FOXY Fusions Blog

Pursuing art as a career can seem luxurious to lots of people, like it’s not really a job at all…it’s fun. And in some ways this is true. I’m blessed that I can earn a living being creative and I enjoy calling myself an “artist” or my new favorite—”artisan”. Before he worked some shows with me, my husband would remark that all I did all weekend was have fun drinking wine and hanging out with my artist friends.

But spend any amount of time behind the scenes with artists and you’ll discover an absolute truth: pursuing art as a career is extremely challenging emotionally, financially, and physically. Sometimes people ask me questions about booth fees or displays, and it’s clear they’re contemplating pursuing a creative career involving arts and crafts. So on the wake of a somewhat frustrating show experience, I’ll offer my most accurate portrayal of what you can experience doing arts and crafts fairs.

First, you can expect absolute unpredictability. All of us artists share news of various show experiences in the hopes of discovering the very best chance of doing well in sales. I say “chance” because finding good sales opportunities hinges on so many factors including:

• Weather–If it’s too hot or too cold, or raining or snowing, you won’t get the turnout you need to be successful. No amount of show promotion can fix that. A previously good show turns sour instantly in bad weather.
• Promotion–Picking a show that has a history of being a decent show is the best you can hope for, and then it’s very competitive to get juried in so you can have the opportunity to try out your merchandise on the market.
• Event competition–Even if the show is excellent, if there are conflicts with other art shows, community events, or even football games that the public wants to attend, your show attendance will suffer.
• Market appeal–Until you try a show, you have no idea whether the market for that show will like what you have to offer. Each show is like a microcosm that your product may, or may not, thrive within. You’ve got to pay to play.
• Economy–Over the last year, the economy has definitely dampened sales and made everyone cautious with spending money. This has hit the artist community hard. Look around your neighborhood–you’ve likely seen many boutiques and art shops close down because they can’t make ends meet.

Second, in response to the unpredictability, you can expect to need coping mechanisms. If you’re having great sales at a show, you don’t need to do anything except soak up the glory. But you definitely will experience shows where you do not make sales–these shows shake your foundation and make even the most confident artists wonder whether they should be pursuing this line of work.

Third, you can expect to get sweaty, dirty, and wet setting up and breaking down your booth. It takes time to develop the perfect booth display for your merchandise, and to get everything you need to keep it looking nice, dry in wet weather, and stable in windy conditions.  That learning curve can be frustrating, but once you’ve got it worked out, you’ll get great exercise lifting, bending, stretching, and hustling to arrange your booth before a show.

Lastly, you can expect to make life-long friends. Doing arts and crafts shows can be traumatic, and like any traumatic experience, the art show circuit produces strong bonds and friendships between artists. Artists are living on the edge, not knowing one minute to the next whether things are going to be great or awful. It’s the true test to whether you see the glass half empty or half full. Whether you can turn lemons into lemonade.

I’ve learned so much from participating in arts and crafts shows over the years. I’ve learned about myself mostly. I’m a lemonade-maker. I can make lemonade from even the most tart lemons.

Every year at the Austin City Limits festival I find new music to groove to in the studio! Music is an essential part of my creativity and design inspiration. I need music like I need air.

