wearing just sweatshirt, jeans, and boots. And very heavy suede gardening gloves.

I had some black raspberry bushes that I’ve been wanting to take out. I do love the berries—when I can salvage some that the birds leave me—but keeping them from spreading everywhere had just ended up being far more work than the berries were worth to me. I’ve been saying for few years that they had to go, that I’d dig them out in the fall. Then I’d get busy, not get to them beyond maybe a bit of pruning, and the next year it’d be, “Well, the bushes are there. I might as well enjoy another year’s harvest, and take them out this fall.” I’d spend some time during the summer trying to stop new runners, and promising myself they’d all come out after I was done harvesting. And then I’d go into busy-season and….

So, this week with warm temperatures and soft, moist ground, it was time for berry-bush-removal! I wasn’t counting, but I think I took out about 15, and cut them into small enough pieces that city-trash will take them. Half were picked up this morning; the ones from today are bagged up and will get put out for next week’s collection. There are two left that I didn’t get to before dark (though sunset has already started getting later, I just didn’t have quite enough daylight to finish those). But the ones I chose to leave are, deliberately, those in the least-convenient locations, so I hope that will convince me to complete the removal at my next opportunity! I’m almost there, though those last two may just stay where the are until spring…. Now what I have to do is to decide what I’ll put into the spaces where the (overcrowded!) berries used to be.

(Oh, and to compare this to last year, I didn’t feel the need to mow the lawn again this December. But I did spend an hour after sunset, after I’d had enough with the berries, both yesterday and today, raking up the last round of sweetgum leaves by street- and holiday-lights, and dumping those in my “browns” compost bin. Once again, though, no after-dark photos of any of this.)

Silver Metal Clay on Pottery

For reasons I’ll explain at the end, here are a few examples of pottery I’ve made over the past few years to use in some of my early experiments in adding silver metal clay decorations to them.  Since I’m showing here my first experiments with various techniques, for those I chose to not risk my best pottery pieces and the decorations were deliberately kept very simple. But each of them does seem to have a little story to tell!

1. I threw, bisqued, glazed, and fired these pieces.  The same electric kiln was used for both firings.  The relatively rough glaze was a deliberate choice … I then smushed some clay onto the surface and fired that with a creme brulee torch to sinter the silver.  For my first-ever attempts at these, I was happy with these results.
   
2. I threw several pieces, cutting ridges into their outside surfaces. After bisque-firing those (in a different electric kiln), I glazed the inside and smushed silver clay onto the outer ridges, then fired those (in a gas kiln).  Most turned out wonderfully, and I’ve already sold all of those but the one shown here.  Part of the back of this one did break off. (I used the same glaze inside this one as on the piece in item #3, below.) The fault could have come from either a flaw in the pottery (perhaps I’d cut a ridge a little too deeply?) or because I’d applied the metal clay a bit thicker there (and the shrinkage as the binder burned off and it sintered was too much for the pottery clay), or even from both of those combined… I haven’t yet gotten around to trying to distinguish among those possibilities.
   
3. I threw, bisqued, glazed, and fired this piece.  (Those firings were done in the same electric / gas pattern as #2, above.)  Then I rolled out some “snakes” of a low-shrinkage silver metal clay and spread a tiny bit of overlay paste onto them (in the setting where I made this–not my own studio and I’d forgotten to take a tiny paintbrush for this step–that was far easier than applying paste to the pot). I pressed those onto the vase, and fired this piece yet a third time (and in yet a different electric kiln, a small one that another artist had for firing metal clay molds).  The clay shrank: the upper snake held at the ends but cracked open at roughly 1/4 of the way from one end; the lower one held along its length but pulled up into itself leaving a little smudge of silver paste at the end and at a few places along its side. The little “splats” of silver must have been a bit of clay/paste from my fingers as I was sticking it all together. I didn’t notice those until after the firing, but I really like that accidental result. Now I want to figure out a way to reliably recreate those, especially like the one above and to the right of the top snake!
   
4. I threw this piece and bisque-fired it (in an electric kiln).  I applied glaze to the outside.  I rolled several “snakes” of a low-shrinkage metal clay, wet them on the bottom, and applied them in a “spray” pattern to the unglazed inside bottom and edge.  The piece was fired in a gas kiln.  When removed, the silver looked sintered and the patterns were all still intact.  The piece was immediately (i.e., still hot!) dropped into a newspaper-filled can, and covered.  (Those who know the process will recognize that as a “raku” firing!)
   
   This outcome was my biggest surprise! The gas kiln did not over-fire the silver, but the fire from the raku-process did then get the inside of the can hot enough to completely melt the silver!  You may just be able to see some faint hints of where part of the pattern had been: tan spots where some of them were even show little trails of tiny silver balls.  But most of it pulled up into two balls in the center! (Another small bit from the edge must have just fallen off in the raku-can and disappeared as it was emptied out. That’s experimentation!) I was able to get a number of pieces with ball-decorations to survive the raku process (similar look to both #1 and #2 above) and turn out beautifully, but I have yet to figure out how to approach, in raku, designs like those that later developed from the technique I first tried with #3.
5. While I’m sure that many readers with metal clay experience will have taken their clue from the size of the silver balls and snakes above, I will end with another little pot from that session.  The pencil is there to give you a sense of scale for all these pieces! And if you look carefully, you should be able to see the small (3 mm) clear cubic zirconia I’d set into the wet clay.  All the ones I made with those did survive all three firing steps (bisque and two-part raku).
   
   While the previous items all show my very first attempt at each technique, this was my second try. The very first piece did have one very tiny crack just off to the side of the CZ, visible but with no obvious damage to the structure. That was probably due to my having used too-wet clay until I figured out that I could set CZs in stiffer clay. That bowl did have a great shape, and another artist really wanted to swap me some art-glass for it!

I’ve been playing around with miniature pottery, off and on, with and without such embellishments, for several years now. Though I have been offering my miniature pottery for sale at various shows, I haven’t taken the experimentation seriously enough to feel inclined to write much about it. (And I’m not teaching this, at least not yet, so I don’t have that inspiration for writing about it either…)

But I decided to post these examples after seeing some experimentation that Terry Kovalchik has been doing, and writing about, with painting silver clay paste onto pottery shards, and reading some of the reactions he’s gotten to that in the Metal Clay Now group on Facebook. (Metal Clay Now is a “closed” group, but readers of my blog who use Facebook are certainly welcome to ask to join it!)

While many of his results are superb (as usual!), Terry has reported some further breakage of the clay shards during the sintering process. But, like my #2 above, that could be from any or all of: a weak spot in the pottery (at initial construction or from whatever created the “shards”), the shrinkage of the silver clay (how thickly or how evenly it’s applied, exactly how it aligns with any weakness in the clay body), or any number of other little peculiarities. So I thought it was time for me to bring out a few of my explorations too, and maybe others will start to chime in with what they’ve tried and how it’s worked out for them.

If you are working with similar combinations, please leave a comment: I’d love to hear from you, see some of your results, and compare more notes!

December 27, and I was mowing my lawn?!!

And now, a little diversion from art into practical issues of life.

Six weeks ago, I thought I’d put my lawn mower away for the winter. The last leaf pick-up the city offered was on November 10, which is later than it’s been in other recent years. By then, I’d gradually trimmed the grass down for its last mowing, cleaned up the mower for the winter, and tucked it away.

I knew, however, that I wasn’t done. My trees still had leaves! I’d cleaned up those that had fallen from the apple tree and other shrubs along the sides and in the back, and I was willing to let any remaining ones that fell just be for a while. I leave stray apples down in the back yard too: deer from the park can come and find them during the winter! Then I do the final clean-up there in the spring. But I try to keep the front tidier.

