… And I have purchased some presents for myself!

From the lovely Oblivious Designs at Etsy I have purchased the keyring photographed, as discovered via Oblivious Designs blog, as discovered via Brandy’s great and gorgeous Indie Obsession blog.

For some reason I’ve been living without an interesting keyring for years and it’s time it stopped! I’m looking forward to its arrival - the fabric is really lovely. Thanks for your help with the purchase, Brandy!

A rather more substantial present to myself - in terms of price at least - is the Nikon D50 digital SLR camera. I felt a little bit sick spending so much money in a single purchase. But, to be honest, I could easily spend that much on shoes alone in the space of a year and I’m just going to have to deal with only having 30 odd pairs of shoes for a while. Oh the horror!!

I’m very hopeful that the camera will help enormously on the business front - selling jewellery online particularly requires crisp, clear photographs and for a long time I’ve been limping along with a camera which is brilliant for landscape and people snapshots, but really not cutting it for close ups of jewellery. I’d like people to be able to see what they’re buying much more clearly than they can now - and with any luck in a few days this will be the case. I can see a long day of photography ahead of me tomorrow if it’s a sunny day.

Jewellers & Metalsmiths Group website

In other news, I’ve also overnight built a new website for the Jewellers and Metalsmiths Group of Australia - NSW (JMGA-NSW). It’s a very basic site to help us provide information to members and others now that the organisation no longer runs the sadly now defunct Pyrmont Studios and our Pyrmont Studios website is very much out of date.

If you’re a contemporary jeweller or metalsmith in NSW I strongly suggested you become a member - it will be good for your health! And that of contemporary jewellery and metal!

Next week (4 September) is the organisation’s AGM at the Powerhouse Museum. At this point I’m expecting to be continuing on as Newsletter Editor, a Committee position, for the next 12 months. But who knows what might happen!

My dear friend James went off travelling the world (again!) and after trekking through south-east Asia, India, Pakistan and Iran he landed in Istanbul. He fell head over heels in love with the city and has set up home there for the foreseeable future. I’d always wanted to visit the city and James being there seemed like a great excuse to do so, given that I was on the way to London anyway.

I found the city very intriguing and took a lot away in terms of thoughts about art and design - particularly relating to use of dense pattern and colour. I also developed a bit of an obsession with windows in the city and took many photos of them.

The outcome of this is that I’ve started work on a holloware object reflecting my Istanbul-related inspirations which I hope will form part of an exhibition called Expeditions which will open in October and is being run by my metal supplier, A&E Metals. To help motivate me with my work, I’ll tell you a bit about it.

The piece will be a small non-functional box which I plan to be sealed closed. Each panel of the box will have a small window cut out of it, based on the many photographs I took of windows in Istanbul. The interior of the cube will be etched with dense Turkish patterns which I plan to enamel in bright colours. The exterior will be plain silver, probably with a muted finish.

The idea will be that the windows allow light in so that you can see aspects of the highly decorative interior, but it will be difficult to see it all, reflecting the way I felt about Istanbul as being a fairly mysterious and partly impenetrable place.

At this stage I’ve done the etching of the patterns and they look good. But other than that the box is all in pieces and there is a lot of work to be done! I hope to make a start on it this weekend and will share my progress as I work.

I’ve added a couple of small pieces to my Etsy shop today - two pairs of earrings, one with a mother of pearl lozenge and another with bright pink adventurine beads - both with a long and simple sterling silver hook.

Plus I’ve been back through all of the items in my shop and have added some more detailed information - including sizes of pieces (forgot that the first time around!).

There’s still quite a lot of pieces to add, but I’m doing so slowly. Keep your eyes peeled!

I think I’ve also made an executive decision (being my own executive and all) to get a proper SLR camera - most likely the Nikon D50 which should suit my needs. I’ve now got myself a proper light tent for photographing my work which has helped such a lot, but my little digital camera is never going to do my work justice - it’s wonderful for snapshots, but not great at close up, detailed images. Can I afford it? Well no … but I’m very hopeful a proper digital SLR will in time prove be a good investment.

