Room Posting 1: Master Bedroom

Okay, since I want to show off my house to the anonymous voids and I can't handle the uploading and tagging involved in a photodump post, I'm going to do this room-a-day style.  Those who were after an exclusive jewelry designer blog instead of a general design blog are ... probably not reading anyway.  Hmm.

Anyway.

The room: Our master bedroom
The style: Medieval Gothic meets American Arts and Crafts Movement
The colors: Black and orange/New England Halloween


We spent hours stitching and stencilling for this one.  It's still missing the big, traditional black-and-white quilt with orange sashing around which the entire room is designed, but here's what there is now.

From the door:

Bed from a local thrift store.  The bedskirt is crinkle panne from our stash.  Gothic mirror on the right from our collection, its avian shelf-sitter from Hobby Lobby and the dollhouse books it's perusing are fantastic, readable little volumes from Bo Press, a first-anniversary gift to M.

The picture frame on my bedside table is a triptych of our second anniversary photo and a black-and-white set from the thoroughly awesome DeSigns by Renee, which were my birthday gift to M last year.  Above the bed, a vintage upholstery fabric in two shades of orange, displayed in a pair of black frames from Goodwill.  The museum plate on the outer frame reads "Sunset on Snow."

Photos of the rest of the room after the jump ...

Back in (Bridal) Business

It is time for an announcement:

TangoPig Jewelry Creations is now selling bridal jewelry.

I know, I know, it's not my usual niche market -- but all my research indicates that the bridal category has pieces that are a.) unique and intriguing, b.) well-constructed, and c.) affordable -- but no d.) all of the above. And d.) is what I do.

So, my forty-some bridal pieces have at last returned from consignment, which -- I now feel comfortable blogging -- was an unrelenting nightmare -- the consignee never replied to email, there is no evidence that the pieces were ever actually displayed in their shop, and their online marketing was laughable -- one piece, made of freshwater pearls, was advertised as "hand carved ivory beaded earrings." A couture Swarovski crystal piece I wincingly priced at $80 retail, and braced myself for a loss of profits, was listed at $40, about $25 (significantly less than I spent on materials) of which would have gone to me. The same piece was listed as "glass and lightning sand" (which I have never heard of). Let me note at this point that I spent days on pricing and thorough descriptions for them. My business name was nowhere on the site; four pieces were photographed with only the back showing.

Also, that same Swarovski crystal necklace came back severely broken.  It was a coral sprig pendant.  They're flat.  This should have been easy to pack.

It would probably be professional at this point to go back and remove their links from my blog (if I ever even did link), but I am much more spiteful than professional. It's a personal flaw.

So ANYway. They're now out of my hair and I can sleep at night without worrying they've made off with that thousand-some dollars worth of jewelry, and I'm out of their inventory so they don't have to worry about me calling the police for petty theft or a customer actually buying something, which would necessitate them paying me and possibly being asked some interested questions about their either-false-advertising-or-elephant-poaching.

For you lot, there will soon be photos and a special offer or a few to promote the collections. Even pre-special offer this jewelry I'm currently listing the hell out of is going to be waaay below the 300% bridal markup I've discovered is industry standard. Everybody wins!

I can work the equivalent of four part-time jobs, right?

So classes began yesterday and already school is ... well, gruelling.  Item listings will be slow.

I'm attending five classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays from eight to five -- no lunch break in there, either -- and then two classes plus six tutoring appointments on the other three days.  Twenty units.  A full-time schedule is twelve.  Plus a part-time job.

But that's okay.  I can do this.  I fantasize that I'm walking in the weary footsteps of heroic scholarship students in the insular worlds of Victorian universities.  Hopefully, the romance of being overworked and underslept won't entirely wear off for about ten weeks.

However, some awesome things:
- My history professor refers to lectures as "storytime," requires laptop use, and encourages us to comment on the class Facebook page with questions.
- All of the lecture halls are still filled with colorful helium balloons, too high to reach, with signs calling for academic strikes.  This is brilliant -- I love creative nonviolent political action.
- Nothing makes me feel smart like going to class and hearing someone define self-actualization as when you're so self-actualized that you're fully self-actualized.

