Treasury Wednesday: Sugar and spice? Also, my "rules" for making these

When I make a treasury, I select items with this sort of "decision tree." This isn't anything I've codified, mind you, these are just the priorities that have evolved naturally as I became dedicated to the idea of letting these be my community presence.

First of all, I won't feature anything that I strongly suspect to be a reseller item. I'm certain that some slip through my grasp, but I'm pretty careful. Also, blatantly incorrect tagging and glaring spelling errors drop things very low down the list of things I want to feature.

After those basics, my first priority is photo quality. I try to emphasize both good photography and well-made items -- decoupaged clothespins go in way after hand-drawn sketches. Good crisp lighting, however, trumps it; if the clothespins were photographed well and the sketch poorly, in they go and out goes the sketch.

I select to match both a color family and a theme, but color comes first.

If I have the option of a well-known, oft-featured shop and a newer one, all other factors being equal, I go with the newer one. I try to overemphasize shops with fewer than 100 instances of feedback.

Last and least important is avoiding competing with myself or M. I won't feature fairy doors or plush squid, and I do attempt to limit jewelry, though mostly that's because I try to have a wide range of item types.

This treasury is a great example because I managed to get a good number of newer shops, to emphasize some really excellent photography, and to make every single item fit a theme/story. It's a little naughty, which I always expect people to remark on more than they do -- you'll notice some bondage-themed items, never mind the corsetry -- but has an appealingly innocent look covering the wickedness, with a light blue and dark blood red combination that's unconventional enough to intrigue but could easily be a standard slightly-vintage Fourth of July scheme.

'One Way or the Other' by balletllama

Light blue and bright red in a variety of beautiful vintage-inspired designs. And once you see the story, just a bit scandalous.

Giclee illustration... choumie7 $15.00	SALE SALE 1970s lig... Threefeathersv... $20.00	Royal Blood - Chain... rabbitdance $70.00	pretty blue ribbon ... labellefairy $299.00
SALE. Group of thre... HouseOfCeramic... $54.00	dog waltz - fine ar... olivedear $30.00	Personalized Pet Bo... patspottery $26.00	Red Leather Rose Fl... Wycked $199.00
Hilarious, Mean Any... goatcards $3.50	Caught in a Net of... FruttiTuttiBea... $33.00	Red satin cupped lo... MorganaFemmeCo... $995.00	Classic Cameo Heart... lovesoapapilla $8.00
Untitled 12x8 Fine ... alicelily $35.00	Burlesque Gloves wi... DelilahBurlesq... $25.00	Baby blue linen cus... copperpod $30.00	Hand painted Doggie... jakeybb $399.00

Treasury tool by Red Row Studio.

Multiculturalism in Victorian Accessories

Victorian clothing was slightly more resistant to extremes than we are sometimes led to believe.  Then as now, Paris was the center of the fashion world, where extremes of couture included (during Jane Austen's era) piercing the nipples and wearing sheer, dampened bodices so the piercings were visible through the clothing -- and the Parisian fashion plates we think of as our primary sources for Victorian clothing were to the dress of, say, wealthy English and German women in the 19th century as high-fashion magazines are to day-to-day celebrity attire today.
However, while dresses might stay plainer and more conservative than fashion plates show, worldly socialites wished to bedeck themselves in all the luxuries of Empire; colonial capitalists wanted to adorn their daughters in the spoils of their trade.  This meant both other parts of Europe, plus "the Orient" (Africa and the East). Yet, this article discusses, the Eastern woman was stereotyped to be the antithesis of everything a Victorian woman ought to be.  So how to combine that "exotic" allure with good, stolid Western virtue?

Accessories and trimmings.


Victorian outerwear mantles from the 1850s and 1870s, North African inspired, in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose online exhibit of Orientalist clothing is here and as droolworthy as it is educational.

Hence, we get turbans worn for evening in the 30s, patterned Chinese and Japanese silks and velvet brocades in at-home and bedroom wear throughout three centuries (the wallpaper in the Ribbon and Ladies' Bedrooms at Woodburn is another great example), and mosaic jewelry, Etruscan Revival jewelry like the demi-parure below, and (I kid you not) chandelier earrings.


Image courtesy of Jewels at South Kensington.

