Looking Back. . . and Looking Forward - Part II

My last blog post was a bit maudlin. I was concerned about my sales for 2009 and I was trying to decide where to go from here. You may recall I wondered whether to focus more on PMC or on beading.

Since that blog post, I have made my decision and several things have happened to encourage me in that decision. I taught my first class in PMC, which I believe was a success. It was small, but I was able to give the students a lot of information and gave them a chance to make several things from PMC. In addition, in the past week I have had three sales from my Etsy shop, one of which is my first overseas sale! While not a lot by many standards, this is very encouraging to me, especially since all those sales were of PMC pieces.

It's probably obvious by now what my decision was: I will be focusing the most on metal clay adventures and beading will be done to support that. The first thing I decided to do was re-work my studio a bit. My work table was getting out of hand and I have re-organized it so the essentials for working with PMC and metals are within reach and beads and other things have been put on shelves elsewhere in my studio so my worktable isn't quite as crowded. My before (left) and after pictures are below.



So what's next? Well, I have a few PMC pieces in the works. Some have been made and fired but not yet made into jewelry. Others are waiting to be fired.

And something very exciting for me will be some new experiments. I have been wanting to try copper clay for a while now and have finally decided to take the leap. There are two different types/brands: COPPRClay and Art Clay Copper. Each have different instructions for firing and I decided to buy a bit of both and see which I prefer to work with. Look for my results in my next blog post!