By Thanksgiving weekend, the sweetgum tree in front had dropped no more than 100 leaves: the many, many thousands it bears usually fall over the course of that whole month. At the end of November this year, I just shoveled up those first few and dumped them in the compost. And then the busy-season started: shows and events and last minute requests plus gatherings and baking and decorating and visitors and whatnot. The first week of December, only a few more leaves dropped. Then, suddenly, a week before Christmas (during my last Trunk Show of the season), there was the first real deep-freeze, followed by a quick warm-up with heavy rain, and they all dumped straight down in a day or two, piled up in a soggy mess. I guess that’s better than dry and blowing all over the neighborhood! But these were clumped together inches deep on the eastern-third of my front yard under the tree. Every now and then I’d find a few spare daylight hours when I’d think I could try to work on that, but those just never happened on dry-enough days.

Still, despite a lot of rain, it rarely went below freezing. The grass kept growing. And with short days, it seemed to do the thing plants do during their “growing season” when there’s not enough light: it shot up another six inches or more!

I thought maybe I’d try to deal with all this yesterday, with temperatures in the 60s (SW Pennsylvania the last week of December, and temps in the 60s?!!). But it rained all day. I did, at least, take down the “window boxes” full of flowers that I hang from the porch railings. I could, of course, do that from the shelter of the porch.

Today it only reached into the 40s, but it was clear. I didn’t have as much free time today, but I did manage almost four hours out there! I raked up about 80% of the leaves and sucked those through my mulching leaf vacuum. (I wouldn’t have had to rake if they’d been dry. But wet, they stick together and clog up the machine’s nozzle unless I “fluff” them up.) The rest just got mulched in with the grass when I mowed the lawn.

Since we’re just past the solstice, the days are short: so my last hour out there was after sunset! A few days shy of the new moon, there was no helpful light from that, but streetlights and holiday lights did offer some aid. By the time I’d finished collecting leaves and mowing, however, the mower, leaf vacuum, rake and shovel all went straight back into the garage. And the thing I’m debating tonight is whether to take time in the morning to clean them up again for winter storage, especially the mower, or just figure I may need it again in a few weeks.

I can’t believe I’m having that thought! I also can’t believe that it wasn’t until well after dark before I said to myself, “I really should have thought to take a photo while there was still some light!” Oh well. I hope you enjoy the story!

An Important Question, prefaced by a couple laments….

My question, dear readers, is at the very end of my two long laments in this post. If you want the short version, just scroll down to that….

1. RIP Picasa. That’s the saddest part of this post.

I loved Picasa! If you’re not familiar with Picasa, it was the photo-sharing service that I’ve been using for images on this blog since I started it. (The photo illustrating this section is the same one I used on my first post on this blog: an old image of the first metal clay piece I ever made!) Google has “retired” it.

Picasa had a desktop application; it was fine but I have other tools I often use for editing, file transfers, and such, so that’s not what I’m mourning.

Where I’m feeling the loss involves their web-based photo sharing! I’ve not tallied the exact number, but I have put thousands of photos there, organized into albums by topic or event. There was a total-memory limit, but I was conservative, posting copies of my images that were too small for most print situations but generous for general web-viewing, because making them accessible on the web was my goal. (In about eight years I had not yet used ten percent of the quota.)

What a really valued was their click-able options for including either a tiny (“thumbnail”) or small version of photos I wanted to share in this blog. Readers could get a view of what I was trying to illustrate while taking up only a small amount of bandwidth / data usage. If you wanted to see more, you could always click on any image to have a larger version open in a new tab or window. That whole operation was seamless, for me as the writer as well as for you as the reader.

Now, the good news is that most of the small views are still available in these posts, so readers looking at older posts (e.g., finding them in web searches, which I can see happens a lot) can still get the idea of what I’m talking about when I reference them. A few seem to be missing, from when I wasn’t thinking and clicked a different spot while connecting, but those will be easy to fix (ha: when I find the time!). The bad news is that all the click-to-enlarge photos are gone!

I have not lost my originals. I will admit, however, that those are not as well-organized as what I had on Picasa. I worked from various different locations, and backed up my originals from there as I went along, so they are scattered about in different places … which had not been a problem in the past, because if I wanted to find the big originals I could always go to Picasa and find the little clues I’d hidden there for myself as to where they were… Grrr!

I can still get to all of my public albums via Google Photos. I strongly dislike the design of that interface! I’m not going to go and re-do the links to display all the photos I’ve already posted, but I feel zero inclination to use that for any more of my images. Google claims it’s better for mobile applications, but I’m trying to share photos outside of just Google. For my own purposes, I find it awkward to use. And, yes, I an used to switching between lots of different applications, so it’s something more than that.

I have a few photos on Flickr. I really only used that when I wanted to participate in some Flickr-group thing (e.g., Vickie Hallmark’s Month of Earrings challenge back in 2010, which began here) that required you to link to Flickr files. But it took several more steps to be able to include one of those shots in my blog, so Picasa was my default for here. Flickr did improve the interface a bit over time, not as good as Picasa’s was but less clunky than it had been. My primary concern for shifting over there right now is that Flickr is part of Yahoo! and Yahoo! is having its own issues at the moment…

I have a bunch of photos on Facebook, but there is zero way to keep everything organized there. Yes, I can create some albums for posts on my own timeline. But, aside from the fact that some places I want to share them on Facebook won’t let me share them from those albums (no, they want me to upload a version of the file specifically for that situation…?), photos I put there are really only easily made public within Facebook. That’s too restrictive. For my primary stash, I want my public photos to be public, and I want my restricted-access photos to be available to people to whom I provide access myself, and both settings should be regardless of whether viewer is currently, or ever, logged in to Facebook or any other service!

I have an account on Instagram, but don’t see a way to organize things there. It’s just a chronological stream. Or am I missing some key feature: can I create albums there? If so, can I sort them various ways (e.g., by first / last date or title)?

I have a couple of YouTube channels. I’m working on some videos for those (that I’ll write posts about eventually). But that’s different from what I want to do with photos here. I have some GigaPan albums. But those are mostly for other kinds of projects I’m involved with entirely.

Yes, for this blog, I could just insert photos directly via WordPress. I may be forced to do that here until I can find a new service that helps me keep my photos organized. For that matter, I have a whole domain, and could share photos from there! Except then I’d have to access them by file-name rather than by image-appearance, and my memory works far better and faster when it’s processing images.

I know that I have lots of options, mentioned here and otherwise. I’m not seeking a service that does everything. But I do need to find a good replacement for the sheer organizational assistance that I had with Picasa…..

2. WSCC’s woes.

Which brings me to my second lament: the building where I have my studio is having its own issues. The connection should become clear in a few moments.

I love the space I have at the Wilkins School Community Center. I looked for studio space for several years before I found that spot. I can’t imagine not having it, nor finding a place with the features I love about it anywhere else. (The photo illustrating this section shows what the space looked like the day I first saw it and decided to rent it!)