2009 ACL favorites included:

• Mute Math–New Orleans’ electro-rock quartet draws upon new wave and electronic to ambient pop and alt-rock to deliver FRIGGIN’ AWESOME JAMS!!! I loved them. I even got signed by the lead singer…a doppelganger for my husband! I bought the newest album–Armistice–and the original album–Mute Math.
• Ghostland Observatory–They rocked it hard on Saturday night…arguably the best performance of the weekend! They even brought the entire UT Marching Band out on stage! Ghostland Observatory serves up guitars, sequencers and programmed beats into a white-hot mix of punk rock, digitized funk and techno. Taking cues from disparate influences ranging from Daft Punk to Jerry Lee Lewis to Queen, Ghostland Observatory delivers with sweat and screams.
• Thievery Corporation–Exhilarating and eclectic blend of electronica, dub, rock and all manner of ethnic music, I’ve loved Thievery Corporation since I first heard a song of theirs on the movie soundtrack for The Truth About Charlie. They rock it!
• Phoenix–Loved this French band for their upbeat and danceable tunes! And the lead singer fathered Sofia Coppola’s child…an interesting celebrity tidbit.
• The Knux–For a hip-hop twist, check out The Knux. I love their creative use of instrumentation and electronics, and savvy use of slinky ’70s-sounding guitar lines. Fun!
• Citizen Cope–Born in Memphis, Cope delivers a folk-pop/blues/hip-hop/reggae/soul sound that is distinctive and hypnotic. He sang my favorite song on Saturday–Sideways. Awesome.
• STS9–Once again, Waterloo Records was sold out of STS9 records yesterday when I went for my yearly music feast. This band is awesome and has very groovable tunes for studio time!
• Cotton Jones–I had never heard this band before, but really enjoyed their trippy dreamy sounds that weave elements of folk, jazz, and country into a woozily melodic quilt of Americana with psychedelic sensibilities.
• Ben Harper and Relentless7–Gotta love Ben Harper anyway, but his new band is truly jamming awesome tunes!
• Passion Pit–Very playful eclectic electronica tunes that are fun to groove around to as I’m working in the studio.
• Arctic Monkeys–A favorite of mine since I saw them two years ago at ACL, I added their new album to my collection happily!
• B52s–I took a walk down memory lane and remembered dancing in college to these awesome tunes! This band is STILL rocking it! Unbelievable! (Although, they did give themselves a bit of a glamour shot for their band pic…)

AND….we also got to catch The Gourds at an after show at Threadgills. These guys JAM it HARD…and rewarded us with a rare rendition of ‘Gin and Juice’ which they adapted from…you guessed it…Snoop Dogg.

I can’t believe I have to wait another whole year for the next ACL Festival! Drats!

Sitting in GrapeVine Texas at the annual GrapeFest festival, I thought I would write a little something about them FOXY Charms….since this festival is all about the wine! But don’t stop reading if you don’t like wine…you can use FOXY Charms on any stemware: margaritas, martinis, champagne, you name it. (Can you tell I’m well versed in the drink menu?)

My daughter Shana cringes when I tell her “We’re making FOXY Charms in the studio today!”  These little gems are tough and tedious to make. First I cut each base piece which is roughly 0.5″ x 0.75″, making sure the edges are rectangular, and cold-working any weird edge that occurs when snapping along cut lines. Then I cut the second layer which needs to be placed like a little picture frame along the bottom edge of the base piece.  Then we use some fiber paper cut into very thin strips to make the “channel” for the wine glass hoop. And the piece de resistance: an ultra thin piece of glass (the “strap”) along the top of all layers. Shana hates this last piece because it always wants to lean one way or another, and not lie flat like a good little piece of glass.

Then we load the kiln with all these little gems in the making.

This picture shows a half-loaded kiln that, working alone, took me about 4 hours to fill. If I were to package these FOXY Charms into sets, I would get 28 sets.

After these little charms come out of the kiln, they need to have the fiber paper removed, be cleaned up, and be added to boxed sets of FOXY Charms for selling.

FOXY Charms are truly a labor of love. And wine.

And now…for a glass of wine.

Warning: I am stepping on my soap box~!

An interesting aspect of this past weekend’s show in Arkansas was that it was held at an outdoor mall. Partially this was a great thing because of the mall security already built-in to the environment…artisans did not need to worry about their booths being vandalized overnight. And initially I thought it would be good for business as well since people who did not know about the festival might discover it when they arrived at the mall…already in the “shopping” mindset.

However, in Rogers Arkansas an interesting phenomenon occurred. People shopped at Dillards, Eddie Bauer and other established retailers….and did not purchase from the crafters and artisans lining the streets in front of these shops. It was such a mystery to my booth neighbor why she was not selling her handcrafted jewelry when there seemed to be a steady stream of shoppers walking past that she went inside Dillards to see if anyone was buying in there. And lo and behold…gathered around the jewelry counter were gaggles of women buying Fossil and other national brands.

Back out on the street, crafters were uniting and chanting “No lemmings allowed!”  (It wasn’t like chanting actually…more like muttering under our breath!)  Which leads me to the point of this blog….

