Monday, March 18, 2024

Seeing Asemic Patterns, Some St. Patrick's Day Observations, and an Oops

Happy day after St. Patrick's and day before the spring equinox! For many of the vegetables and flowers that gardeners like to start indoors here in Minnesota, now is the time to plant those seeds. Maybe that is the reason I tend to associate St. Patrick's Day with green growing things.

I have often started seeds of Dutch white clover indoors at the end of January in order to grow my own seasonal houseplant by March 17, since the plants sold in stores as "shamrocks" are really South American oxalis. It's one of my little pet peeves about how the day is marked, which I have written about in this 2017 blog post.

The other thing that bugs me a little — but just a little — is how the emblematic greenery is often depicted as a four-leaf clover, when the whole reason for its association with the good saint is the folklore claiming that he used the plant to teach his followers about the Holy Trinity. Never mind that there's no evidence whatsoever that he ever did that, it's just that it's so missing the point about shamrocks and St. Patrick's Day.

Patrick is the subject of a lot of historical misinformation, including in his own telling of his story, says historian Roy Flechner in his 2019 book, Saint Patrick Retold. Flechner argues that Patrick was never captured and enslaved, that he made up that story as a cover for his flight from inherited onerous duties as an imperial officer in Roman Britain. You can read a good overview and summary of the book on the publisher's page here, and an excellent review in the Irish Times here.

As to Patrick's own version of his story, known as The Confession of St. Patrick, you can read it for yourself on this website, and view facsimiles of the earliest versions known. The elegant Latin text makes me think of asemic writing: Both aesthetically pleasing and meaningless (to me). 


Seeing Asemic: Patterns Everywhere 
Image from Post, a blog of the Museum of
Modern Art

Because the Latin text has no meaning for me, my attention is drawn to its decorative form, the patterns created by its marks. While all asemic writing mimics the form of regular writing, some artists copy the form of printed works almost exactly.

For example, Argentinian artist Mirtha Dermisache (1942–2012) created "asemic versions of the daily newspaper, maintaining the layout, but substituting illegible characters," hence highlighting the patterns formed by the headlines and columns of text, wrote Peter Schwenger in the book I mentioned last week, Asemic: The Art of Writing. 






With that sort of thing on my mind this past week, I began noticing the text-like patterns in seemingly random things, like my scarf . . . 








and the seeds in a bell pepper . . . 









and my half empty latte.







My heightened awareness of patterns that resemble asemic writing got me to thinking about the tendency we humans have to not only see patterns, but to imbue them with meaning, as if they contain some message from the divine. You know, like, "Today I saw X and I believe that god/the universe was telling me something." An article I read some while back on the web journal Psyche nicely describes this phenomena, called apophenia.  


From Leiden Medievalist Blog

About that Latin Text

There is something about Latin text and other hand-lettered archaic languages that carries an air of mystery, don't you think? It evokes a magic spell or incantation, mainly because we don't understand it, and because that ancient script looks so fanciful and mysterious, especially if you've read any historical fiction set in medieval times. 

Both because I have read those kinds of historical mysteries, and because of all that asemic writing stuff echoing in my head, I pounced when I spotted a review of the book Textual Magic: Charms and Written Amulets in Medieval England, by Katherine Storm Hindley (Chicago, 2023). 



By "pounced" I mean I read the review, not that I bought the book. I'll wait for it to come out in paperback, or become available from my library. But the review by Tom Johnson in the London Review of Books provides an excellent overview. 

In medieval Christian Europe, the written word was highly venerated, from the opening lines in the Gospel of John to amulets made of text written on parchment believed to have the power to protect and otherwise benefit the one who holds it. Johnson describes these as a kind of "charm magic," that is, "words and rituals that invoked supernatural power, whether divine or arcane, in order to gain protection, medicine and secret knowledge." 

The kinds of things people wrote down included "holy verses, sacred names, symbols, runes and pure nonsense." If that last part doesn't describe asemic writing, I don't know what does.

Apparently, the more undecipherable the writing, the better its magical properties; so while Latin was the primary language of these charms, they also incorporated lots of  "Greek letters, Hebrew, runes and all kinds of luxuriant gibberish," plus "sham alphabets, pseudo-writing and non-signifying marks." 

Fittingly, the author traces the decline in use of these written charms to the rise in literacy. "As more people came to be able to read, . . . it became harder to maintain the idea that writing contained occult power." 

Now I am thinking about a new variation in my 100-Day Project: asemic amulets.