The site is a decommissioned school building, still owned by the borough but managed by a local community group that gets to use it in exchange for handling all the maintenance. And in a building that is 89 years old, that is piling up. I’m on the top floor, but in the middle, so I didn’t suffer much from the roof leaks that were fixed a few years ago. I was delighted to be among the first rooms to have its overhead lights replaced. Being on the top floor has sheltered me from various plumbing / drainage leak issues; there are no “private” rooms in the basement, in fact, so it’s just private parties renting the kitchen and auditorium who have suffered from those (and, of course, the center itself, when it loses room rental income while incurring plumbing costs…). And now, there is crumbling concrete and masonry on the outside that is going to involve some hefty repair costs. I’ll probably post info about calls for local support for that in the near future. For now, there’s one more item to address…

Regular readers may have noticed my comments in recent months about issues with internet access. I really have no clue what went wrong there. The Linux group who manages that for the center (in exchange for reduced rental rates for their meeting spaces… are you getting an idea of how the whole system operates?) said we needed some new equipment. Now, Amy and I, who have rooms on the top floor, are puzzled by this. If we’d brought in new, more modern devices, ones that didn’t work on the old set-up, that could have made some sense. But we’re still just trying to connect devices that we used to be able to connect, but now we can’t even find a signal… One can frequently be found downstairs, and at times there is a weak one in the upper hallway, but once you go into the upper rooms, the signal is gone. A parade of people have been in and out, working on some bit or another of the system, for months. They don’t tell us when they’re coming, report that they have fixed something and it’s now all working again, but when we get in to our rooms, no, we still don’t have a signal. If I sit with my laptop in the hallway I can work, but the laptop has its own problems, and the hallway is noisy and full of echoes and other distractions that I prefer to avoid. My favorite machine, a desktop device I have tucked away out of sight of casual passers-by along with my wireless printer, now sees nothing. And because net-access in select rooms is just one item in a huge list of maintenance issues, there are long gaps between attempts to get it working. The latest story is that someone else is coming out to see if they can resolve this (by switching to a different ISP) in early September. Here’s hoping!

Until those problems started, I’d had a pretty good system working in my studio. Those of you who use metal clays know that there are times when you are “waiting for something to happen.” For moist clay to dry. For dry clay to rehydrate. For a kiln to fire. Etc. Sometimes those steps can be rushed, but often the final outcome is better if one can wait patiently. I can fill in the gaps with other construction or finishing processes, of course, but I would also often fill in the gaps with tech-tasks: editing photos; uploading those; tending to blog, Facebook, etc. In the gaps, they didn’t seem like chores: they were efficient, effective uses of waiting-time. But if I have to take time to tend to them after I’ve left the studio and gone home, which is supposed to be my refuge and not my work-place, then much less of that gets accomplished. And it spirals down even further.

I haven’t been writing about all my recent explorations (e.g., with various forms of “flex” and/or “sterling” clays, more experiments with cutting and engraving with the Silhouettes, excursions into different forms of clay entirely, and more!), which means I’ve actually been thinking less about possible variations … because those come to me while writing … which means I haven’t been making quite as much as I could either.

It also means I haven’t been able to spend gap-time there exploring alternative photo-sharing sites. Which leads to….

3. An Important Question: What’s a good photo-sharing service, and why?

The net-access issues I will leave to the community center’s governing board, but I sure could use some help identifying a good photo-sharing service. When I do manage to get online, I can do searches and read reviews but (a) I find a lot that are out of date, which I’m sure of because Picasa is listed as being among the best yet that’s what I’m being forced to replace, and (b) I’d also appreciate being able to see (and discuss) what folks who are at least somewhat “like me” are using!

• I’m not trying to post photos to sell so, while I can add a bit to my jewelry sale prices to compensate for additional overhead, I can’t offset much price for the service that way.
  
• I need space for a lot of photos, but few of them need to be super-high resolution: my aim is easy ‘net-access, not best-print quality.
  
• I want an _easy_ interface for getting a link I can stick in a blog post, a Facebook post, etc.
  
• I want an _easy_ way to reference photos of different sizes (e.g., tiny for a blog sidebar, small for a post, medium when I want to show off some special feature).
  
• I want settings that allow me to switch between:
  
  • full-public access (my primary use, where people like my blog readers can see my images without having to be logged in to some service),
    
  • various forms of limited access (I don’t put anything online that I’d be concerned if it went public, but I may for example want to limit access for certain images that are part of a collaboration), or
    
  • private, just for me ( I often use the latter while building a story, and then open up access when I have a collection ready).
    

I sure hope I will get some good recommendations, in comments here or via email. Thanks for ANY help you can offer at this time!

I found it!

I found the missing Friends & Lovers bracelet!!! I’ve written about this one before.

I first wrote about it in 2014, when I created it for a Valentine’s Day Romantic-theme challenge. It contained domed hearts that were the first trial pieces I made in my own studio with what Hadar was then calling Friendly Bronze (and now calls One Fire Bronze).

The next time I wrote about it was in 2015, when I thought I must have “put it somewhere safe” before an Open House in my studio … because my cousin, Debby, wanted to buy it to wear at her son’s wedding. But then as the big day approached, I couldn’t find it. So at pretty much the last possible minute, I made her another one, Love & Commitment.

Well, I’m here to tell you now that I hadn’t put it away for safekeeping. I had put away a couple other pieces that were already promised to customers, and I found them as expected after the show. I wasn’t sure that’s what I’d done with that bradelet, but I couldn’t imagine where else it could be. Even after making a replacement for Debby, I’d periodically look for it. My studio has many, many little cubbyholes and boxes and drawers full of bins and yet more boxes, so any time I’d decide some section needed to be cleaned up a bit, I’d check all the nooks & crannies to see if the missing bracelet was there. No luck.

But, this week, I was shuffling around some shadow boxes I use when I display pieces in gallery shows and, as I pushed one back into one of the sections in the bottom of an old china closet I use in my studio (for art & jewelry displays on the top, and supply storage below), for some reason that big one didn’t want to go in the whole way. So I got down on my knees and pulled out a couple other frames in the back to see what was wrong. And there the bracelet was, in the very farthest back corner. I have NO IDEA how it got there. None. None at all!

Funny thing is, I discovered it just about a year to the day from when I first realized it had gone missing. I remember when that was because another cousin, Marie, is here now on her annual visit east from Calinfornia, and it was during her visit here last year when I first discovered that I’d misplaced it (though I didn’t admit that to any of my cousins until a couple months later, shortly before the September wedding).

Regardless of timing, I am glad to have recovered it!

Well, that was a surprise!

As promised in my last post, here’s the story behind the earrings whose photo I posted there….

1. In my fairly early days working with metal clays—as soon as I’d moved on from just using a creme brulee torch and bought my first kiln but when I was still working on tray-tables in my family room, years before I started this blog or opened my studio—I found much inspiration in the work of CeCe Wire (one of the pioneers in metal clay techniques), and one of the things I had fun doing was making pieces that played with shrinkage. I learned about the concept in her first book, from 2003, Creative Metal Clay Jewelry: techniques, projects, inspiration, and had that reinforced when I earned my PMC Certification in a course with her, in Baltimore in 2007.

At that point, I’d make a small piece (earrings or small pendants) out of the original PMC Silver formula (no longer available), that had a shrinkage rate of 28% (and had to be fired in a kiln for a full two hours). I’d embellish it with Art Clay Silver, that had a shrinkage rate of 10%. Why those two? Because their shrinkage rates were the farthest apart of all the clays at that time on the market.

Because it was constrained by the low-shrinkage clay, the high-shrinkage clay would curve and distort in interesting ways: the fun part was trying different locations for connecting the clays to discover what results I could produce. (This was also back in the day when the nominal price of silver was a mere fraction of what it is today…. I am so glad I started that early! Even then, I did feel limited in how much sheer experimenting I could do, but nothing like it would be today….) I did some other clay combos too, but that particular pairing consistently yielded the most interesting results. The relatively high shrinkage of “original” was the key, no matter what other clay was combined with it.

I stopped doing any of that when Mitsubishi discontinued their original formula. Like many others, I was sad to see it go, but I created enough designs in other ways that the loss didn’t feel as devastating to me as it did to some folks. Since then, a few other silver clays have come on the market with shrinkage rates in the range of 20 to 25%, and at times I’d think about reviving that old technique with them, but then would get caught up in other project ideas and that would slide way down on the priority list.