Why should consumers favor products from crafters in an art fair rather than products from established retailers? Here’s a quick list I can think of without trying too hard at all:

• Karma and positive energy. Crafters passionately create their products individually by hand in a studio or other friendly environment. National retailers sell products made without passion by workers in factories.
• Buy local, support the local economy. Crafters at art fairs in your local community are from the United States, and probably from your state or town. If you spend your dollars with local business, it stays in your community.
• Handcrafted=Special. Products you buy from crafters are one-of-a-kind, unique, and special. No one else will have one just like yours. This makes you special. Don’t you want to be special?
• Better quality, lower cost, higher overall value. Products from crafters are often made better because artisans pay attention to detail. And it seems like a contradiction, but products from crafters are often less money than similar products from national retailers because we don’t have all that overhead built into the cost structure. All we have to pay for is our home.

What are you waiting for? I challenge each of you reading today’s blog to make your next purchase from an artisan…check out www.etsy.com if you need a place to start!

This morning I ventured out to Pea Ridge National Military Park in Garfield Arkansas for my 7 mile jog, one of the first long runs for this season’s marathon training. The one-way Telegraph Road loop winds through historic grounds where Cherokee indians migrated to Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears during the winter of 1838-39, and Confederate and Union soldiers clashed during the Pea Ridge Campaign in March of 1862.

For a land that witnessed so much human misery, it was quite peaceful and beautiful on this overcast and cool morning. Graceful tree limbs arced overhead as I jogged the gradual uphill climb to the East Overlook where exhibits explained the fighting that took place in the battlefield below over a hundred years ago.

As I read the exhibit at the first stop and saw that the Trail of Tears passed through this land, I wondered if my ancestors could sense the presence of kindred blood. My maternal grandfather was born to a full blooded Cherokee woman and the European man who fell in love with her. She died shortly after his birth, and family history was rewritten with a new caucasian mother who enabled a smoother integration with polite society. As a genealogist, my mother has searched and searched for the identity of my great grandmother to no avail…she has all but disappeared into history.

I jogged along this road where my ancestors walked over a hundred years ago, and thought they would be comforted to know that they are remembered, and that their progeny walk the earth freely and happily.

Every season I decide that I’m really not loving a couple designs anymore, and I get traitorous and replace them! The good news is that I replace them with young upstarts that have lots of FOXY style! Check out the two new FOXY Circle designs for this fall…I am LOVING them.

These new FOXY Circles will be up on my website soon.

Notice how these two photographs look different from the photos on my website? I’ve been working on getting new, crisper photographs of FOXY designs so they’re easier to see online. Hope you like these pics better!

Yes…I’ve finally managed to make HOOP earrings out of fused glass! This was the most challenging project I’ve given myself yet, and I had the most wasted glass yet of any project as well with all the breakages! Take a look and let me know what you think!

I made these earrings by making blocks of glass following the patterns in my FOXY Circles line, fusing these blocks a really long time, then drilling the blocks with my coring bits.

Coring glass with a drill press is very dangerous and difficult. In fact, the local art center (Art Glass Fusing Center in Austin) does not even have a drill press anymore because of insurance risks…a student sliced her hand open coring glass during a class!

The bigger the drill bit, the longer it takes to core glass and the wackier the glass block behaves as it’s being cored. It can split entirely in a second and catapult its sharp broken edges into your hand…this is likely how that student sliced open her hand. The glass makes all kinds of weird noises as it’s being cored, all of which makes a person skittish during the actual coring process, so this is not for the faint-at-heart!

Using a drill press to core glass necessitates violating several key rules of shop class:

• Never put your hands near the blade. Well, you have to steady the glass block until the drill bit takes hold and starts cutting the glass, which means YOUR HAND IS NEAR THE BLADE. Luckily, the diamond grit on the coring bit feels a bit like a cat’s tongue when it’s in motion, so I don’t really think this is the dangerous part.
• Never use water with electrical tools. Again, you gotta break this rule because water is the lubricant needed for the drill bits to cut through the glass. You need water, and lots of it.
• Protect your hands and eyes at all times. Actually, this one you SHOULD adhere to. I wear gloves and eye goggles when coring and coldworking glass. Glass is sharp, and if you don’t wear gloves the very least you’ll experience are a thousand papercut-type wounds on your fingers.