And we should be getting some new special offers here soon/at last!  So stay tuned.

Self-Googling ... today's ego boost

I Googled myself today, just for fun.  And it was fun.

The top search results are my two Home Jewelry Business Success Tips articles and a couple of places they've been linked, which is nice.  Then comes my UCR listing as a trained Queer Ally, also nice.  My Facebook page, my Twitter which I use solely for making up Starveling Cat doggerel ...

... aaaand then it gets creepy.

There is a lot of surprisingly accurate information about people on the internet.  Name, age, cities lived in, relatives.  And for $39.95, someone could learn everything else about me -- schools.  Phone numbers.  Jobs.  Crime record.  Neighbors.  Every address I've ever lived at.

As someone who was once in a stalkeresque emotionally abusive relationship (one day, when I'm a bit more over it, I may blog about it), this scares me.  As a queer woman in the South who has my own and M's safety to think about, this scares the hell out of me.

Anyway.  Shrugging off.  No one is that interested in me.

At that point you come into my stage-manager credit for my high school's production of L'il Abner (none of my master-of-properties credits show up, which is a little disappointing; I was good at that, and much prouder of my work, but that's cool!), and my lecture listing with Harry Potter Education Fanon for the semiotics-of-broomsticks talk, and then highly cheering evidence that one of my articles in particular has been linked all over the crafty net-world.  So overall, I feel well-represented by Google.  Perhaps I shall bake them cookies shaped like the Internet.

Sugardog

Back in California for school, familiar things acquire their humor again.

My family has this elderly bi-color Beagle, Sugar.  (My father is fond of reminding people that when four-year-old me named her, it was Sugarcookie Rabbit-Foot.)  She's seventeen, and she has learned to look like she's going to keel over any minute now so that people will pet her out of pity.  Mind you, she probably is.  Sugar has outlived six other puppies acquired years after we got her.  The last one, our endearingly dumb Border Collie-Great Dane mix Stormy, adopted when Sugar was already going white, recently died of old age.

Sugar's also figured out the art of selective deafness.  You can stand next to her yelling "Sugar!  Dog!  HEY!" and she'll lie there and sigh.  Open the cat-food bag, though, and suddenly there's an obese beagle sitting loyally at your side ... and she watches the mail-truck go by every day through a windowless wall.

Another habit she's picked up is pushing her food bowl around.  She never used to do this.  But we have full tile floors now and there's no one else to steal it from her, so she does vague wavering circuits of three rooms as she eats, until she fetches up against a large appliance or someone's ankle.  You'll be cooking and feel something smooth and hard collide gently with your foot, and look down and there's this small, fat white dog contentedly chowing down.  It's generally best not to move until she's done at this point.  She might fall on her face.  You wouldn't think a dog could do this, but she can.

On a vaguely related note, I can't look at a sloth without imagining it going ".... duuuuuuuuude."  Or possibly drawling "mIrAcLeS."

That is all.

This is gorgeous stuff too

I have a love-hate relationship with collage, truly, because I feel it's like beading: Easy to do, easier to do badly ... but look.  Look at this.






Photos copyright Moon Moth Press.

They're called Moon Moth Press and I want to buy about fifteen of their cards on the spot.

As it is, I'm settling for inspirational browsing, but that's equally troublesome as I have none of my beads with me.  All I've got is some hypoallergenic earwires and a pair of round-nose pliers I packed for M.  But I see a dignified black lace collar with a little jet and a lot of fuschia fire-polished glass.  A simple, no-nonsense double strand of glass pearls in vintage sepia and girlish coral and sensible dark pink.  Elsewhere, a long strand of black with just a few almost-symmetrical winks of dark purple German crystal, a wirework necklace with one half bronze wire and yellow glass and the other half copper wire and green and purple glass, but otherwise identical.

As it is, it's a lovely inspiration for the walls of our studio-art room.  Thus I must content myself.

Lovely things!