2. I have written here before about how I try to not store “leftover” clay. I just keep making things until I’ve used a packet all up. Some of my earrings are made with leftover bits. Little embellishments can be cut out or coiled up, dried, and used in later creations. The last few dregs can be shaped into little balls, dried, and stored for later use too. If I don’t have time at the end of a work session to use everything up, I will store the last bits for a brief time, but I do try to form those into something useful as soon as I can.

3. Last month, for various reasons (e.g., different projects, classes, demonstrations), I used a number of different clays, including these (as well as several others, but these are the ones relevant to the rest of this post):

Clay Formula	Shrinkage Rate
PMC 3	12%
PMC Flex	15%
PMC Sterling	15% – 20%
.960 made with PMC3	Question #1
.960 made with PMC Flex	Question #2, this post’s inspiration…

Re Question #1: In a comment on the post where Celie Fago introduced the idea of home-made .960, Holly Gage estimated the shrinkage of PMC3 and Sterling to be about 13%. In a post that further disseminates the idea of using .960, Emma Gordon writes that “You can use PMC3 syringe with it, no problem.”

Now, maybe I’m missing something obvious, but if folks are combining PMC 3 syringe clay with .960 made from mixing PMC3 and PMC Sterling, it seemed as though I should be able to combine PMC Flex lump clay with .960 made from it and sterling: their nominal shrinkage rates are even closer! I had a bit of Flex.960 left from one activity, so I used up those dregs making a couple little pairs of earring bases. Flat ones. Definitely flat. I had a bit of regular Flex left, so I twisted a little spiral-pair for one set of earrings, and made a little twisted rope to embellish the other pair. (With the last few bits, I made a number of little balls which I then accidentally knocked all over my studio floor. I’ll hunt for those eventually!)

And when I fired those two pairs of earrings … the photo below shows what I got! Can you see how far they’ve curved?!! I’m not disappointed in the results. In fact, I’m happily reminded of those early CeCe-inspired domed pieces that were so much fun. It’s just that this is not what I was expecting! The shrinkage rates on these clays are nowhere near as far apart as what I was using in all domed pieces I was making a decade ago — I would have expected this with those. Just not now.

I guess this is telling me I need to find some time (where?!!) to do some more experiments! If you’ve experienced anything like this, intentionally or not, please let me know.

Take a deep breath and “Don’t Panic!”….

On the day I’m going to write about, I was already thinking about The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy when this thing occurred. (I’ll get to the thing in a moment….)

Why THHGTTG? Well, my favorite version remains the original radio plays; and within months I was volunteering with a radio theatre group that was forming at community-radio station WYEP-FM! (Over the decade or so that the group existed, I served as sound man (technical term for that role!), technical director, director, and producer.) When I saw the TV series, there were a few scenes that definitely impressed me, but mostly I thought that my imagination had produced a much richer galaxy than they’d been able to capture on screen (which is a huge part of what I love about audio productions). I went to the movie when it came out (much later, 2005) and I probably would have loved it if I hadn’t already been so spoiled by the earlier versions, but I remember two specific thoughts about that movie:

• Though it seemed odd to have Simon Jones, who’d played Arthur Dent in both the radio and TV versions, replaced by Martin Freeman, that was still the moment when I realized that MF was an actor I hoped I’d be able to continue watching, and
  
• Though it seemed odd to have Stephen Moore, who’d been the voice of Marvin the Paranoid Android in the earlier versions, replaced by another actor, I just melted into my seat when I realized it was Alan Rickman‘s voice I was going to have the opportunity to listen to that evening.

So I was thinking about THHGTTG because I’d been thinking about the various times I’d seen / heard / watched Alan Rickman because this was on the day his death was reported. And when I thought I’d lost a student’s piece, I was already primed to quote from THHGTTG, “Don’t Panic (in friendly orange letters)”!

Lost a piece?! A student’s piece?!! Let me back up from the start. Late last week I got an email from some folks who’d “found me” online, checked my website and saw I wasn’t promoting any classes in the short term, but wrote me anyway. With a friend coming in for the weekend, they’d been hoping to find an introductory metal clay class. I responded that, though I didn’t have an “official” class scheduled, I could free up a couple hours on Sunday afternoon for a “semi-private / custom” lesson on basic techniques. My schedule was tight enough for the day that we wouldn’t have time to make anything elaborate, but there’d definitely be time for a few basic pendant and/or earring pieces: textured on both sides, cut into interesting shapes, embellished a little bit, domed for drying if they wanted, and finished nicely all over. They’d get a feel for working with the clay and, if they wanted, we could cover something more involved later on.

I’m very glad I made the offer: they came on Sunday and were lots of fun to work with! I showed some sample pieces where I’d embellished them with metal clay decorations, but also others where I’d kept the clay-design simple and embellished with beads and wire and such afterwards. It’s always interesting to see different techniques resonating with different people, and that afternoon was no different.

Having fit this into my schedule at the last minute, I said I’d fire and tumble the pieces over the next few days, would have them ready at some point, by the next weekend at the latest, and would send a note as soon as they were ready. So far, so good.

Now, most of the pieces were domed, so my plan was to fire them in a small crucible and provide some support for their shape by nestling them into fine vermiculite. Between all their pieces plus a few I’d made during demonstrations, the bowl was feeling pretty crowded. I wasn’t worried about pieces being so close they’d fuse. But I was a tiny bit concerned that, because having a lot of metal in a close space can help hold heat in that one area, I might have to drop the temperature and/or speed a bit. I could have just poured vermiculite on the shelf to spread things out, but I had a few scraps of fiber blanket, so I took a couple items out of the crucible and placed them on the kiln shelf with a bit of that for support, and it all seemed better.

What I did next is something I learned to do a long time ago: I take a photo of everything on a kiln shelf before I put the shelf into the kiln. I don’t necessarily keep those photos for very long. It’s just that, if I notice anything “odd” when the pieces come out of the kiln, sometimes it’s just useful to be able to go back to the pre-firing photo and double-check what a piece had looked like then.

So I fired them one afternoon, did a quick check once the kiln had cooled a little bit, saw that everything looked fine, and headed off to an evening meeting on another of my activities. I came back the next day, prepared to work on something while the pieces tumbled. In the workshop, I’d talked a bit about the different results I could get if I tossed them with mixed steel shot in my rotary tumbler for a couple of hours versus if I ran them for 20 minutes or so in my magnetic pin finisher. So I was sitting there, lining up the pieces according to which they’d asked to have treated each way, when I realized that one of the smallest hearts was missing.

No panic: I must have just missed taking it out of the bowl. I poured the vermiculite from the crucible into another bowl. No sign of it. Don’t panic! I started looking around my studio. No sign of it. Don’t panic! Because I hadn’t felt like taking time to set up the exhaust system (works fine in the summer; doesn’t have quite a good enough seal for use in cold, wintry weather … another project to finish), I’d just put the kiln on a cart and wheeled it into an unused room to fire the day before. Don’t panic! And I’d moved the pieces around, placing a few with support on the shelf in order that the crucible would have fewer pieces crowded in there, so could I have set it down and just missed putting it back in the kiln? No sign of it in the other room either. Don’t panic! I just kept repeating that to myself. I poured the little bits of vermiculite back and forth yet another time, still no sign of it. Don’t panic!

The missing piece was a tiny domed heart. Had it been something I’d made, I would have not had to repeat that mantra as many times: I would just have made another one and found something else to do with the first one if it ever turned up again. But this was not my piece; it had been made by a student. I could offer her some more clay and a chance to remake it. But the missing piece was one by the out-of-town visitor, and apparently she had been the person who’d been most enthusiastic to learn about metal clay and had encouraged a friend in Pittsburgh to find a class they could take together when she’d be here … and this was one of her very first ever pieces. I do remember how attached I felt to my first piece. I had to find this one.

Take it easy, Carol. Don’t panic! Just sit there and think. You took a photo before putting anything in the kiln. See if it’s in that photo (the one shown above). Yes! It was there. So … where did it go?!!

