And she's off...!

I'm not sure what the internet cafe scene is like in Greece, but if I can get access I'll be sure to post while I'm away. Otherwise, I'll be back here on July 21.

How much is a necklace worth?

My friends have been telling me that my prices are too low. Over the past few months I've gradually raised my prices from the the $20-$30 range to the $40-$60, which I thought was pretty ballsy of me. Then I did some looking around and was startled to find pieces similar to mine going for hundreds of dollars. Not that the people charging those prices are out of line - it just made me wonder, where does the value in a piece of jewelry come from?

Right, this isn't neuroscience - there are standard formulas out there for pricing jewelry and all of them are some version of cost of the materials + overhead + hourly wage for the artist. So the difference between a $40 pendant, like the one on the right, and a $315 pendant should come down to things like the quality of the materials used, how long each took to make, differences in overhead, and the wage each artist pays herself.

Let's break it down for these two necklaces. Both are made of sterling silver and fine silver (PMC) - the prices for those materials are fixed by the silver market so the only really substantial variation is going to come from quantity. My pendant is smaller, about half the size of the other one. The freshwater pearl is definitely a less expensive embellishment than the fossilized wood - hard to tell by how much. Let's say the raw materials for the other necklace cost twice as much as the raw materials for mine.

Hourly wage for the artist is is much trickier - and not just because people work at different speeds or pay themselves differently wages. Do you count just the time you actually spend working on this very piece or do you count the hours you spent coming up with the design and refining it? What about time spent sketching? or buying materials? (or is that overhead?) It only took me about an hour to make my pendant - but there were many other hours spent trying to figure out how to work with PMC, trying out different shapes to get the curves I wanted, texturing and re-texturing, etc. I don't figure that into the selling price - maybe the other artist does. As for overhead, let's assume we both added in about 10% of the base price.

Working through this makes me think I did undercharge for my pendant - the price should've been more like $60. That's still a long way from $315. So where does the other $255 of value come from?

It could be quality of workmanship: I'm still a beginner and there are lots of things I do that could be improved. For example, the back of my pendant isn't finished very well - it's reasonably smooth, but that's it. I've seen pendants with lovely patterns, design elements, or artist marks on the back -- all of which make the jewelry look much more professional.

It could be that the other artist pays herself a significantly higher hourly wage. I could try doing that, but would anyone buy my jewelry then? Now we're getting to the real issue: what will the market bear? Do you have a product that people are willing to pay a premium for? Clearly the other artist does and, just as important, she's found the people who are willing to pay the premium. And you know what that means, don't you? Promotion, marketing - my twin nemeses. I can work on my jewelry-making chops all I want, but if no one knows about it, my prices are going to languish in the middle two figures. Is doubling, or even tripling, the price of my jewelry worth the extra marketing and promotion I'd have to do to make it salable at that price range? Does the extra income balance the time and mental anguish of getting out there and selling? Honestly, I don't know.

Vacation anxiety

For the past two days I've been working in a bit of a frenzy, trying to get all the pieces I've started at and since jewelry camp finished before Friday. That's when we leave on a 3-week trip we've had planned since December. At the moment I can't really believe that it's going to happen: there's so much that has to get done before Friday that it's easier to imagine that it won't happen than it is to imagine that I'll get it all done and leave. Also, the thought of leaving my tools behind for that long is causing mental hyperventilation ... well, that sounds like a hole in the head. Let's just say I'm having a constant low-grade anxiety attack.

Oh, and just so it's clear how totally nutso this reaction is, here's where we're going - that's right, Greece. This is a picture of Hydra, one of the three islands we'll be visiting. It's so freaking quaint that donkeys take your luggage up the hill to the hotels - but it's also supposed to be the most cosmopolitan, to take a word from their own website, of the Greek islands. It's also the preferred hideaway of famous folks like Leonard Cohen and Brice Marden and various Greek celebs I don't know. Here's the obligatory picture of the donkey taxis. We're also going to Paros and Santorini. Pretty great, right? So why am I so stressed?