Department of Oops: Pi Day on The Useful Calendar Planner 

My husband discovered a mistake in my planner this week. He wondered why I had put the pi symbol on March 12. I quickly checked all versions of the calendar, and the planner is the only one with the misplaced pi, which would have happened after I copied the calendar grid from the desk version and placed it into the planner document, then dragged it across because the planner calendar spans a two-page spread. I didn't notice that pi was left behind in that motion. I would actually be a little surprised if I managed to make all versions of my calendars without any mistakes! I tell myself that it will please the people who enjoy catching other people's mistakes.

It also reminded me of a custom I was told about when I took a quilting class many years ago, that of the "humility block." Traditionally, quilters were supposed to deliberately include one block in their quilts that contained a mistake, because only God is perfect. I thought at the time that it was a convenient "rule," and  I was certain I wouldn't need to do it deliberately.

But apparently the "tradition" is nonsense, as related in this excellent blog called Willy Wonky Quilts. 



On My Work Table

It's all quiet in Sharon's Compendium-Etsyland now, but the week started out with a mini flurry of orders over the weekend. Well, three orders, actually, but two of them had multiple items that I needed to make, so that kept me busy through Thursday. 

While I welcome the business, I really do, I'm looking forward to getting back to playing at my asemic projects, both doing some painting and drawing of the patterns I photographed last week, and playing around with those amulet charms. I also have a meeting with my art exchange group on Friday, and I've been pondering how I might incorporate some asemic writing into my coffee-and-tea themed Artist Trading Cards for that. 

I'll show you what I come up with next week, as well as whatever asemic marks I manage to put on paper.





Monday, March 11, 2024

Flowers in the House, Asemic Musings, and Being Particular About Notebooks


I want to start this week with flowers in the house. 

Years ago, a florist and blogger who went by the moniker Flower Jane would initiate a monthly blog chain called Flowers in the House, in which she posted several photos of flower arrangements she had placed in different rooms, and invited other bloggers to share links to their own pages showing their flowers. Even though her arrangements were quite impressive, she never made anyone feel that their simple bouquets were any less delightful, and would visit and comment on every blog that participated. As an occasional participant, I always enjoyed visiting blogs from all over, admiring their flowers, commenting and receiving comments, and reveling in the conviviality of the whole exchange.  

I don't know what became of Flower Jane, she hasn't posted on her blog since 2016. I know people get tired of blogging, or burnt out, and it really has become kind of a quaint way of sharing yourself online anymore. Everyone is on Instagram, it seems, or TikTok or whatever. I have an Instagram account, and Facebook, and Pinterest, and I find them all both inspirational and a little overwhelming.

If you care to share your own photos on Instagram or wherever about the flowers in your house this week, please comment and share a link. I'd love to see them.

My 100-Day Project this Week: More Asemic Doodles, with a Brush

Last week I mentioned a book, Asemic: The Art of Writing, by Peter Schwenger, which I said I would be picking up from the library, and indeed I did. I've only just begun reading it, but I did find the answer to my burning question: Where did this term come from?

It seems that the word was borrowed into English in the 1980s from French linguistics, in which it described an unintended absence of meaning or sense, such as occurs with a typo. The word is derived from the Greek root "sema," meaning "sign," which gives us words like semaphore, semiotics and semantics. "Sign" here relates to "signify"— to convey meaning. Adding the prefix "a-" changes it to not signifying anything, not having meaning.

Schwenger attributes this coinage to two men he describes as visual poets, Tim Gaze and Jim Leftwich. (Here's an interesting interview with Gaze from 2009).

In my continued exploration of this art form, I decided to try working with a brush, in particular one called a liner brush, which is very thin and long and used for lettering as well as other things where a fine line is desired. I found a nice little six minute tutorial by Andy Jones that proved to be a fine introduction. (I used my watercolor paint instead of the acrylic paint thinned with water that he is promoting.) I combined practice and note-taking as I watched, and after. So I guess some of this is asemic, and some of it is semic.

I realized that what I'm looking to develop are the same skills used in hand lettering and calligraphy, and that I have a couple of nice resources about that already. One is a book that was my grandfather's (I know because he wrote his name in it). Published in 1922, Principles and Practice of Show-Card Writing is filled with elegant examples from that era.

The other is a relatively more recent paperback, the Speedball Textbook for Pen and Brush Lettering. Mine is the 20th edition, published in 1972. I may have bought it back then, or someone might have given it to me, I really don't remember, but I've hung on to it all these years and it was kind of fun taking another look at it this week. The current edition is the 25th.