Hold on a minute. Don’t panic! You did something else, not your usual routine, when you checked the pieces last night. You’d been thinking it would be nice to have a good set of before-and-after photos, to show what “dried clay” looks like going into the kiln and how “just-fired silver” looks more white than silver. You took a photo last night so there really is no reason to panic: just check whether the piece was still there afterwards too.

Do my blog readers ever do those “Identify all the differences between these two images” puzzles? (1) One photo of these pieces was taken in the daytime; the other, after dark; so there is a slight change in the overall color tone besides just what is there in the dried- versus just-fired-clay. (2) In the pre-fire case, the shelf is sitting on my metal-top cart; in the post-fire one, I’d put a double layer of black “welder’s cloth” and “kiln posts” on the cart before setting down the then-still-hot kiln shelf. (3) The shrinkage that goes on with the binder-burnout and sintering=phase is visible, which I think is great! (4) But have you, my readers, found the missing piece yet? Is it there, after firing, or not? If it’s not, where could it have gone?

I’ll let you think about that for a moment. I’ll answer, and continue the story, in the comments section of this post. I’d love to see some of your comments there, too.

One more thought on using my tumbler…

Well, it’s about time! Last night, I finally took two minutes to figure out how to “publicize” a blog post on Facebook. (That time was split between finding where the settings were and choosing among the options available.) And I used that feature for the first time with my last post. This morning, I found the following exchange over there:

Now, Alice is correct. So I could have just “liked” her comment but, well, I admit I don’t know how to be terse, and I thought it was worth trying to be clear about what was going on, for anyone else who might stumble across the discussion here. So I decided that another blog post was in order. Once I’ve got it ready, then I’ll go “like” her comment and share this post too.

This is what my rotary tumbler looks like when I’m ready to use it:

There’s a brown paper bag folded in thirds and stuck under one end. Why?

Well, I don’t think it’s specific to this style of tumbler, though it may be a bit more common with these than with some others. But I discovered this trick with the very first tumbler I ever used: a little, all-plastic, undersized for its intent, rock tumbler for kids. The key is that the barrel has to be in good contact with both rollers, both of which have to be able to turn smoothly.

In an ideal setting, the base would be flat on a table. The motor would turn and the belt attached to it would turn the roller in the middle of the base. That would turn the barrel. Because the barrel is also supported by the other roller–the one at the end–that one would turn too. Thus, the motor, belt, both rollers, and the tumbler would all roll around together.

But, with this particular unit, if I simply put the base flat on the table and set the filled barrel on it, then the roller in the middle–the one that’s driven by the motor–that one turns just fine. That’s my clue that the “belt” connecting it to the motor is adjusted correctly. (If that roller slips, or seems to stick, that’s a sign that the belt needs to be adjusted which, for the record, is a routine maintenance task.)

In my case, however, this barrel would just turn in fits and starts. The “other” roller turns only when the barrel turns, so it’s not helping either. It seems to me that there are two possible solutions (though I do welcome other informed suggestions…):

1. Slightly raise the end with the motor on it. This pushes the barrel onto the roller at the “end,” which forces that one to move along with the barrel.
   
2. Slightly aise the end opposite the motor. This pushes the barrel onto the roller in the “middle,” which reduces the role of the one at the outside end.
   

I’ve tried it both ways and, in fact, both seem to work. But, as shown in my photo, above, I tend to set things up the first way, so the end with the motor is just slightly higher than the other end. In my logic, the second way seems like it’s putting extra pressure on the motor to do all the work. The first way seems to force both rollers to contribute to the effort, and that’s why I prefer to set it up that way.

If you have any other suggestions, or a better way to explain what’s going on here, please contribute to the discussion via the comments below!

I love my clear plastic hexagonal tumbler barrels!

An art-jewelry-friend of mine, Zoe Nelson, posted this in a metal clay group on Facebook last week. But I check Facebook only sporadically, so I didn’t see it until a day and a half later, by which time she’d already received dozens of suggestions and found a neighbor whose car-repair tool (an oil filter wrench) actually helped to solve the problem.

Until then though, none … none! … of the suggestions were how I would have responded: a few were halfway-decent alternatives, a few were complaints rather than solutions, some were simply sympathetic notes, and the rest were ideas that were far more complicated than I’d’ve thought necessary, a few even likely to damage the barrel. Thus, this blog post, at last, that Zoe knows I’m writing for her (and any others in a similar predicament!) to have for future reference.

I did make a range comments about my tumbler that uses these barrels, and more, a few years ago. (Looking for the link — gosh, that was way back in 2012!) So I have over three more years experience with it since then.

Yeah, the clear plastic lid can be a bit tricky. But (just as Zoe said in her Facebook exchanges with her readers) I’ve had as much trouble, in different ways, with the lid on the kind of barrel that’s made out of black rubber. While your experience may differ, I will take the clear plastic ones any day!

You can follow the link above to read the pros and cons I wrote back in 2012 (and see a few more photos, plus other alternatives, if you landed here without a lot of knowledge of tumblers), but here are the things I want to say now that relate specifically to Zoe’s problem and anyone else who may encounter a similar one.

First of all, let’s try to prevent the problem from the start:

• After you’ve filled your barrel with shot, water with either a bit of dish soap or burnishing compound, and the pieces you want to tumble, do this: Dip your fingertip in the liquid and run it around the rubber ring that seals between the barrel and the top. You don’t need to soak it, just get it slightly damp. This seems to help it form a good seal.
• Then put the lid on and turn it backwards until it feels like it is seated correctly and fits smoothly. (I don’t do this all the time, but if it seems to stick at all at the next step, then I always back up and do this!)
• Turn the lid forward to tighten it. It should turn smoothly and freely: if it doesn’t, stop! If you have trouble getting it on, you will have more trouble getting it off! It should tighten easily. If it’s catching, it’s not seated correctly. Back up a step, and repeat that one and this until you get it to close up easily.
• Then, tighten it a bit more so that it seals. The lid does need to be tight, but not super-tight. Tip the barrel sideways and turn it around a couple of times (like it will turn on the base), and see if it leaks.
  
  • If it doesn’t leak, proceed to start tumbling.
  • If it does leak, try to tighten it a little bit more and repeat the test. (If there is some liquid in the little “gaps” in the big part of the barrel, where the straight edges connect to the rim, that might be all that’s leaking. So test it for a bit longer and see if it stops dripping once that has emptied out.)
  • If it continues to fail, don’t over-tighten it! Spin the lid backwards and, if it moves smoothly, go ahead and try to re-tighten it. If it doesn’t move smoothly or still continues to fail, just take it off and start from the first, seal-lubricating step above (checking to see if it may be time to replace that rubber ring).
• When you’re done tumbling, the lid should come off…. It may take a bit of effort (you did have it sealed up well, you know, so it wouldn’t leak!), but set it down flat on a table, hold the barrel, and figure out how to push down (to press against that great seal you managed to make) and turn the top, let up and turn if you can, push a bit more if necessary and keep trying to turn, until it starts to move.

Now, if that last step doesn’t work, ignore all the suggestions about things like cooling the bottom while heating the top, or hitting the edge of the lid with a knife, or trying to pry the lid off, or any of the other tricks that people have tried in their kitchen, and use the method that I always use in mine and which has always worked on my clear plastic tumbler barrels too. I will quote it directly from the funny but still useful book by John and Marina Bear that is illustrated to the right (just so you get an idea of what the whole book is like, in addition to the tip on what to do…):

Problems with Utensils Stuck bottle or jar tops H. Allen Smith revealed to the world the technique for opening all screw-top containers. Now there are untold millions of us who face Mount Kisco or wherever it is he lives and say thank you every time we are faced with an obstinate top. The technique: Bang the top flatly on a hard surface, like the floor. Not the edge, but the flat surface of the top. Just once. Hard. That’s all. And to think of all those jars we used to hold under hot water.