So…now that you know what I’ve been through this week, and you see how BEAUTIFUL these FOXY HOOPS are, you’ll totally agree that these puppies are well worth the $50 price tag I’m giving them. 8-)  Happy Thursday!

After two days of immersion in projects, I have returned to the FOXY blog to give ya’ll an update. Here’s an insight into the life of an artist…my life is probably very similar to yours! As a mom/artist, I juggle getting kids off to school, volunteering with the PTA, and after-school homework and sports practices with time in the studio, marketing FOXY Fusions and other administrative tasks, and….drumroll….”real” work. Yep! I do some freelance consulting work to pay the bills and keep the lights on in the studio when I’m not at shows selling jewelry. So the past two days I’ve been using my left brain instead of my right…and it is tired and wants the right brain to do some work!

Right brain…activate!

Tonight through next Thursday I’ll be working on my new earring designs…HOOP earrings made out of glass, one set in each design from my FOXY Circles series! I am so excited about these earrings! I made a prototype and Shana and I both loved the earrings…they’re nice and big, with the hole offset in the middle, and they’re not too heavy at all….Loving them! (I’ll upload a picture once I complete them so you can see!)

We’ll see if FOXY customers think the FOXY Hoop earrings are as swanky as I do at my upcoming shows:

• September 11-13 I’ll be in Rogers Arkansas at the Pinnacle Hills Art Festival. I haven’t done this show before (in fact, never shown FOXY in Arkansas before), so I’m looking forward to the adventure. (Website)
• September 17-20 I’ll be in GrapeVine for the annual GrapeFest celebration! I’ve heard this festival is chock full of customers and really good family fun, so I am very excited to participate. (Website)
• September 26 I’ll be in Dallas at the All About Uptown Festival. I love Dallas, and my hubby will be going with me and taking me dancing after the show! (Website)

It’s going to be a busy month! Hold onto your hats!

When you own your business, and it’s only you, at first you have to be an expert about everything. For the last four years running FOXY Fusions, I’ve become knowledgeable not only about working with fused glass, but about making leather cord necklaces, wire-wrapping earrings, processing credit card transactions wirelessly, setting up a booth display, designing product merchandising, weighting down my tent so it doesn’t fly away, writing content and building pages for my website, implementing an online store, designing business cards and advertisements, taking photos of my pieces (still hate this part!), talking with customers and making sales, researching “good” shows and getting into them, registering trademarks for my company, filing taxes, and a myriad of other skills that I never knew I would have to learn to start my own jewelry business.

For the first time since I started my business, I’m hiring someone who is an expert! And I am so excited! Karly Hand is a graphic and web designer and she is going to give FOXY Fusions website an overhaul in terms of look and feel, navigation, and integration of my online presence. She’s going to make me look like what I am–a glass artist!

It’s still so funny to me that I am an artist, I learned how to do graphic design, and yet when I make a look for FOXY Fusions it is totally corporate. I’m not a corporation! I’m an indie artist, self-representing, living in the funky town of Austin! FOXY Fusions isn’t mass-marketed jewelry…it’s one-of-a-kind handcrafted artwork for your body that I make out in my studio with my neighbors’ cows looking over the fence at me!

Stay tuned for the real FOXY to emerge online! Can’t wait!

As the school year begins, I am busy with preparations for leading this year’s Reflections program at my sons’ elementary school. I just love inspiring young minds!

For those of you that may not know about it, Reflections is a national PTA program designed to give students an opportunity to explore and learn about various art forms including music, photography, visual art and literature. Every year they have a theme, and this year’s theme is “Beauty Is….” Take a look at the website (www.pta.org) and view the slideshow of the artwork that won top awards last year. These kiddos are amazing!

At our school, we will show off our kids’ creativity in a two-week exhibit of entries down the main hallways. It’s a great way to get those beginner artists used to public commentary (which is not always nice by the way!) and being on display~! And it’s good for inspiring the kids that didn’t create an entry too…maybe next year they will!