Probably the most valuable thing I've learned from all of these is that you have to practice using a brush just as you would practice a musical instrument. The various brush strokes — asemic marks, really — are like playing scales and etudes. I don't know why I haven't thought about it that way before, but it's kind of freeing and revelatory to me. Who knew?

On My Work Table

I like notebooks, but not just any notebooks. I like them to be small and easy to take places, have attractive covers, be reasonably sturdy, have a pocket in the back, with gridded lines that are pretty faint so they offer guidelines but don't dominate, and that are sewn rather than stapled.

You can probably see how this would lead me to making my own notebooks, and being an artist with an Etsy shop, how I might decide to make a few extras and offer them for sale, in case there are others who like those same things and don't mind paying for handmade. I actually only make two of a given design in order to create a listing on Etsy, then offer them as made-to-order items, so I don't invest a lot of time and resources in multiples of something that I don't know if anybody will buy. If nobody does buy them, I'll use them eventually. Having said that, I will note that I have sold a few of these, from time to time.

Shown here are two of my mini notebooks (about 2.75" wide by 4.25" high), I also have some that are half letter size (5.5" wide by 8.5" high), which have numbered pages and a different style of pocket.

I make the notebooks and most of my zines with a pamphlet stitch, which is quite easy and gives a satisfying result, in my opinion. I then run a glue stick up and down the spine and smooth it with my finger to reinforce the stitching. 

In case you're interested, here's where to find the notebooks and zines in my Etsy shop.

Thanks for looking. Show me your flowers! (If you want to.)


Monday, March 4, 2024

Playing at asemic writing, and a little detour


Asemic writing is mark-making that looks like writing but isn't. The practice as an art form has been around for centuries, but the term seems to be a more recent coinage, or else it's just obscure. When I searched for it in a couple of dictionaries, they either asked me if I meant "anemic" or said it isn't in the dictionary. But it does have a Wikipedia page, and a few books have been written about it, including Asemic: The Art of Writing, by Peter Schwenger, published in 2019 by the Univ. of Minnesota Press, which I'll be fetching from my local public library this week.

I first encountered the term on Pinterest a year or so ago, when some mixed media art that incorporated the technique came across my feed (sandwiched among cute animal videos—I have got to stop clicking on those), and it's been on my radar ever since. More recently, I stumbled upon a Facebook group, Asemic Writing: The New Post-Literate, which has fed me a steady stream of inspiration and examples. 

So I thought, what better occasion to try my hand at this intriguing art form than as part of my 100-Day Project? I decided to once again use a journal page for this week's work: I would fill the page with a single composition, rather than a collection of mini works, and I would limit how much I would work on it each day to ensure that there would be something more to add the next day. I started by writing my start date in the upper left corner of the page. I then decided that I wanted to include some collage elements to make the page more interesting.

Two things I noticed early on with this one. First, it actually took some restraint to not try to "finish" it each time I sat down to work on it, which allowed ideas to percolate in my mind and be influenced by works that people were posting in the asemic artists' Facebook group. 

The second thing I noticed was how, as I was making my various squiggles, I recalled doing something like this as a kid, before I learned cursive, when wavy lines filled with loops looked just like handwriting to me. It gave me a warm feeling of nostalgia as I remembered spending hours with my childhood friend and frequent drawing companion, Vicki, doodling and drawing together with no particular purpose in mind.


I had a couple of days midweek (days 4 & 5) when I didn't work on it because of other demands on my time and attention. Interestingly, the project emails that I got this week were about being flexible with yourself regarding what it means to "show up" for your project each day. And, indeed, I did feel that I was still working on it because it was on my mind and I was pondering what I wanted to do next.


On Saturday morning,  I took what I thought was my final photo of this week's work, and noted the date at the top right of the page. I wasn't sure whether it was actually done, but I was pretty sure I was done with it. Except I had a slightly nagging feeling that it still needed just a little something more. So instead of noting that it was finished, I just noted that I had stopped.

When I showed it to my husband, who is a writer, editor, and an avid reader, he insisted on looking for words among the squiggles. He pointed them out to me, saying this part looks like the word "anything" (later, he said it looked like "everything"). Then he pointed to the word "Zen," which was a little more plausible (see it in the upper right, by the blue dot?). Perhaps the whole thing is some sort of koan. 