(Not that I want to date myself here, but I found that book in what must have been just a few months after this version was published. I have the 1973 UK edition: that’s the year I moved there — my second real full-time job after college — and I suddenly found myself cooking in a somewhat different kitchen using a number of unfamiliar local ingredients, and in London at that time there was a waiting list of over a year and a half to get a phone installed! (I was there for only two years, to the day! So I never even applied to the waiting list. We had postal service twice a day, and lots of people I knew didn’t have a phone either: we could simply write letters back and forth to make plans for the evening! But I digress…) Transcontinental phone calls back then would have been way too expensive anyway… so I had no way to call my family or old friends for help and there were times when I just wasn’t ready to admit to my new English friends some things that tripped me up. The book was a hoot — written by former New Yorkers living in the UK — so although it did use the British terminology I was just beginning to learn, the attitude sometimes felt familiar. And it was helpful too! People seem to either love or hate that book, and I’m one of the former….)

Anyway, there may be a few “bad” clear plastic tumbler barrels out there (and others that have been damaged by mis-use) that are harder to tighten, and those will also be harder to open. But I have two myself: one marked A for the Latin Argentium aka silver (or other precious metal) pieces, and the other, marked B, for pieces containing any form of Base metal. I’ve used a few others at meetings or workshops. I’ve seen people struggle to get them to seal and I’ll admit I struggled with mine the first few times I tried to use them, until I got a feel for it. Like riding a bike (or rolling out metal clay) once you "get" it, it seems easy!

And, every time I’ve had a problem closing any of those barrels, I’ve just loosened the lid, spinning it backwards until I’m sure I’ve got it seated right, and closed it back up with little difficulty. If I tighten it just enough to get a seal (and even that does take a bit of practice to get the feel, but it will come if one remains calm and pays attention), it may take a bit of oomph to get it to start to open, but it will come loose again. Or, if it does resist, just use the tip above: lid down, flat, once, hard.

Because we do need to be able to retrieve our beauties once they’ve completed their tumble-burnishing, don’t we?!!

Year #7: Here we come!

Am I really already into my seventh (7th!!!) year of musings here?!  Hard to believe that, but it’s true.

I’m a few days late with this one, but things got even crazier than usual at the end of the year.  So instead of posting on my New Year’s Day blogging anniversary, I’ve managed to do this on an alternative holiday, one of several for Christmas as calculated on the Julian Calendar.  What can I say: I do understand the math involved, and why not find another reason for a celebration!

Part of my year-end disruption was due to the main interstate highway near my house (locals call it the Parkway East) being closed for a week so the city could demolish a deteriorating bridge that crossed it.  (How bad?  So bad it had made it onto 60 Minutes last year!)  There had been a temporary fix a while ago: they built a second bridge underneath it, not for anyone to cross mind you, just to serve as a sort of diaper to catch the bits that were falling off the upper bridge so they wouldn’t land on cars driving down the interstate highway!  So the demolition involved covering the interstate with lots of dirt, imploding both bridges down onto the pile, and then hauling everything away.

Now, I tend to use the back roads and simply avoid that stretch of freeway, so the closed road itself was not the problem. No, the problem was that no matter where I wanted to go, I’d’ve had to drive on, or at least try to cross, the detours. For a day or two, no problem; but for a whole week, well, I just left town. Here’s what I missed:

(I like the angle of that video: it shows both structures being taken down, but it definitely plays with the speed (slowing it at the beginning, and speeding it up later on). A more accurate idea of how it went can be found here, though that one was shot from much farther away in a city park, the closest that a “civilian” could get … while I was hundreds of miles away!)

I hadn’t decided exactly how long I’d be gone.  I had friends coming to town from across the country that week and I did want to see them.  But then there arose another complication: if I stayed in town, there were to be several days when I couldn’t get into my studio!  The general community center activities that go on in the building were on hiatus for the week between Christmas and the New Year, and they decided that would be a good time to paint all the public-area floors.  So I left late the night before I thought both the highway and the building were closing, only to learn the next time I checked email that, at the last minute, the painting had been delayed for a few days.   And the Parkway was still closed.  So I didn’t come back early, but instead stayed away a while longer.  And then … yes, there’s more!  The painters took longer than expected, and didn’t quite finish everything, but their time was running out because the community center did have events planned.  I never got the all-clear notice I’d been promised but, finally, I went over yesterday and found that I could get in.  So, now I’m writing!

Happy New Year!  Here’s hoping that everyone’s complications are finished from last year, and we can just get down to some serious work in the realm of having fun in this new one!  The photos with this post showing a pendant from several different angles are one that I started making last year….  It’s made from .960Plus silver clay (a mixture of .925 PMC Sterling and .999 PMC Plus).  That’s the clay we used for the Button Making class at Indie Knit and Spin last November.  I had some mixed clay left over after I’d finished doing my demonstrations in the class but, rather than think about how to store it, I went the route I usually take and just made something with it! (For technical accuracy: the spiral is from plain .999 PMC Plus that I had left over from the previous day….)

Because having several layers loop over the top to form the bail meant that area was thicker (and thus, likely to take longer to fully dry), I didn’t fire it right away with the class pieces.  Instead, I waited until the next month when I made some earrings.  I’d used .960Flex for those, but the same firing schedule works for any form of .960, so I fired this pendant with those earrings.

Having made the earrings just in time for my last Holiday-season show last year, I polished and added a patina to them, but I ran out of time before I got to this big piece.  The first thing I did when I got back into my studio was to finish it up, so I’d have art-jewelry photos to accompany my first post of the year!  I’m happy with how it turned out.  I still have to select a chain on which to hang it.  But I’m back in the groove for the year, and looking forward to new adventures.  And I hope you are too!

 

Good grief: I can still read it!

Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night
…
Good grief

I can still read it!

This old Peanuts strip was reprinted in this week’s Sunday comics. I do wonder what its original publication date was. It did take a few minutes before all the necessary Gregg shorthand symbols came back, but I found it to be an interesting trip down memory lane.

(As soon as I realized that his notes matched her her words, I was able to use that to help me remember which was what; though I swear that he noted her request as a blue setter, not sweater, which could be very interesting!)

If my mother were still alive, I wonder how long it would have taken her to read all of it. She’s the one who insisted I take shorthand in high school. Not so I’d be prepared for the secretarial work that she had done (though having that as back-up plan was not out of the question) but because she believed it was a skill that was generally useful. (Then again, once I’d begun to learn it, she suddenly realized she could no longer hide notes from me by writing them that way!)

I used some shorthand in high school, but much more once I got to college simply because I found myself trying to take more detailed notes then. I didn’t take notes entirely in shorthand, mind you. I wrote out many discipline-specific words longhand, rather than try to sound them out in shorthand style. But being able to use shorthand for a lot of my notes did save time, better enabling me to keep up with the lesson while still taking notes. Sometimes I’d transcribe them back to longhand; but usually, if I did that, it was during a review-session before exams.

So it was funny, in college, when a friend who’d skipped a class would ask to borrow my notes. I’d usually just answer “sure” and hand them over without thinking. And the person would come back in just a few minutes with a puzzled-looking face, and that’s when it would hit me, “Oh, don’t you read shorthand?” Hmmm, it just wasn’t a class that the majority of academic-track students heading to my university had taken!

But now this has me thinking. I’m not a big fan of jewelry with words on it, but some shorthand symbols do have interesting shapes. (If you know Gregg shorthand, you will know whether or not to agree with my feeling that I’ve always enjoyed writing “after” that way. I’m less sure about putting that symbol on artwork, although this thought-exercise has me realizing that I’ve already used “before” on a number of pieces, as well as “great” and “correct” and even “rarity”!) Don’t hold your breath waiting to see any … but I may have to find an old shorthand dictionary at some point and just scan it for interesting shapes that represent words I might like to use. I’ve no clue how many I may ever end up making, but I think I have to at least try it!