I never state categorically that I don't like something.  Well, sometimes, but I try to avoid it.  I don't like cleaning.  But I've discovered that there is a huge amount of personal satisfaction to be gotten from scrubby polishy cleaning, as long as I don't have to organize things in order to do it.  I was convinced I didn't like Lady Gaga, then someone introduced me to the magnificent song and video combo for "Alejandro" and I went "Oh my god ... this is actually a genderqueer, pornographic, post-apocalyptic Lady of Shalott.  With lace goggles."  I thought I didn't like coffee, but then I tried a good chocolatey French roast and now my appetite for the stuff is unhealthy.

I had the same feeling about seed bead jewelry.  I had the impression it was all either overdone, dripping-with-gewgaws "statement" pieces, or dainty little-girl stuff.  Then I found this.


Photo copyright Clara Francis.


This is amazing stuff -- particularly the botanicals.  In the flowers, this artist is actually using the shimmery, almost pixel-like nature of the medium to contribute to the design instead of working around it.  It's sort of ... Art Nouveau meets Impressionist in a lovely organic way.  Really versatile stuff, too, especially the lovely earrings -- I love a "jeans to wedding dress" piece, which the pansy earrings certainly would be.  For all my gushing, I don't particularly care for most of the animals -- we're straying back into dainty-little-girl territory there -- but I'd wear those fan flowers everywhere.

And the Web site!  Just click through this beauty.  THAT is design.  Lovely storybook collage, and the nav bars as playing card-bookmarks is a nice touch.


So yeah, go look at it.  It's an enchanting way to spend half an hour.

Culture Shock: some things about the South

• People really and honestly are ... surprisingly friendly.  It's not that there aren't lovely chatty clerks with senses of humor, and neighbors who want to hear all about how you're doing now you moved in, in California -- but here it's almost everybody.
• The weather is much nicer than I was expecting.  When we flew back to house-hunt, I thought it was miserable beyond belief.  But it turns out I was not admitting to myself that I was really, really sick so it seemed worse than it was.  Also, it was in the middle of a heat wave.
• The hurricanes that hit the coast in North Carolina cause even nicer weather to happen in upstate SC -- we get nice cool dry breezes.  I feel vaguely guilty about this.
• I sort of expected to go through ethnic-food deprivation, especially because the girl at one of the visitor's centers said that we'd just have to get used to fried-and-barbecued everything all the time.  But they've got a lot of stuff.  Everything I'm accustomed to eating and much, much more.  They have Asian food brands at our local Ingles I've never seen before -- including some culinary soup broths I can't wait to experiment with.
• Nobody sells 4x6 recipe cards anymore.  Admittedly this is not really a thing about the South but a thing about everywhere, but what is up with that?
• It was worth moving just for Hobby Lobby.  They carry everything.  Jewelry supplies I usually have to special-order, at great prices.  And then there's a leathercrafting aisle and a doll house aisle, which always makes me salivate over the charm potential.  Relatedly, apparently M has always wanted a dollhouse.  I think one day I'll get her one of these.  Anyway:  Hobby Lobby.  Awesome.
• Cracker Barrel's idea of vegetables pleases me.
• Geraniums seem to do well here, judging by other people's balconies.  The landscaping up by our loan office/community center heavily features impatiens and lavender.  We have full northern exposure on our deck, but I have been researching native woodland species that won't mind.  Next spring, when I'm here for good and the frost (they have this thing called frost here) is mostly past, I intend to plant Jack-in-the-pulpit and wood anemones and probably some fennel.  I wanted a Passiflora but they're invasive in Georgia and we're all of twenty minutes from Georgia.  I am passionflowerless.  This is a source of sorrow.
• Our milk has a slightly stronger flavor.  It's not just one brand, either, it's pretty much all of it.  It's tasty, just different.
• In and near Anderson County, you can easily get hand-gathered eggs, giant jars of dark rich honey from bees kept by a dad and his two daughters, blue cheese made in Clemson University's dairy thirty minutes away by slow truck, and more local preserves than you can shake a slice of bread at.  Squee.
• Oh, God the bugs.  They're everywhere.
• They refer to cockroaches as "water bugs" in the South.  I could have gone my whole life without knowing that.
• Life just generally happens a little slower.  It's nice.
• My upstairs neighbors are generally quiet, but today they're either autumn-cleaning or moving furniture.
• Beadless and shoeless and chairless and at loose ends as I find myself, I am so, so glad to be here.