I still wanted to find that "something more" to complete the work, so I picked up a small vintage paperback about photography to look for an image, and there was a black-and-white photo of a man looking at a script, which made me think of the way my husband looked at my squiggles, trying to make sense of something indecipherable. It felt like just the finishing touch it needed, to put that quandary right in the middle of all the asemic nonsense.


I like having this one in my sketch journal, because it feels and looks like a kind of sampler to me. I plan to continue working with asemic writing and collage, but move on to a different substrate now and quit using the journal (probably white watercolor paper). Enough with the brown pages! Plus I want to reclaim it as my visual/junk journal/scrapbook again, in which I paste various things relevant to recent activities, or put stuff in makeshift pockets, with (legible) commentary and observations. I'll show you some of the pages in a separate blog post another day.

A Little Detour, or Other Mini Projects

I was clearing some of the clutter on my desk this week when I came across a clipping I had saved earlier in the year. It was from my local newspaper, reprinted from the Washington Post, titled "Seven easy steps to a more fit 2024," by Gretchen Reynolds.

Keeping the clipping on my desk only to get buried by other detritus didn't seem to be doing me any good, so I thought I would paste each of the tips on separate cards, repurposing some playing cards from incomplete decks in the process. Because if they are in the form of a set of cards, with some splashes of color and a picture, then I'm sure to actually get out there and do the things. Right?


Meanwhile on Etsy . . .

I added my newest zine to my Etsy shop, titled Green: A zine about a color. You can read more about it and see pictures on the listing page. I'll be mailing that and the also-recent Zine of Days and Dragons to two of my returning customers today (Monday), with a couple of other things. I always include a few stickers with orders, and some other little freebies just for fun. Packing up orders and shipping them off is one of my favorite parts of having an Etsy shop, and I'm quite content with my slow pace of business, which allows me to take my time preparing orders—and to do other things, like the 100-Day Project. I used to try harder to promote my shop and follow Etsy's tips and suggestions, but it wasn't any fun and I never really had my heart in it, so I stopped doing it. 


That's all for now. I'll be back next Monday.



Monday, February 26, 2024

My First Week of the 100-Day Project, and a New Zine

 


I started the 100-Day Project on an impulse last week, having learned about it just one day before its official start date of February 18, so I didn't spend any time planning a project or even deciding what type of project I would do. Because I had just done a couple of mini collages in my scrap journal, I figured I would keep doing that, with the idea that I would go about it as a kind of study, experimenting with materials and composition, intending to incorporate some drawing and other mark-making into my collages. Which I did, more or less.

But I was also in the midst of finishing up a zine that I had started about a year ago and then set aside because of timeliness. The zine is about the color green (possibly the first in a scattered series of color-themed zines), and when I started it last year, March was upon me already and I could see that it wasn't going to be done in time to peg it to St. Patrick's Day, so I quit working on it with the intention of picking it up again this year. 

About two or three weeks ago, I had a vague recollection about it and was pleased to discover that I had already done several illustrations and written a fair amount of text. I got right back into it and was enjoying some momentum when I stumbled upon the 100-Day Project. So after a couple of days of mini collages, I decided that finishing something I had started before was exactly the sort of thing that this project was made for.

Well, now the Green zine is done and I asked myself, what next? I have other unfinished zines and was considering which one to take up this week, and then remembered that I really needed to focus on a very mundane but essential task: gathering all the relevant financial information for our tax preparer. Unfortunately, that includes a lot of catching up on my bookkeeping. The longer I let that go the more the stress builds up and becomes a real creativity killer. As a kindness to myself, I need to devote some time to it each day before it comes down to crunch time, so that it doesn't become the only thing I can let myself do for however long it takes.

But I feel that such dull necessary tasks can fit nicely with a daily art practice. In fact, it's probably the best way to get such things done.

The organizers of the 100-Day Project encourage participants to spend a small amount of time each day on their projects, like 10 minutes or so, in order to make it sustainable. If it takes too much time, a person is more likely to drop out. So this week, I am going to heed that advice and work on something for just a little bit of time each day, and not try to complete a thing daily. In fact, I am intentionally going to take the whole week to work on one mixed-media composition, filling a page in the same scrap journal where I made my mini collages (four on a page, each completed in one sitting). Or longer, if needed. There is no deadline, after all, there is only doing.

Since I still like the idea of blending collage-making with drawing, and since I have been intrigued by a type of aesthetic scribbling called asemic writing (it looks like writing, but it isn't), I am going to use this week to explore combining that with collage and just see where it leads. I began it this afternoon. Next week, I'll show you how it's coming along.