I’ve also made my first Etsy purchase! It’s very much handmade … but it’s also software rather than an object. Check out Serena’s Etsy spreadsheets. I can see they’re going to save me a lot of time in terms of keeping track of things. Thanks Serena!

Since my last posting I’ve added some more links to this page and have joined the Etsy bloggers webring.

And I’ve made another jewellery sale on Etsy as well - thanks anomia! Two in my first week is a great start.

Tonight I’ve also made contact with Little Miss Meshell, a fellow new Etsy-er and the writer of a great blog. And she’s an Australian maker as well! To the left is an example of Meshell’s work as seen on Etsy.com - pincushions were never meant to be so lovely!

I’ve also encountered a great shopping list and recommendations site in my travels today. I’ve come across a few of them, but this one has a lovely web 2.0 interface and I think has a lot of potential - take a look at www.thisnext.com. Here is an example of one of my own pieces that I’ve posted on ThisNext as a recommendation.

Of course all of this web-related work has most certainly kept me away from my bench and I am keen to get back there soon! There’s still those pieces of silver laying there which are in dire need of attention.

I’ve had a very busy week or two setting up my new Etsy shop to directly sell some of my handmade jewellery, as well as finishing off a re-build of www.simonewalsh.com, a website that had been in ‘one day’ mode for longer than I care to remember!

The website probably looks not much different to most of you who visited before, but it has actually been entirely rebuilt to be standards compliant with a CSS layout and the content has been substantially updated. There’s also a new section to showcase some of my web and graphic design work as well.

Because I clearly have a lot of spare time (ha!), I’ve also decided to complement this work by building this blog for myself as well. The blog, Make Me, will be where I keep people informed of what I’m working on, thinking about and creating. It will be a place where I can generally ramble on about things should I feel the urge!

So, to give a quick rundown of what I’m working on:

art stuff:

On my bench are a few pieces of silver which are the beginnings of an art object I’m making for an exhibition entitled Expeditions which opens later this year. The piece will be a small non-functional box which relates to a visit I made to Istanbul earlier this year. I’ll write more about it as work progresses.

I also need to start thinking seriously about another exhibition which will be held in November called Takeaway. This show is for members of JMGA-NSW with the idea being that buyers will take their purchases away from the gallery in a takeaway box - in the empty space will sit a photograph of the piece. I have some ideas for what I’m going to do and will also write more about this later.

jewellery:

It might still be August, but I’m already gearing up for Christmas in terms of saleable jewellery. I’m slowly adding to my Etsy shop as well as catching up with demands from retail outlets. I also have a number of ideas for new pieces which I just need to find some time to actually get started on! I’ve recently made a large batch of findings and have also purchased a rather chunky amount of silver, so time is all I need.

web design:

This is what seems to eat up most of my life just now. I’m working closely with a programmer to build a whole new website for St James Ethics Centre. It really is being built from the ground up (fortunately with the exception of most of the content) and is an enormous amount of work, having taken up a large chunk of this year already and seeing me work up to 80 hours a week on it. Again, I’ll write more about how that pans out.

other stuff:

There’s always a lot of other stuff happening!

For example, I’ve just completed yet another issue of Filings, the newsletter for JMGA-NSW (Jewellers & Metalsmiths Group of Australia - NSW) of which I am the Editor (a voluntary Committee position) and there’s the AGM coming up in just over a week. I’m also just about to start work on building an interim website for the same organisation to replace it’s currently very out of date one, both in terms of content and code.

I’m also fairly seriously considering another year of University next year - in the Visual Arts arena, of course. I will need to research and write out a proposal by the end of October. Eeek!

…

And that’s about it for my first blog posting. Keep your eyes peeled for more!