First, big events are stressful, even when they're happy events - think about every wedding you've ever been to/participated in. I'd say three weeks in Greece is a big event for just about anybody. Second, at heart I'm a complete homebody. There's nothing I love more than waking up at home in my own fabulous bed with my own fabulous partner knowing that there are no external demands on my time for the entire day. I can amuse myself for weeks on end with jewelry-making, painting, reading, and just plain hanging out. Third, to paraphrase the MIL, who, at 76, is a gung-ho world traveler, going away is hard, being away is easy. Sardine-style flying, dragging overloaded suitcases hither and yon, figuring out train and bus and hydrofoil schedules... ok, now I'm starting to feel embarrassed about all this kvetching. We're going to Greece, after all!

So how do I deal with this tool-separation anxiety? I might take some thin silver wire and a couple of crochet hooks to work on crocheted wire pieces, though they kill my fingers. Mainly though, I'm trying to think of this trip as an inspiration workshop. I plan to fill up my eyes, mind, and camera with colors, textures, and shapes that I wouldn't normally see. I'll pack materials for sketching and painting, and I'm taking my computer, so there will be writing going on as well. (Truth be told, I have non-blog-related writing to do this summer and I'm hoping to get a start on it while we're away.) Along with the obligatory beach-reading, napping, walking, sightseeing, etc., I should be so busy that I hardly notice the absence of my pliers and my torches and my hammers and my kiln and....

Of torches and lemonade

On the torch front, yesterday I went to Home Depot and bought a MAPP gas + oxygen torch, mostly because the tanks were in a handy package with the hose and torch and striker -- and it didn't cost too much. I've never heard of MAPP gas much less worked with it. The good news is that it's way hot enough for everything I wanted to do. Much silver has been reticulated this afternoon, to my great satisfaction. On the downside, it's a two-tank deal, which is a bit of a pain. Even more of a down-side, when the gas is burning without oxygen it produces this extremely sooty smoke. It stops once you add sufficient oxygen, but yech. All the spiderwebs on my kitchen ceiling, which had previously been invisible, are now black. I'm trying to think of it as the decorating equivalent of liver of sulfur.

Here are some other pieces I finished at Peters Valley. All the bracelets are sterling silver. The first two were run through a corrugator before being formed with a mold in a hydraulic press. Of the nine pieces I made at PV, I think these are my favorites. The corrugation makes the silver look like it's ruffled, especially in the white bracelet. The patina on the other one blew me away - I've never gotten that many colors from liver of sulfur. As far as I know, it was just LoS in water - but the teacher kept it pre-mixed in a brown glass jar and we brushed it on cold. I've read a bunch of books on jewelry-making in the past year and many of them had "recipes" for using LoS, but none of them recommended keeping it in liquid form. I haven't tried it since I got home, but if this is the kind of patina cold application gives, I'm for it.

For the third bracelet, I fused silver wire to the silver sheet and then ran it through the rolling mill to flatten the wire before molding. The patina on this one isn't as striking - I think it's because this wasn't polished to a high shine like the other one. Finally, this pendant is the last thing I finished at jewelry camp. The stone is a quartz doublet: two layers of quartz with a thin layer of rose gold between. This started out as a way to salvage a mistake. I had domed the pac-man shaped circle, then decided I didn't like it and hammered it flat, which erased most of the texture and made it slightly lopsided. I put it aside and made another one for the piece I was working on. Later I was looking at the pieces I had left over and started playing with some bits of wire and the lopsided pac-man. Something about the arrangement clicked and, with a little extra texturing using a chasing tool, I had a new pendant -- which I actually like better than the original piece I had been trying to make when I made the mistake.

So the lesson for today is "Carry a big torch and make lemonade." Or something like that.