Sunday, February 18, 2024

Having a go at the 100-Day Project

 I have seen various artists I follow on Instagram and elsewhere reference the 100-Day Project as a kind of daily art-making practice and have wondered about what that is, exactly, and whether it's something I might like to do. So, yesterday, when I saw that it starts today, Feb. 18, 2024, I looked over the project's website to get a better understanding of what it's about. I really liked how loose and open-ended it is and decided to just jump in. 


For example, I expected the daily prompts to be themes and motifs to include in your artwork, but they're more like messages of inspiration, and guidelines for developing a daily creative practice. In fact, the whole idea is to work on any project you want, not just visual art, as I had originally assumed. And it doesn't matter when you start or stop or whether you actually do it for 100 days. The timeline is just the duration for their newsletter about the project. There's a free version with limited information, and a paid version with more, plus access to the archives. I opted to pay $50 for a one-year subscription because I realize that a lot of time and effort and expense goes into what they're doing, so as long as I can afford it, why not support the project with my dough.

As it happens, I had just been playing around with my scraps left over from making ATCs (artist trading cards) for a group that I exchange them with, and had decided to make mini collages from these tiny bits and scraps in a sketchbook that I had turned into a scrap-collage journal. I penciled a couple of 2-and-a-half-inch squares and decided I would fill in just one of them each day until I used them up or got tired of it or for however long I felt like doing it. It's like I had a two-day head start on the project already.


I usually have a small pile of scraps after making ATCs for our monthly exchanges, which is what led me to start the scrap-collage journal in the first place. I like the bits and pieces of leftover papers and didn't want to just discard them (plus there's figuring out what's recyclable and what isn't), and I really liked the idea of pasting them into a journal for my own amusement with no other end purpose in mind. I've also used junk mail and other found ephemera to fill a page, with lots of text jotted on and around the things, because I'm really a words-and-images person, I just am. Perhaps you noticed?

The 100-Day Project does not have to have an end purpose in mind either, unless you want it to. They offer some suggestions for thinking through your intentions. Why do I want to do this?

• To nurture a daily art practice;

• To improve my skills, especially in combining collage, drawing, and painting. I want to nudge myself a little to combine these techniques more, rather than treating them as separate things, as I have tended to do;

• To play! Not just making art when I need an illustration for something else I'm working on (like a zine or the Useful Calendar), but with no end purpose in mind.

I had also originally included: To get in the habit of sharing my art on Instagram and Facebook more regularly, but then was immediately confronted with my own ambivalence about social media. I prefer sharing things by way of this blog because it feels more expansive and leisurely, and because of what I said already: I'm more of a words-and-images person.

So while I do intend to work on my 100-Day Project as consistently as I can, I plan to only "share" about it occasionally, when I feel like it. To begin with, I'm doing the 2-1/2-inch collages, like those I made on the two days prior to the start of this project, but I'm sure I'll want to change it up as I go along. 

Here's day one, showing one in-progress photo and one of the completed composition.




Wednesday, November 22, 2023

Etsy Musings


I opened my Etsy shop in 2009 after learning about it from a friend. I know it's an understatement to say that it's changed a lot since then — and each change has elicited a robust round of complaints from many Etsy sellers and some shoppers. A lot of other selling platforms have emerged over the years, and many erstwhile Etsy sellers have jumped ship for these alternatives. While I've looked into each of these as I've learned about them, I've so far not been persuaded to seriously consider moving my business elsewhere.

After investigating a recent tip from a friend about yet another marketplace for makers, calling itself a "better online handmade marketplace" in a pointed reference to Etsy's failings in that regard (the handmade part, that is), I found myself remembering my early experiences with Etsy, and in the process reinforcing my decision to stay with this imperfect platform.

When I started out on Etsy, I had no idea how to promote my shop and it took maybe a year before I had my first sale. I gradually learned how to navigate the site and access the resources and guidance available, which still include tips on managing and marketing your shop, how to use keywords to help potential customers find your things, and ways to connect with other sellers. It felt like a real community of makers then, and there were many ways in which Etsy encouraged and facilitated connections between us. 

One of these was the forming of "teams" — interest groups of sellers who joined together to encourage, advise, and promote one another. One of the more creative and fun ways we could promote one another on the site was by making a virtual gallery wall of 16 items, called a "treasury," for which Etsy provided a user-friendly template. (Here's a blog post I wrote in 2011 about Etsy treasuries.)