Unbeknownst to most, cameos are actually an expression of, not Orientalism but definitely multiculturalism.  They're an old art form; there's a tale of Alexander the Great presenting his lover Bagoas with a cameo portrait in chalcedony.  The best place in the world to get cameos was (and is) Pompeii, where there was a school of cameo-making and where students sold their work to pay their tuition. Lava cameos, made from the remaining lava rock from the Mt. Vesuvius explosion, were most popular. Lava cameos were a frequent gift to sweethearts when a young gentleman just out of school finished his Grand Tour. Owning one meant that you or someone you knew had either been to Rome or paid an exorbitant amount for an import.

For more on multicultural Victorian accessories: Have a look at the references to African imported silks and the turban Algerienne (remember Algeria was a violently oppressed French colony at the time) in these 1844 fashion forecasts, and later, this discussion of Poiret's exoticized Edwardian hats and slippers.  And Beyond Victoriana has a wonderful analysis of what incorporating Orientalism (or the delightful neologism "Victorientalism") in steampunk actually means; I don't entirely agree with the discussion, because I frankly think the alternative to Victorientalism is whitewashing, but it is intelligent and anyone interested in Orientalism should give it a read.

The glory that was Rome

A necklace heavily inspired by Gradiva, the novella by Wilhelm Jensen based on a Roman bas-relief; the artwork and book jointly inspired some of Freud's ideas about fetish and a Dali painting.

Here's my interpretation:

Available here.

The cameo is a vintage glazed ceramic piece I've had for donkey's years, worked into one of my nest-type bezels.  When I'm making those I'm always convinced they're not working, but they almost always do ...  The wirework on the chain is not just decorative, but secures the connections between the chain and the beading in a graceful, textural manner.

Cameos are an old art form.  In the pre-industrial age, cameos were not the molded-resin pretties we are familiar with today, but were hand-carved from ivory, shell or stones.  There is some (possibly apocryphal) record of Alexander the Great presenting his Persian lover, Bagoas, with a ring containing a portrait cameo of himself carved in chalcedony.  You can still find some natural-material cameos, like these black lip shell examples, but hand-carved ones are rarer than ever.
More on cameos, plus multiculturalism in Victorian accessories, on Monday!

Treasury Wednesday: Still in the monochrome box

This time, a medieval theme!

I used to do a lot of charcoal portraits, which I like to think left me with an appreciation of greyscale tonal values. Or maybe it just left me covered in black dust. One or the other.

Anyway, there are a couple of new artisan blacksmiths on Etsy I've been featuring a lot, because I lurve art ironwork.

'Of Home and Hope' by tangopig

Quiet, peace and strength; the return of hope. Medieval-inspired designs in black and white.

Holyrood Abbey Ruin... TweelingPhotog... $15.00	Chapel Veil / Manti... LadyinBlueShop $	Blackthorn michaelbudd $3000.00	Knight 01 milemurtanovsk... $100.00
dark secrets journa... ThreeTreesBind... $86.00	Medieval Weapons 1 ... nichestitch $6.99	SALE - NEW GOTHIC R... granddutchess $49.99	Gothic (buy one get... angiemuldowney $10.00
Black and White Asp... wildideasglass $28.00	Estonian Blacksmith... morbidanatomya... $9.99	Woven Leather Cuff ... SnappingDragon $54.00	white and black jew... etcArts $42.00
Black and White Med... SuzCocoon $45.00	FOREVER ROSE Handma... CheringtonMeta... $55.00	The Splendor of Kin... kclarkphotogra... $30.00	Handmade Black Leat... peaseblossomst... $32.00

Treasury tool by Red Row Studio.

Anomie and Etsy: A sociological approach

Student quote of the day:  "Dr. Mazhan Khan discussed the felt and pitfall when my grandmother is an emergency room."

Yeah, that has no relationship to anything, I just had to share.  Anyway.

The Slate.com article from Friday's post and my recent rumination on the site's weird pricing competitions make me think of anomie, a concept in the theory of criminality I was recently explaining to a student.   Basically, the idea is that deviant behavior results from a disconnect between a.) that which society teaches as worthy goals and b.) that which society offers as methods to achieve them.  Much of the time, b. doesn't accomplish a.  At this point, the individual can either continue to strain themself psychologically by continuing to accept both a. and b. (conformism), refuse to accept a. or b. or both (ritualism, innovation, or retreatism), or replace both a. and b. with more suitable alternatives (rebellion).  In other words, when you are told what to want and how to get it but the "how" doesn't give you the "what," you have a couple of choices as to how to cope with that.

On Etsy, the teaching of the weird little internet subculture is a.) to live on the profits of an Etsy shop is a worthy goal and one we should all strive for; and b.) the way to achieve this is through creating unique, high-quality products and selling them with diligent work.

