A photo discovery

M and I have been having some mild friction lately over item photos in the Ballet Llama shop. See, some of the items we've been listing? Hyper-mini:

And unfortunately, at a large size, the details that are exquisite in person (seriously; her tiny fairy doors are out of this world) become a little blobby and odd.  The ones with parallel or concentric details are worst for it, but the photo layout on Etsy requires them to be blown up to about five times actual size, unless I take a mediocre distance shot, and every crumb of clay is blindingly obvious.  Furthermore, the photos, if cropped to squares, fill the entire screen and can't be seen simultaneously with the text.  (Have I mentioned I miss the narrower, older layout?)

In this listing, you can see where I've been doing some experimenting, and at last I think I've found the key.  In Picasa, I crop to 170x135 pixels, then export in full quality at 570 pixels.  The last photo in the bracelet linked above shows the result.

It's still mildly problematic in terms of the item photo being seen at a size you'd need Super Magnifiable Vision to see in person, but the cropping can center and emphasize the item without making it quite such a large percentage of the image area.

So, success!  Now back to trying to work out a good way to freeze bolting cilantro.

Jewelry Sets and Busy-ness

I've become a lot bolder about listing coordinating items separately of late.  My bridal jewelry all links to the rest of the collection in the listing, since those are intended to be sort of infinitely mix-and-match.  Lately, I also listed this set:



Available here and here. Sold!

That ... is a weird piece.  I have to say it.  It's really odd.  Even more disparate materials than I usually combine, which, with me, is saying something.  It would be awesome to layer with a longer piece, though, a pendant on a very long cord maybe?  I haven't done a lot of A.) chokers or B.) multistrand before, though I've done a good few of the latter lately.

And I'm fond of the earring photo; I think I managed the depth of field and dimensionality, what with turning the pot that the earrings hang in toward the light and away from the camera, which makes them a little more interesting.  Not sure it's visible at the teaser size, though.  Hmm.

Also, since I originally wrote this post, the set has sold.  Obviously I'm not the only one who likes it!

I always consider jewelry sets to be an excellent gift -- coordinating necklace-earrings, bracelet-pendant, pendant-earrings-bracelet or what-have-you vastly increases the perceived value.  However, I'm getting more confident about breaking up jewelry sets listing-wise because I often sell them that way in person, with someone wanting just the necklace but not having pierced ears, preferring studs, or not caring for the pendant but liking the color combination and so purchasing the matching bracelet alone.  Things like that.  It's only twenty cents more for me, and it takes my customers to the Priority-shipping upgrade faster, so I think this is actually better.  Thoughts from the reader pool?

On another note, we've just finished out the semester at the tech college, and in the sudden glut of free time and M-is-home time I've had a couple of stupidly productive days.  We're still decorating the house, the garden flourishes, and I made hamburgers with homegrown spinach on them last night.  The Japanese maple looks like the Japanese maple.  The English primrose and daisies are not terribly happy, which is not unexpected, but my Oscar milkweed, liatris, and (shockingly) trout lilies are all remarkably happy.  The Jack-in-the-pulpit died but it's been the only thing to croak out of season so far.  More topically, I've made approximately a thousand charm bracelets, two with bits of miniature tea set and three with buttons, including my weird but somehow trademark combination of plastic buttons with pearls. We're discussing having all our work friends over for traditional British tea and jewelry-showing sometime next month. 

For those interested, I'm selling off much of my collection of vintage hematite in the Ballet Llama storefront.  There are also some nice hard-to-find charms there.  Get 'em while the getting's good!

It's hot, but life is nice right now.

"Asian Inspired" and its moral implications, or, Why Orientalism is Bad, Kids

So I just realized that my setup in this photo makes it look like the charms are sliding over a cliff to their certain doom.



That's okay; it sold last November.  Anyhow.

It occasionally troubles me to create Asian-inspired designs.  However, the following things always and without fail suggest Asia to me:

• peonies/ranunculus/large floral patterns
• cloisonne
• fish
• jade
• strong black/red, blue/red, or black/green color palettes

The problem?  Anthropological training has made me a little overly sensitive to cultural appropriation.  Mind you, this doesn't trouble me nearly as much as "tribal."  And yet ... who decides that something looks Asian?  Is it okay for me to use the term "Asian-inspired" when I in fact mean, "This, to me, resembles Western culture's idea of the motifs of Asia"?