A remnant of a treasury I made in 2014


Back then, Etsy had a common home page, so anyone who visited the website saw the same things, and one of those things was a featured treasury, which changed throughout the day (hourly, I think). In order for your treasury to have a chance at being featured on the home page, you had to include items from 16 different shops, and none of them could be your own. It was a common courtesy to return the favor if someone included your item in their treasury.

It gave everyone who participated a lot of exposure, and if your item was in a treasury that had been showcased on the home page, you could pretty much guess when it happened because you suddenly had a spike in views and maybe even sales. Even if you had something in a treasury that never made it to the home page, you still got a boost in exposure. My very first sale on Etsy happened after somebody had featured something of mine in their treasury. 

Etsy also used to foster a more direct relationship between its own personnel and the sellers. For example, at the end of the year they had "home for the holidays" events where employees who traveled from Etsy headquarters in Brooklyn, NY, to their home towns to visit family hosted in-person gatherings that were like intimate town halls.

 They even gave away some very lovely and practical schwag at these meetings, such as a spiral-bound planner-calendar for 2013, which I not only used for a couple of years to keep track of my shop's progress, but which inspired me to design my own version when I couldn't find another like it. 

The 2013 Etsy planner (my shop was called Arty Didact then), and my own 2024 one.

Lest you think that everything was light and lovely in those days, or that I was blind to the dark side of Etsy, I assure you that I was well aware of the many issues and conflicts. People gamed the platform from the get-go, disregarding the rules about what was permitted, much to the chagrin of many makers, who often got quite testy about somebody else's "handmade" thing being nothing of the sort. 

But I also knew of at least one person who was accused by another seller of passing off factory-made items as handmade, who then had to produce some kind of proof that he really made what he made, which became such a hassle that he gave up on Etsy altogether, saying it wasn't worth the bother. I learned about this and other complaints through a private Facebook group of Minnesota Etsy sellers. I recalled that person's experience recently when I read about how the "better" handmade marketplace would enforce their rules with the help of their sellers. 

Many people on Etsy could be quite nasty to others in a variety of other ways, too, with all the pettiness that social media and middle school playgrounds seem to bring out in some people. 

But my own experience was quite convivial and fun. Being part of a few teams that joined together to make treasuries that would catch the eye of those who chose what to feature on the homepage was kind of a game, and a thrill when it succeeded. And it definitely helped buyers discover your shop.

I don't recall when Etsy stopped the treasuries, but it went along with changing the user experience so there was no longer a common home page. Now we are all siloed in our own landing pages, with algorithms to show us more of whatever we've already indicated we are likely to buy. It was around that time that they also introduced onsite advertising, so a seller could pay to have their items boosted in search results. 

The treasury teams went extinct, and most of the connections I had made with other sellers faded away, although there are a few with whom I have maintained virtual friendships via Facebook. But for many sellers, Etsy became a much colder place.

Maybe it was bound to happen as the number of sellers grew by leaps and bounds and Etsy gave up all pretense of policing so many shops to ensure that the items they are selling were truly handmade (or vintage, or a craft supply). Ownership of the platform has changed hands, too, and it has grown more sophisticated in its use of algorithms, marketing strategies, and so on.

I call these cards "Little Reminders"


So Why Am I Still There?

Here's the thing, and why I continue to use Etsy despite all those changes and a significant decline in my sales since the halcyon days of treasuries. For me, it's still better than the alternatives, and over the years I have collected a nice cadre of repeat customers whom I genuinely like. It certainly helps that I sell ephemeral things — cards, bookplates, zines, and the Useful Calendar, which keeps people who like the way I make those things coming back for more. 

Many of these repeat customers send me chatty messages when they're about to buy another thing. One buys custom bookplates for each of her grandchildren, for the books that she gives them. I hear from her when she needs to replenish her supply (she must give those kids a lot of books!), and with cheerful announcements about the birth of another grandchild.

It's because of those customers that Etsy never became a cold place to me. But there are also plain practical reasons for staying with Etsy.

First, Etsy has so many sellers because Etsy has so many customers, and they have so many customers because they have so many sellers. When I am investigating another selling platform, one of the first things I will do is search for items like those I sell. I want to know if my items will fit in, and if the site offers enough of those types of things to attract customers.

That new handmade site had no calendars. Not one. Calendars are my biggest selling items at this time of year, followed by cards and bookplates.