If I were to do that, how many of you could likely read what the symbol said?

Hey, what’s up with Carol & Convergent Series this summer?

This has been and continues to be a great summer … except for blogging, trying to maybe work on a website, and other such “online” tasks.

Now, there are several reasons for this that I’m not going to go into just now (e.g., and in no particular order: the instant-gratification time-sinks like Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, etc., that are full of interesting tidbits but require slogging through far too many individually-irrelevant items to find them; various great travels with friends & family; car-maintenance nonsense that tied me up for a week before getting fixed; ordering, having to wait for, and then trying to learn a new camera; taking workshops & teaching private lessons; my ongoing efforts with the Penn State Master Gardeners of Allegheny County especially at the Urban Edible Teaching Garden; and more!).

The thing I will describe in some detail is that ON TOP OF ALL THAT, the internet connection in my studio is failing. It’s definitely the internet-part, not my own computer, as confirmed by the experiences of others in the building, my taking in other devices that work fine via other connections, etc. And there is no easy way for me to fix that.

I mean, how can one complain when one pays nothing for the service?! Yes, I pay a monthly rental for the studio space, all “utilities” included. I get heat for free. I had to buy my own window air conditioning unit, but they put in an extra electrical line that I can use at no extra cost for the AC in summer, or a space heater to supplement battle between the furnace and the leaky windows in the depths of winter, or my kiln (just one of those at the same time mind you but, for the price, that’s ok with me too). There’s water (restrooms, kitchen, and big utility sinks) and trash pick-up and they take care of clearing away snow outside in the winter. And so on. And the building even has a “business class” internet connection, which has let me post away happily for the past few years.

But my studio is in a “community center” building. The folks that run the center just live in the neighboring community; they organize things through phone calls, visits to each other’s homes, or even just walking around “the Square” (as the neighborhood may be called); they do hold only an occasional formal meeting in one of the center’s open rooms when they want input from the community. But the important thing with respect to today’s topic is that they don’t work in the building at all. They have no need for internet service there. And the center’s budget goes for things like all those utilities and maintenance items and such.

So where do the ‘net services dome from? Well, there’s a local Linux User’s Group that used to meet in the building every month. The are the ones who really wanted the ‘net, so they made a deal with the center: they’d provide it, anyone could use it for free the rest of the time, while they’d get a comparable discount in the rental they paid for the meeting room. That worked wonderfully for my first years in that building! (Well, it was configured so you had to re-sign-in every hour or two, so I’d have to time any long sessions (e.g., system upgrades) to fall between that, but again, for the price, that was never a major inconvenience.)

Except, recently, that group has been rotating their meetings around among other locations. Lots of groups do that (including some I’m a part of), so it does make sense. They have left their conmputer and routers and such at the center, and they are still paying the bills, but something is very wrong with it. And they aren’t coming to fix it. And the center-folks won’t touch it because it’s not theirs.

I could take my computer home (nice desktop model with a huge screen) and connect from there. But it was just so very convenient to have that beast in my studio! Especially with metal clays, there is a lot of time that goes into little bursts of just “waiting for something to happen” — waiting for some moist clay pieces to dry before being able to proceed, or for some frozen stash to thaw, or for a kiln-load to finish firing, etc. Those moments are when I would easily catch a bit of “online time” in my studio. And, yes, I could still catch some via one of my “mobile devices” while at home, but for writing and doing photos and such, I just so much prefer the good, big, fast device I’d hooked up in my studio between my big, bright windows and my tidy little photo-taking table. Besides, I don’t have anywhere near as many “gap times” at home, and I’ve already found ways to use the few I do have productively.

So, I don’t know what to do. The big beast is big! If I were to take it home, I’d first have to figure out where it would go, then I’d have the hassle of packaging it all up and hauling the huge box down three flights of stairs at the center followed by up two more flights at home. If there is any chance the ‘net services will return in the next few months, it will just be easier to wait. Until I know more about the possibilities, though, I’m not going to put myself through everything involved in moving it. Instead, I just ask that you bear with me for a little while longer. I’m fine otherwise. (To illustrate, I’m including two photos from last month’s great road trip across PA with my cousin Marie from CA. The first, with my cousins, her nieces, Becky and Katie, at Phipps Conservatory; the second, at Ohiopyle, after we’d spent an afternoon at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater.)

Thanks so much for your patience!

More Fun at Three Rivers, or Ivy Woodrose is simply charming!

I have loved jewelry for ages. Not mass-produced jewelry, but special kinds of pieces ranging from unique antiques to modern artisanal pieces. Talking with colleagues as we staffed the Arsmiths of Pittsburgh booth at the Three Rivers Arts Festival yesterday, I noted that it’s an interest I shared with my mother. Kate said that, in contrast, she and her mother did not share that at all. Now, it’s not that my mother and I liked the same pieces: our tastes were not mere miles apart, the scale was more like galaxies. But we did both relish finding unusual pieces, and we could pretty reliably spot something that the other would just love. This was in complete contrast to clothes: we could rarely buy clothes for the other that the recipient could even tolerate. But we had great success with jewelry exchanges! And then there were further delights when, shopping for the other, we’d also find treats for ourselves….

In the 1990s, I started experimenting with making some jewelry. My earliest attempts were simple beaded creations of various sorts. I also dabbled a bit in glass-work and polymers and wood and more, but never felt the urge to go full-scale on any of those. Long before that I’d also dabbled in traditional metalsmithing and pottery: those were both far more interesting to me than later media but still had not completely grabbed me. I first heard about metal clays while I was in my beading heyday but for various reasons (including but not limited to a more-than-full-time academic post) I just wasn’t able to pursue it at all at that time. A few years later, enough had changed in my life that I could try to pursue it. I started out slowly but, eventually, I decided to kick it up a notch, moving things off the tray-table in my guest bedroom and into a full-scale studio. By then, my mother was gone and, in fact, I used a fair portion of my “inheritance” from her to set all that up. I figured, if it didn’t work, at least I’d know that I’d tried but, if it did work out, I’d have her (and my dad) to thank for it.

The thing is that now, since both my mother is gone and I’ve started seriously making more jewelry, I’ve pretty much stopped buying it for myself…. Clearly, I can wear anything I’ve made whenever I want (until I sell it), but an even bigger part of it is that I do have a fair amount already, not a whole lot, but enough that I certainly don’t need any more. I still enjoy looking at it, and I believe in helping support other artists, so I do still buy pieces now that I can give as gifts. I’ve continued to buy non-jewelry art for myself and I’ve exchanged pieces with other jewelry artists. I also make a point of taking several of my art- and jewelry-loving friends to shows where I know there will be art jewelers whose work I think they’ll like, and encourage their purchases. But I’ve bought very little jewelry for myself.

But more than zero. And today was one of those “exception” days: I bought a pendant from Ivy Woodrose (aka Ivy Solomon)! I’ve admired her work for years!! I never imagined meeting her in person but there she was, two booths up from the Artsmiths this weekend! I asked if she’d been there before and I’d somehow missed her but no, this really was her first time at Three Rivers. I went up yesterday and gushed and drooled and embarrassed her with my admiration, then went back today with some cash and, after a very lengthy and delightful discussion about techniques and products and sources with this absolutely charming artist (and her congenial husband), I actually bought a piece!