The thing is -- I took Art History with a global emphasis and Artists in Traditional China in school -- the latter in seminar under Cheng-chi Hsü, one of the world's foremost experts on Chinese painters and their relationships with art connoisseurs.  I spent that class reading the UCR library's entire extensive section about Yangzhou courtesans so I could roleplay a courtesan novelist for the final project.  And this was after I abandoned, as beyond me without the ability to read Chinese script, a paper about the transgressive gender presentation of the painter-poet.  I am as educated on the matter of Asian art as most amateurs can claim to be.  Why do I always have this guilty feeling when I'm as qualified as most Westerners to identify Asian motifs?

 But that requires me to think of myself as a Westerner, which is a problem in and of itself, and it goes back to that old linguistic problem of the Orient and the Occident.


Available here.

Basically, the word "Oriental" means "from somewhere else."  It means, basically, "Them."  "Those people."  "The others."  To refer to someone as an Oriental is literally to say "the person who is deeply unlike me."  (This is why, in the Age of Steam, North Africans and Gypsies were called "orientals," though the term is usually specific to the continent of Asia today).

To call oneself a Westerner or Occidental assumes a geographical position; it says, "Of course this is the West and that the East.  Anyone who matters is standing right here, where it's true."


So true, Mr. Munroe.  So true.

So for the moment, I continue to soothe my conscience by using the terms "Asian" and "tribal," but being specific in descriptions ("motifs taken from Chinese scrolls," "suggested by the shapes of West African hunting trophies") and tagging with "asian inspired" and "tribal inspired."  The butterfly necklace up above is called "Papillon Orientaliste" -- the Orientalist butterfly, not the Oriental -- because I am trying to suggest an item created with elements that construct a reflection of a worldview of "the exotic" (there's an unwieldy construction), not that there actually is an Other to refer to by this term.

Possibly this is still morally corrupt, but it keeps me feeling honest, and I still think that's important.

I dream in black and burgundy

My customer's wedding was at the end of February, so time to show off the jewelry I made for her party!

Her earrings, wire-wrapped 14k gold fill with a hand-brushed finish.  I'd never actually done a brushed finish, so I allowed myself an hour or two to devote to learning the technique on inexpensive wire, and purchased a nice fine wire brush and file set.  I soon discovered that: (a.) it's really easy, and (b.) five minutes and a sanding block works better and looks better.  We live and learn.



I'm contemplating making up a tutorial for those.  Look for it at the beginning of April!

The bracelets were three-strand Bordeaux Swarovski pearl and black onyx with pewter toggle clasps and silver-plated charms made of crystal pearls with bead caps.
Lessons learned here:
(a.) Get the wrist measurements before ordering the supplies -- I think this customer may have gone handmade partly because she couldn't find anything ready-made to fit her very small bridesmaids.  I have a bunch of extra pearls.  But this is okay because I also learned:
(b.) Allow "wiggle room" in your pricing for stuff to sell out two minutes before you place your order.  That is not the originally planned clasp.  And I had to get the 6mm pearls much more expensively from Beadaholique when Fire Mountain Gems sold out of them since they were having a sale.
The clasp: an adventure.  I highly recommend this shop and this one for supplies; neither of them were selling multiples of the clasp, but they were both very prompt in telling me so!

I couldn't resist doing "vintage" styled shots of the jewelry.  This is the "winter" version, styled with browned leaves of flowering kale -- I desaturated, soft-focused and upped the dynamic color range for a sense of time and nostalgia:



And here's the "warmer" version, half-sepia-filtered, graduated-tinted, and soft-focused after styled with a litter of the deadheads from my apricot violas, for a sense of nostalgia, the warm blush of the beautiful and impermanent:


Pruning makes for great props. Also, I definitely want to do some more sanding of metal for the nice matte finish. 

The total of the jewelry was five bracelets and a pair of earrings: all in all, a good-sized commission, though if I hadn't been custom-sizing each one and thus redesigning a little, I'd have naturally gone stark raving mad on bracelet four.  But as it was, getting the same design with varying wrist sizes was an interesting challenge.  Much fun!

I feel vaguely obligated to do a Valentine's day post ...

... but I remember being single and how much Valentine's Day always depressed me, since I inevitably broke up with my boyfriends before it and I was never a particularly sociable teenager, preferring the company of adults and butterflying from one social group to another, which was lonely but relatively drama-free.

Yet Valentine's Day is a big jewelry occasion.  So it relates.

Kind of.

Let me see if I have a single picture of jewelry with a heart on it to post ...

Nope!  I had something at Christmas, but it's very Christmassy.  Well, who cares.

See?  That button at the very back is heart-shaped.  No, I promise.

I wonder what went so wrong in taking this photo ... I might have tried to take it indoors.  That's never good.