Second, Etsy offers a lot of services that make selling on their site convenient: They collect and pay all applicable state sales taxes; I can buy USPS shipping labels through them for a lower cost than buying directly from the Post Office, and it's much more convenient; the listing platform is user friendly and allows for up to 12 photos per item; and my customers are already there.   

Finally, it's just plain easier to stay with what you know than learn to navigate something new. I would rather put my time and effort into my creative endeavors, making my customers happy, and my other interests than getting the hang of a new way of managing my online sales, creating new listings and uploading photos all over again, and doing the necessary marketing to get found in a different spot. 

Changing platforms would also mean either abandoning my most loyal customers or asking them to follow me to a new and unfamiliar site, one they may not have heard of before and don't know whether to trust. I just don't see that as providing a good experience for my customers — or myself. 

Just another zine available in my Etsy shop.






Friday, January 20, 2023

Making a Collaged Paper Rabbit Puppet

A group of friends and I get together once a month to exchange small handmade art tokens, usually artist trading cards (ATCs). We have a theme, or prompt, for each month, which anyone may use or not as suits them. We hadn't yet come up with our list of prompts for 2023 when we scheduled our January meeting, so we left it as "artist's choice," both regarding theme and form, so long as we keep to a small format similar to ATCs, which are 2.5" x 3.5". 

Our meeting this month is on the day before the Lunar New Year (January 22, 2023), so I wanted to make something related to Year of the Rabbit, and I decided to make a paper doll or puppet that could be placed on the end of a coffee stir stick (because I have a lot of those), thinking it could be displayed as an ornament of some sort. I'm envisioning pushing the stick into a houseplant, but I didn't want to constrain the others that I give them to, so I wanted the stick to be removable.

With that in mind, I did a few sketches of running/leaping rabbits, then traced over one of the sketches, tracing the parts separately, to make a set of templates. Since I used a rather flimsy translucent paper for tracing, I scanned the sheet of rabbit parts, reduced it slightly in size, and then printed it on heavy card stock so I could cut out the individual shapes and then trace around them onto decorative paper/light card stock and assemble them into colorful puppets. You could use a sheet of vellum instead, to trace the parts without needing to scan and print them after.

The most time-consuming and challenging part for me was selecting among my various decorative papers for colors and patterns that I thought go together. Once I made my selections, the cutting and assembling went pretty quickly and was rather fun.

I chose fairly plain parts of the deco papers for the heads and then drew the faces on. The yellow one at top is from an image of a sun face, and the proportions were just right to use that for my rabbit face, adding just a few marks to complete it. The torsos are also cut with a plain enough center so I could write "Year of the Rabbit 2023" on them. 

First I glued the heads to the torsos, then attached the ears, then put another piece at the back of the head to cover and secure the glued parts. After that, the legs are attached with tiny brads so they can be moved into different positions. 

To make a slot for the stick, I cut a small piece that fit between the legs on back, placed it over the tip of the stick and creased around it with my fingernails, then glued it to the back of the torso and clamped it while the glue set. I use Uhu glue sticks for this and a lot of other things.

These were rather time-consuming but a lot of fun to make. I don't always make something this elaborate for my art swapping group, but once in a while it's nice to try something new, which is one of the reasons I enjoy being a part of it. And I made enough of them to have one extra for myself.  





Monday, December 26, 2022

A few things I've learned about rabbits and hares

While working on the Useful Calendar, I try to learn as much as I can about the featured animal, which I choose based on the Chinese luni-solar calendar and zodiac. The Year of the Rabbit begins on Jan. 22, 2023, and so I have been immersed in many things rabbit for the last several months.

Naturally, I began by trying to find out what species of rabbits are native to China so I could choose a proper representative for the year. Instead, I learned that there are no rabbits native to China, only hares. That's why the leaping leporid* that graces January in my Year of the Rabbit calendar card is really a hare: Lepus sinensis, the Chinese hare, to be exact. (*Leporid means any rabbit or hare.)


Even though we casually use the words rabbit, hare, and bunny interchangeably, rabbits and hares are distinctly different animals—and bunny is just a nickname often used for rabbits. Both belong to the family Lagomorph, which also includes the pika, an adorable small mammal that is native both to China and North America, and resembles a rabbit in some ways, but has short rounded ears and other distinctions. I did not include any pikas in the 2023 Useful Calendar, but I do plan to include them in the upcoming 2023 Annual: The Rabbit Zine. (And, no, if you're wondering, the pika is not the model for the Pokemon character Pikachu, despite the name, which is apparently coincidental.)