Size does matter

This afternoon I gathered up the pieces for several soldering tasks and headed off to the kitchen to assemble my small soldering station. Got out the ceramic board, the charcoal brick, the crappy flux (source of many of my soldering woes - better stuff is on order), assorted tweezers and picks, and set up the pickle pot (a tiny slow cooker). Oh yeah, and I got out my little butane "torch". It worked fine for soldering ends onto chain and soldering bezel wire closed and even sweat soldering a tiny peach onto some textured silver I brought home with me. Then I tried to remove a part I had soldered onto some copper incorrectly and, because I used hard solder originally, it took ages. Only slightly daunted, I tried to ball the ends of some heavy wire... and tried and tried. Total failure. The ends of the wire look a little mushy, that's it. Finally, I pulled over a stool, sat down, and decided to finish texturing a piece of silver I'd started reticulating at PV. I held the torch on that sucker for a good three minutes and only managed to get the thinnest corner red-hot, which isn't hot enough. Feh.

You know what this means, right? I have to buy a bigger torch. Normally, I would celebrate the opportunity to buy more tools, but a torch presents some problems. My studio is on the third floor, but I solder in the kitchen (first floor) because I like the fact that there are fire-proof surfaces to work on and a killer vent over the stove to deal with fumes. That's where I run the kiln for PMC and enameling, too. I don't really like the idea of having a tank of acetylene or propane on the third floor in what is essentially a spare bedroom. (No bed anymore, just acres of jewelry-making supplies.) Rick Marshall said it's actually illegal to have acetylene in the house. So what do I do? The garage is a shell with no electricity, so that's not an option. The basement is damp, moldy, and stinky, so that's definitely not an option. Time for some research. In the meanwhile, it's little tiny bits of easy solder for me. Feh.

So you wanna go to jewelry camp....

Some folks have been asking how I found out about Peters Valley and if I know of any other jewelry camp opportunities. I read about PV on the ArtJewelry site. The link takes you straight to their page on schools and workshops. Here's a list of schools from Metalwerx, another very useful site:

• Brookfield Craft Center, located in southwestern Connecticut, strives to support creativity, fine design, and quality craftsmanship through a wide variety of educational and retail programs.
• Cambridge Center for Adult Education, Cambridge, Massachusetts
• DeCordova Museum School, Lincoln, Massachusetts
• Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Deer Isle, Maine
• Massachusetts College of Art, a public, free-standing college of art and design in Boston, Massachusetts
• New Approach School, provides visual-intensive, hands-on jewelry repair and fabrication training in Virginia Beach, Virginia
• Penland School of Crafts, a national center for craft education located in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina
• Peters Valley Craft Education Center, Layton, New Jersey, a nationally recognized education center for fine craft located in the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area
• Rhode Island School of Design, a private, co-educational college in Providence, Rhode Island
• Revere Academy of Jewelry Arts, offers short classes and diploma programs on jewelry making as well as jewelry books and videos by Alan Revere
• School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts
• Workshops at Wolf Designs, offers jewelry and metalsmithing workshops using macro-videotechnology, in Portland, Maine

Finally, you should call your local arts council or YMCA/YWCA - such places often give jewelry-making workshops in the summer, and even if they don't, they will often know of local resources. And don't forget to check your local bead store!

If anyone reading this knows of other places to find info on jewelry-making workshops, please add it in the comments. I'll try to set up a more visible location for the information.

Jewelry Camp, part two

For those of you who read yesterday's post to the end, yes, I saw a bear! It looked like a sort of pre-teen black bear, maybe 4 ft tall standing up. It was hanging out in the middle of the road to Thunder Mountain, where the workshop is located. The moment I saw it I realized why all the handouts they give you stress that (a) you shouldn't try to pet the young bears and (b) you shouldn't turn and run when you meet a bear. On seeing the bear my first two, almost simultaneous, thoughts were "So cute! Must pet!" and "Ohmigod, big mother bear - run!" It reminded me of the time I was on a whale-watching boat off Cape Cod. On the way out to the watching area the tour leader kept saying "When we see the whales, don't stand on the benches." Over and over. Then when we saw the first whale, everyone instantly jumped up on the benches, including me! It was like a reflex. Same with the bear. Fortunately, I was behind the wheel of my car and did neither. The bear scampered off and I drove on, feeling that I'd just had a rather surreal, maybe even mystical, experience. By the way, the picture is of some mosaic sculptures in the meadow outside the Fine Metals studio.