The problem is that these aren't as cause-and-effect as the Etsy Success newsletters would like us to believe.

Consequently, we have a number of options:

1. Conformism: We blame ourselves for our inability to reach the goal, and keep at it like the little Skinner-boxed hamsters we are.  (For an interpretation of the Skinner box, see here for the history, here for the interesting applications).
2. Ritualism: We reject a.), saying in effect, "I can't quit my day job.  Whatever," and continue going through the motions of listing and relisting.
3. Retreatism: We reject both a.) and b.).  We close our shops.  We give up.
4. Innovation: This is the insidious one and the one that causes both brilliant and deviant Etsy behavior.  We keep a.) but reject b.), saying, "I'm quitting my day job, damn it -- and I'm doing it my way."  This can range from finding a totally wild product (dog butt covers, anyone?) to assembling products poorly and relying on volume to cover the poor result to selling mass-produced Chinese wedding dresses and pretending they're handmade in your little studio.
5. Rebellion: We say "To hell with all of this."  We reject a.) and b.) and replace them with new ends and means of our own  We go start doing IRL craft shows again or, alternately, move to Artfire.

Hopefully this will help my fellow crafters: Next time you find someone on Etsy who makes you want to solder yourself to the wall and end the misery, think pityingly, "I see you're rejecting society's legitimate methods in pursuit of its prescribed goal -- but in an unintelligent manner.  Poor silly thing," and feel the urge to kill drain from your body, leaving you light and free and sociologically educated.

Feminism and Etsy

I've always liked Slate's practical, tough-minded approach to feminist concerns, so I was immediately interested when I saw this op-ed piece on Etsy's appeal to women:

Etsy.com peddles a false feminist fantasy, by Sara Mosle.

Quote: "I’m not immune to the siren call that brings many women to the site. After decades of being encouraged to forego the unpaid “women’s work” of our mothers and grandmothers, we are tired of being divorced from our hands and from the genuine pleasures such work can afford. This is the female version of Shop Class as Soulcraft, the recent book by Matthew Crawford, the philosopher-turned-mechanic. Women, too, hunger for concrete, manual labor that has an element of individual agency and pleasure beyond the abstract, purely cerebral work found in the cubicle or corner office. It’s become satisfying again to sew, cook, and garden. But unlike our mothers and grandmothers, who were content to knit booties for relatives, younger women want to be recognized and compensated for their talents."

It's an interesting take on the nature of traditionally feminine craft in the 21st century, the problems of "going global," those condescending "Quit Your Day Job" features, and why Etsy's demographics fall out the way they do.  I highly recommend a read.

This led me to apply the sociological concept of anomie to Etsy, about which more (in plain English, I promise) in Monday's post.

In the meantime, I'll be teaching myself how to write game flavor text by lurking in Magic the Gathering forums until I absorb the knowledge by osmosis.  I love being a freelance copywriter.

Until then, have an unrelated globe necklace.

Available here.

Treasury Wednesday: Black and white photos of African animals

This was inspired because I was thinking about safari animals and how popular animal prints are supposed to be this summer, after listing some of my early '70s giraffes:


Available here.

And then I saw the gorgeous polymer clay tree pendant there in the first row and decided to go from there. Originally I planned black and white with only grass-green accents, but then I fell in love with the tapir bookmark.

'Monochrome Safari' by balletllama

Animal prints in black and white with accents of blue and green.

Fun and Funky Zebra... SeaPinks $14.00	Silhouette's Tr... abrowndesigns $25.00	Tapir Bookmark Gree... BlueEyedNightO... $9.00	skunkcup . . . teac... staceywinters $6.00
Black and white Gi... jeneseque $19.99	Build-a-Bag Traveli... IslandGirlsJew... $12.50	Zebra Ceramic Face ... BigSkyArtworks $25.00	Fanny and Alexander... irenesuchocki $35.00
Handmade polymer cl... TulipsBeadsand... $2.75	Black and White Bir... applescraps $45.00	Conus Shell Chiclet... momadonnas $19.00	Wristlet in Snake P... mcallistertuxe... $15.00
Wild Birthday plainjanecards $4.00	Thirsty Giraffe (m... halluejah $79.99	Black and White Zeb... myglamour $32.00	2 For 1 Sale - It&#... WildLifePrints $20.00

Treasury tool is sponsored by Lazzia.com A/B image testing.