It was a difficult decision, balancing what I wanted against what I felt I could afford. The one I chose has fewer different colors than I first thought I’d pick, but I couldn’t find one with lots of colors that fit both my budget and my personal style. (One or the other, but not both…) I spent a long time debating between this and another “floral” one. That one had more, smaller flowers and thus could fit more pinks and reds and several greens (and far, far less yellow!) than this one. I listened to her talk with other customers about how she’d be happy to listen to the colors the person wanted and the budget she had, and could send her pictures of other pieces that either she had or could (re-)make to suit the person’s taste. But, having decided to get a piece, I just did not want to wait. So here’s the one I picked, and I’m thrilled to have it:

In person, the colors in this one are far brighter, more vibrant, than I was able to capture in this photo. (Sorry, Ivy!) But the image in this one is what captured my heart: the sun / sunflower at the water’s edge (which way is the viewer facing?!), with a hint of sunlight on the water and oddly-geometric constellations / clouds in the sky beyond. Though living in Pittsburgh now, I’ve spent a good third of my life so far on one coast or another, and much of the rest along lakes or streams, loving the water and sunsets (and sunrises too, though I’m less often up for those…) and gardening too. The appeal of the image in this piece, in particular, for me is the way I feel it reflects the following quote, one of my favorites from Douglas Adams (in Mostly Harmless):

“We all like to congregate … at boundary conditions …
Where land meets water. Where earth meets air.
Where body meets mind. Where space meets time.
We like to be on one side and look at the other.”

In the end, the one big problem I’ll have with this piece is that, instead of wearing it, I’ll want to be on the other side so I can look at it myself. But I’ll find a way to manage…

Happy “Super Pi Day”….

Well, the long-time math-teacher in me can’t let today’s opportunity pass without at least noting today’s date. I may not do this every Pi Day (3.14 in month.day format), but somehow I can’t let pass the only one this century that goes into extra digits (3.14.15 in mo.da.yr format) without saying something. And, of course, simultaneously wondering how “the ‘net” will do with, I am sure, a lot of people (in each US time zone, at least) trying to post at exactly 9:26 (am or pm) on that date.

You see: 3.14.15 9:26:53.58979 –> 3.14159265358979 –> Pi,   (usually written as the Greek letter Π), which represents the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle…  Like the outside of a nice, round, freshly baked and cooled pie that you’ve just sliced right down through its center….

Nor can the metal clay artist in me ignore a day when it’s suggested to celebrate with a Pie (or two, or more). As I teach how to mix powdered metal plus binder particles into something that feels like dough, then how to roll it out into the desired shape and move the clay into its final position until, at last, firing (baking) it, I often make reference to any pie-makers in the group regarding how similar those actions are in the creation of both pies and metal clays.

And while I don’t typically flaunt my background in math and math-related areas, those familiar with such subjects may also find it relatively easy to pinpoint the occasional mathematical influences in much of my work.   Not exact representations, mind you, but ideas influenced by math-sketches I’ve drawn countless times while teaching it.  Here are a few more samples of that:

But that’s all for the moment: I have pies in the oven that should be done at any moment now! Just in time to go celebrate Pi Day all day! May you find great ways to celebrate the day too.

On another note: Maryam Mirzakhani wins Fields Medal

Several math-related things caught my attention in the news last week. One involved a change in how silver prices would be “computed” and I thought maybe I’d write a little note about that.

But, instead, I’m going to add a note here because the Iran-born, female, geometer Maryam Mirzakhani won a Fields Medal. As a teenager, she won gold medals in the 1994 and 1995 International Math Olympiads and headed off to college … a decade after I’d finished grad school, and just before I became (in the summer of 1995) a Member of the Technical Staff at the (now defunct) Geometry Center.

“Geom” was a really wonderful little mathematics research and development center at the University of Minnesota, funded for several years through the Science & Technology Centers program of the National Science Foundation. It had a great, unified, mathematics computing environment that supported math and computer science research, mathematical visualization, software development, application development, video animation production, and K-16 math education. On the wall in my studio now I have a group of four posters from my old math-days: two that used computer algebra systems (Maple; Mathematica) from my work before moving to Geom, and two specifically about Geometry Center projects (tiling space with triangles; knots and hyperbolic space). Farther down the wall, I also have one of Escher’s Metamorphose prints (the one that comes in four parts); that one was a gift from a long-tine friend, Donna, who was in school with me (two different universities, just by coincidence!) both as an undergraduate (when she studied physics) and during grad school (after she had switched to computer science).

When people come to my studio and ask, “how long have you been doing this?” of course, what makes that a bit of a challenge to the answer is, “what’s ‘this’?” Depending on how much detail I sense the questioner wants (which I may or may not sense correctly, of course), I may talk about when I started in this powder-metallurgy medium, or when I started as simply a hobbyist in other art-forms before that and how some of those were more or less visual than my current one (e.g., radio theatre was a different creative outlet I followed, for over a decade…), but I eventually point to those four posters and say, “But that’s the kind of visualization I did for decades, to earn my living.”

Now the exact image from the Not Knot poster (shown here) was made, not by me, but by Charlie Gunn for the video of the same name. Another of the posters shows an image, by Scott Kim using Mathematica, of five interlocking tetrahedra … that makes the Rio Rewards PMC Certification silver tetrahedron project look simple by comparison…! But I was using the exact same tools to create the same and similar images, and researching how visualization might help students to understand the concepts involved.

So how does any of this tie back to Maryam Mirzakhani, other than that she has worked on “geometric objects whose points each represent a different hyperbolic surface” and, more recently, on “the symmetry of surface geometry”? Well, as I was going through school, I know I was repeatedly told by male teachers and classmates that I was OK at mathematics, where OK was often clearly intended to mean something like, “better than most girls I know, but watch out because this really is a field for guys.” (Not always, of course; but often enough to be discouraging. Donna would talk about hearing similar tones about her work.) In fact, one of the major reasons I went down the path of trying to understand how students learned math and how high school and college teachers might better teach it was because I wanted (I’m about to end this by mixing a whole bunch of metaphors: sorry!) to help level the playing field in mathematics by raising the tide for everyone, male and female. I just hope that, at last, having a woman earn a Fields Medal will be another step down that same path, and will encourage more young women to follow it too. It really can be fun and, now, rewarding too!

This Month: Way More Gardening than Jewelry-blogging

No, I haven’t dropped off the face of the earth! I’ve been busy, making art jewelry and other small adornments, teaching others to do so, exploring some new ideas, trying to trouble-shoot some earlier problems, and visiting several summer art shows. But … I’ve also been spending a lot of time gardening, and that is what has really eaten into my blogging time. Sigh!

Now, if you were to look at my yard at home, you might not think I’ve been gardening all that much. Because that’s not where I’ve been doing it….. I volunteer with the Penn State Master Gardeners of Allegheny County, and I’ve been busy working at, photographing, and helping with some planning and communications with several of their “Demonstration Gardens” including (but not limited to):

The Edible Teaching Garden, my most-regular activity, in the Point Breeze neighborhood of Pittsburgh, PA:

The Garden Table, another garden containing (but not limited to) edibles, supplemented by little artistic touches, in Wilkinsburg, PA:

At the Carrie Furnace site, a historic treasure containing elements of public art, though gardeners also notice the ways in which nature is recapturing this former industrial site, in Rankin, PA:

And, just for the fun of it, during a walking tour led by the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council’s Office of Public Art, held for the Pittsburgh Foundation, I also captured a few images of some of the urban plant-life and inspiringly-designed utilitarian features, in addition to the specific tour-items:

And that’s just my past week…. Click on any of the above photos and you’ll be taken to where you can see bigger versions of them, and where you can browse some of my other albums and galleries holding snapshots of both gardens and art.

I really am hoping to get back to blogging again relatively soon, with that “relatively” qualifier added because I do have to devote some time to that much-neglected yard and garden at home too…. Wish me luck! (Better yet, c’mon over and help…)