The students in the workshop were a pretty mixed group, though not so much in terms of gender. We were 11 women and one lone man. Professions were diverse: two professors, two graphic designers, a couple of students, a geologist, a sculptor, and some others I've forgotten. Most of us were middle-aged. All of us had enough disposable income to afford the tuition -- except the two students, who were there on the equivalent of work-study. (If you can't afford the tuition, this is a great deal.) I was about to say that I got to know a few of the other participants, but, oddly, that's not really true. Though I worked in the same rooms with them for five days and shared many meals with various combinations of them, our chit-chat was almost always about the workshop: what was working, what wasn't, what we liked, what we didn't like, how awful the accommodations were (after all, most of us were middle-aged, middle class ladies!), how annoyed we were with Rick, how much we adored his assistant, Aalia, etc. One of the participants was another Etsy seller, buttoncollective, who makes these fun storyboards for your button collections. (You don't have a button collection? Time to get started: stilettoheights, decayingindustries, belleandboo, and lots of other sellers on Etsy.)

By the time we'd finished with our hearts we'd learned how to saw (in spite of breaking saw blades every few minutes), how to use the rolling mill, how to make 3D forms using the hydraulic press, how to solder (sort of), and how to use the drill press. And we were only midway through day 2! I used some of my newfound skills on some brass that I'd brought with me and created this ring. The thing I like best about it is that the seam is soldered almost invisibly - proof that I've been bitten by the metalsmithing bug. It's no accident that it looks vaguely like Beth Piver's work - I own one of her rings and love it.

Around this time Rick did a demo using a flexshaft machine. (Can't wait till mine arrives!) While demonstrating the use of a separating disk (aka cutoff wheel), he ran it over the back of a piece of copper a couple of times in an arc shape and then easily bent the copper into a beautiful complex curve. I loved it - that kind of simple yet complicated geometric form is right up my alley. So I immediately tried the same thing on a piece of much heavier copper that I had already patterned and cut out. After bending it, which wasn't easy because I hadn't really cut deeply enough in some places, I ran a line of solder down the inside of the bend to support it. Then I drilled two angled holes and inserted a piece of very narrow sterling silver tubing. Much later, after I felt my soldering skills had improved enough, I added a jump ring to the end of the tubing. Eventually I'll put this on a silver chain and the tubing, which fits very snugly into the copper, will act as the clasp. (Thanks to Aalia for that suggestion.) This is the first piece I made at the workshop that I really like. I'm thinking of doing something similar using sterling silver for the body of the piece.

It was around the middle of the third day that I stopped flinching every time I had to light a torch. The torches in the soldering room were real ones, not the little butane-fueled creme brulee torch I have at home, which is basically an over-sized lighter. The flame on these babies was, at its smallest, about four times the size of the largest flame my little guy can muster. Most of us spent the first day completely flummoxed by Rick's repeated instruction to heat the piece, not the solder! since the flame seemed so huge it totally engulfed everything. We also spent the first day or two jumping like scared rabbits every time anyone lit a torch: hissss + loud pop + flame = flight response. Last night I realized I hadn't played with fire and hot metal for 36 hours and I missed it: missed the smell of burning flux, the over-heated, poorly lit soldering room, the hiss of the hydraulic press. But the things I miss most are having the time and mental space to focus intently on learning something new, the highly structured schedule within which our creativity was allowed (almost) free reign, and the experience of being pushed out of my comfort zone. How can I recreate that experience back home, with all the pressures and distractions of everyday life? Sadly, it's not just about buying a lot of new equipment -- it's about finding the discipline to focus and to push myself without the support of an externally imposed schedule and set of assignments. But that's what it's always been about, isn't it?

More to come. Here's a preview of some of the other work I did at jewelry camp.