The Chinese zodiac was developed more than 2,000 years ago, in the 5th century BCE, as a way for an illiterate population to keep track of days, months and years. there were definitely no actual rabbits in China at that time. All rabbits in China today are fairly recent descendants of the European rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus). 

The European rabbit is the species of all domesticated rabbits, whether for pets, food, fur, or talismans. I remember one time when I was a kid and brought home a lucky rabbit's foot that I had bought with my allowance, thinking it to be the coolest thing, and so soft! My mother eyed it with barely disguised horror at the grotesquery that my little relic really was, and my father said, "It wasn't very lucky for the rabbit, was it?" That certainly gave me something to think about.

In the wild, this is the rabbit species known for its burrowing habit, creating a network of underground tunnels that are extended over generations—a literal rabbit warren. Other species of rabbits, such as the cottontails native to the Americas, will dig shallow depressions for nests, called forms, but are not known for tunneling like the European rabbit.

Rabbits and hares are really fast runners and capable of zig-zagging as they run to evade capture by predators. Depending on which sources you check (and which species of hare), hares can run from 35 mph to 45 mph. Even the eastern cottontail rabbit, which is a lot smaller than a hare, can run 18 mph, and make hairpin turns while doing it. I remember my father describing how, when he was a boy, his dog would be chasing a rabbit at full speed, and suddenly the rabbit would change directions and the dog would wipe out trying to make the same turn. 

The main distinctions between rabbits and hares are that hares are generally bigger, lankier and have longer legs and ears than rabbits; baby hares are called leverets and are born fully furred, eyes open, and ready to run, whereas baby rabbits, called kits, are born naked and blind.  

Jackrabbits are really American hares, so-called because their long ears resemble those of a mule, or jackass. Belgian hares are really a breed of domesticated European rabbit developed to resemble a hare.

Now that the calendar is done and the holiday bustle largely behind me, I look forward to going through my notes, finishing the book about rabbits that I started to read, and returning to the websites and online articles I've bookmarked for "later," to write about the most interesting bits for my rabbit zine.






Thursday, September 15, 2022

A tiny Free Little Art Gallery inside my Little Free Library

 


I first heard of a free little art gallery as a place to exchange art locally when an artist in my area (South Minneapolis) installed a box on a post — the sort of thing that would usually be used as a Little Free Library — and called it a free little art gallery. She announced its arrival to our artist network, the League of Longfellow Artists (LoLa), and I remember paying it a visit and contributing some tiny art of my own. I don't remember if I took anything or, if so, what it was. This was nearly 10 years ago and I am relating this strictly from memory, which, as I'm sure you know, is never reliable. 

I have seen more things written about Free Little Art Galleries in the last couple of years; they seem to have become rather a big deal after the pandemic shut-downs began. It appears that the credit for starting the whole movement goes to Doug Millison and a group of artists in the San Francisco Bay area in 2013, to foster community and connections through the exchange of art. "By making and sharing free art, we seek to liberate our thinking and open more fully to the world and to each other," they write in the mission statement on their blog (linked above).

I have had this idea in the back of my mind ever since we installed our Little Free Library last year, but I didn't want to give up on the book exchange that is its original purpose, so I envisioned it as a subsection integrated amongst the books. Finally, a few weeks ago, I took some measurements and designed a kind of display box that wouldn't displace too many books but could still hold very small artworks for exchange, such as ATCs (artist trading cards)

My art exchange display box in progress; it measures 7 inches long by 4.5 inches wide and deep.


The finished tiny gallery box installed in my Little Free Library

The box can be taken out to examine the contents.

I wanted to get it in place in time for the LoLa Art Crawl, which happens this weekend, Sept. 17–18 (2022), and I managed to do that just this morning (Sept. 15). It will remain in place hereafter, of course, and I look forward to seeing what happens with it. I even made a tiny zine about it — to give away, of course, and which you will find in my tiny Free Little Art Gallery. 



Tiny original art in the form of drawings, collages, paint-by-numbers, misc. paper crafting, etc., as well as literary art like short poems and stories are all welcome as long as they are no bigger than 3x5 inches and appropriate for all ages. Art by kids especially welcome and encouraged. 

You can find it, and me this weekend, at site no. 4 of the LoLa Art Crawl. I will have notecards featuring my artwork and several zines besides this free one (although some are this tiny), plus a few handmade journals and lidded boxes. 

To find a Free Little Art Gallery near you, try Find a Free Little Art Gallery.