Last Valentine's day, Megan and I went to the Living Desert zoo so I could do fieldwork for one of my anthropology papers, "Conservation and the Narrative of Stewardship."  Afterward, we lugged our sunburnt selves around Palm Desert for an hour trying to find a place with room not at the bar since I was not yet of drinking age, and not with $30 entrees and mandatory valet parking, and we wound up in a Coco's with all the other gay couples who live in the Palm Springs area, and we ordered a fruit-and-cheese appetizer platter but it was the first day it had been available so they didn't know how to cook it and it took three tries to get the Brie baked properly, so we were in the restaurant for well over two hours grazing on improperly cooked cheeses and talking about the White Man's Burden savior narrative and the conflation of the animal body with the exoticized body.

This is one of my best and most treasured "couple memories," and it involves no chocolates, no jewelry, no expensive tickets, no dressing up nicely, no Valentiney things at all.

Conclusion: I'm obviously really bad at this, and I'm okay with that.

Style forecast brought to you by excitement-induced insomnia

Every so often, I try to do myself a little style forecast based solely on Pantone colors, ModCloth, and wedding dresses chosen by my customers.

My conclusion for the night: There's this interesting little thing going on in the fashion world where there's two personas, if you will. Vintage-inspired seems to be the thing, which means florals, highly visible jewelry, and a lot of interesting different flare silhouettes -- but there's a faintly goth, faintly femme-fatale thing which is operating alongside this sweet, upbeat, innocent ingenue thing. How many times, in one sentence, can Chelsea use the word thing? Patterns are preferred either representative or monochrome (i.e., colorful when it's flowers or feathers, subtle and muted when it's more abstract). Lots of flared skirts and defined waistlines, elegant detailing that's overstated but not over-the-top, and the 70s are starting to edge back into visibility, but mostly in the sweet prairie-girl ingenue looks.

This seems to me to be part of the reason gold is finally coming back so strong. It works for both personae.

Ideally, you're supposed to think six months ahead of the now for design and two months ahead for marketing; being me, I generally make fall stuff in the fall, snap it and store it for a year -- my computer is set (by means of ReminderFox) to remind me two months before the autumn equinox, two months before Valentine's, two months before Christmas, et cetera so I don't forget to start listing things on Etsy. However, I'm making a conscious effort to pull in the Pantone colors in a timely fashion -- spring and summer for this year are supposed to be a lot of primaries and fruit shades, lightening up and shading toward desert dusties next fall. So this is me making a mental note to include shades like "Taxi Cab," "Macaw" and "Satsuma" in my next few pieces (full list here).

I've done a bunch of polymer clay pieces lately, partly because I really haven't touched the beads, apart from my custom order (ooh, I need to post the final version ...) since M left ... and partly because the polymer clay mushroom charms I've made lately don't fit well in my bead boxes for packing but fit just fine in my jewelry stash trays once made into earrings!

We did Christmas with M's parents today, and ate prime rib with wasabi and banoffee pie; I got 62 vintage buttons in shades of black and brown from M's mum which I am currently sorting. I need to do a couple of new-materials photo posts over the next few days (iiif I can find my camera); apart from the buttons, I've gotten some great deals on Moroccan imports lately and a big bag of old women's wristwatches to dismantle. This may be delayed. We've been so busy trying to pack the last twelve years of my life into a PT Cruiser that I've completely burned through my post buffer.

So anyway. Merry Christmas, Internets, and a happy Yule, and may the longest night have left you with a bright morning.

Thanksgiving Sale!

Just a reminder that the After-Thanksgiving/Black Friday/Internet Monday weekend sale is in full swing!  Drop by for special deals and to see my pretty sale banner I made with beads and torn paper and a camera.

I've also decided to give a little extra something-something to blog readers, so if you leave the phrase "almost there" in the Notes to Seller section when you buy, there will be a free gifty coming your way.

A few of the things that you could buy!  and have shipped to you!  for free!  provided you live in the U.S.!  and for cheap!  if you live almost anywhere else!:


Available here, there, hither, thither, and yon.




Happy Christmas shopping!

Some thoughts for the ... morning? Noontide?

* I would really like to know what I'm doing right with Alchemy bids.

Seriously. I've had tons of interest and two commissions in the same number of weeks. What gives? What changed?

* Wire wrapping is AWESOME.