Shop redesigns

Hey, did I ever blog about my new shop banners?

I am not a graphic designer.  Digital art eludes me.  But it finally occurred to me that in the past couple of years I have become a pretty good close-up photographer, and I know how to crop.

Hence, a sneak peek of sorts, solely because the ol' blog is looking image-deprived lately:




I made some simpler ones for Ballet Llama too.  They're seasonal and have nice mellow colors, and I made special ones for my yearly sales (i.e. Black Friday, the Stocking Stuffer Sale I did last year, and an after-holiday sale I failed to plan last January but have slated for this one).  The colors are mellower than my old one's and don't compete with Etsy's as much, either, so that's good.  It's always a little difficult trying to design a unique, unified storefront within an existing template that's got a completely different look.  I took them by the same light I generally photograph under, so they'll have a similar value (hopefully) to my item photos, and a lot of those pieces will be recognizable to anyone who's followed for a bit, so ... yeah!  Cool!

Yes, ma'am!

A timely (sorry) and entertainingly written article in the New York Times -- which I've got an online membership to in celebration of its becoming somewhat more relevant than previously -- discussing the problem of addressing women as "ma'am."

I first became aware of this issue when I read The Devil Wears Prada (don't judge me) and there was extensive discussion of the evil boss's hatred of being called "ma'am."  (I prefer the spelling m'am but I think that's considered scathingly colloquial these days.  But I digress.)

It's timely because I've noticed that, here in the just-as-friendly-as-they-stereotype-it South, if people want my or M's attention, they say, "Ma'am?"  Once even, "Ma'am, could I trouble y'all a minute?" which I found charming beyond belief. 

I love this.  Why?  Because in California, greeters at shops and strangers on the street would call M and I "girls."  "You finding everything okay, girls?"  Drove me mad.  It strikes me as condescending.  You wouldn't say, "Want to try some free samples, girl?" Making it plural does not make it okay.

A lot of women, apparently, don't like "ma'am" because it makes them feel old.  I suppose maybe my lack of objection is because I'm barely edging into my twenties and very conscious of my callow youth, so it pleases me to be thought of as older.  But then, I'm very sensitive to agifying family titles.  Call me "Auntie Chelsea" and I'll call you dead.  Call my mother Auntie Jane and I'll call you buried alive.

So yeah.  Er, yes ma'am.  No conclusions.

Vacation, if it qualifies

Remember how I was going to have Mom fill orders while I was in South Carolina?  I lied.  This would have required me to get everything into numbered drawers and a database made and her informed about the rather whimsical nature of my local post office, and there was just no time.

However, we're making up for it with a pretty good sale.  So there's that.

Mostly now I'm occupying my days with keeping house.  M made me this adorable rockabilly-style apron with strawberries on it to celebrate my ascent to wifehood.  Today, I get the cookware organized and babysit the Crock Pot.  If I finish that, I get to shelve the rest of our books!

I think I'll blog photos of the rooms as we finish decorating them.  At first I wondered if this was appropriate, then I thought:  "Chelsea, most people who are interested in reading a very weird jewelry blog are probably interested to read about weird home decor too."  I also thought:  "When have you ever worried about being topical?"

So the first set will probably be our Medieval-Gothic-meets-American-Arts-and-Crafts-Movement bedroom, which is black and white and orange and gorgeous, and involves a lot of textiles and crisp contrasts.  After that, probably the kitchen, which is leaf green and white and decorated with our collection of red and white strawberry stuff, which seemed like a much larger collection in our one-room studio, somehow, than it does here.

Off to relocate the cake pans and probably buy a mixing bowl!