I've always loved heavily wire-wrapped pieces -- the ones that have that woodlandy, chaotic beauty with wire wrapping in on itself in layers and layers -- and yesterday, with some brass ring bases I got on clearance and leftover silver and brown copper wire, I think I got the hang of it. I'm wearing one of the rings right now (a piece of what I think is agate and fluted antique brass rounds, with a spiral of goldtone and wrapping in silvertone wire, on a wide antique brass ring base) and it gives me a little flutter of joy every time I look at my left hand. I also did a pendant with Czech pressed glass blossoms and leaves over a leftover square glass bead, and it has a WONDERFUL fairy-garden look. I feel like an artist.

* Condescending people suck.

I understand the need to distinguish between art and assembly, but this leads to a certain ... attitude in the Etsy forums. Technically under the Etsy rules putting a purchased pendant on a purchased chain qualifies the result to be sold as "handmade." And I understand that putting beads on a wire doesn't sound any more "handmade" to someone who hand-solders recycled metal, or some such. But statements like "Even the beader does SOME design work" make my hackles rise. Quilters select fabrics to go together in a pattern, I select beads and components to go together in a pattern, if you look at my pieces you can see I'm not just putting stuff together randomly or putting the same bead on the wire thirty times, don't dishonor my art form. *sigh*

* The average high school graduate has no understanding of tone.

I judge this by my own students. They're bright, bright kids, and they think they know it until I ask them to identify it, and then we both suddenly realize the kid has no clue what I'm trying to point out.

* I saw an EXcellent play last week.

"Doin' Time in the HomoNoMo Halfway House: How I Survived the Ex-Gay Movement," by Peterson Toscano, is a phenomenal show. I share an office at work with the performer, Vincent Cervantes, and he's as kind, funny and wise in person as onstage. Also, he's got enough acting talent to make you both laugh out loud and get a lump in the throat within the same three-minute section of the show. Anyone who has acted knows how hard it is to make a mood whiplash like that effective. If you have a chance to see this, run-don't-walk to get tickets. It's both roaringly funny and touchingly meaningful.

* I have GOT to be more careful about cutting chain.

I have a charm bracelet I may have to remake tonight because I misjudged and clipped it too short by one. Freaking. Link. It's a fun charm bracelet, though; 60's music flower-power themed with some I *heart* NY stuff. So not as bad as it could be.

New Special Offer through November 15

This week, I've got a very special offer in mind.

Nothing makes a better gift than something you've had custom-made. From now until November 15, get free shipping on any custom order from TangoPig Jewelry Creations. I take custom orders through either email or Etsy!



A previous custom order is shown above -- what ideas do you have that you'd love to see translated into real life?

Just mention this post when ordering to get the free shipping!

And remember, anything you order from RhumbaSquid can be combined shipping with your TangoPig order!


This offer occurred to me because I actually have a custom order going at the moment; I'm doing a sterling silver charm bracelet for a seven-year-old girl. On that note, 1.) since when is "sterling silver plated" an acceptable metal-content description? and 2.) where have all the "princess" word charms gone? Seems they were everywhere a little while ago, and now I can only find one style. No time to special-order one, either, because the bracelet needs to be done this week.

Two other bids seem to have gotten interest, too -- a great Alchemy week, all in all.

Might as well face it: you're addicted to charms

My partner just returned from a trip to Berkeley, and she happened to go through a bead store. She tells me it was ridiculously overpriced. There are these lovely blown glass beads we've seen at the local craft store, about $4.99 for three to five of them with coordinating plain glass spacers. And at this Berkeley bead store? Five dollars a pop. Yup.

Anyway. She stayed away from the expensive beads, but what they did have was charms. Discount charms. Eight or ten nice pewter charms in a little plastic packet for $2.75.

I spent over an hour sorting them, and resorting them, and matching them, and giggling evilly. I'm so addicted.

There are Hawaiian shirt charms in pewter and gold - nine of each. Little red enameled mouths that beg to become a Marilyn Monroe charm bracelet. About a million corkscrews in gold and silver. Yellow enameled bananas. About fifteen tiny, anatomically correct copies of Michelangelo's David (!). And a pack of wine barrels and grape bunches in antique gold with one horse's head included. I'm assuming that was an accident, but I would like to credit someone else with that kind of a sense of humor - The Godfather Charm Set, I suppose?

Spent today trying to fend off that nestless feeling by making our garden work. My partner, M, has an incredibly stupid flat-coated retriever who is convinced that something is living in the drainage system under her grandmother's gravel patch. He may be right, but considering the twelve-inch pavers in the way, he'll never find out. Unfortunately, he's destroyed our little tomato garden in the process. We jury-rigged a solution involving half a futon frame, three lengths of rope, two bricks and a crowbar. The garden is now quite a respectable little corner patch, and has morning glories. This gives me joy.