Finders Keepers preparation

A big Wintry hello to you! Here, the days have been filled with woodsmoke and wearing slippers, and my belly filled with macaroni cheese and chicken pot pie. It's the only little sliver of the year when sitting in the sun in Brisbane is an attractive proposition. It's also (gasp) only three weeks until the next Finders Keepers market, and I'll be there!

I've been attempting a slow and sustained approach to my Finders Keepers preparation this time, as it can get a bit frenetic, and I'd like to avoid that. Plus, because my things often involve quite a lot of fiddly and repetitive finger-work, I'm trying to prevent my hands turning into cramped immobile claws. So far, things are going well, and I'm amassing a promising-looking pile of wares. It gives me a very nice warm feeling, that growing pile of wares!

So, I thought I'd share some of my new things that will be making an appearance that weekend. The delivery of a batch of new postcards always gives me a thrill, and is a reassuring thing to have crossed off the to-do list.

These cards, printed on uncoated recycled cardstock, feature my latest enormous cast plaster gumnut wall hanging, which I have listed in my Etsy store as a 'made to order' item. I have moulds of only eight of these little spotted gum nuts, so this wall hanging involves lots of rounds of casting and hand-finishing. I'm planning for it to take pride of place at my Finders Keepers stall, but in the meantime it's up in our bedroom!

Oliver Kitten seems to become very interested as soon as I try and take a photo of anything around here. He put himself right in the middle of the bed with no prompting from me!

I've become quite focused on gumnuts lately, probably because the beautiful ornamental gums around here have just finished flowering. The lorikeets and parrots all love to feed from the blossoms, and so the ground beneath every tree is often littered with buds, flowers and nuts. On my morning walks I've been coming home with handfuls of them, and some of them have been made into new moulds. The resulting new plaster casts have provoked the development of lots of new wall hangings, some of which feature gum blossom petals made out of unraveled hemp twine. I'm super excited about these new little gum blossoms with petals!

 

I've also been making the gum blossoms and their 'bud' versions into some little flowery sticks, a handful of which I'll have available singularly at Finders Keepers.

So, things are chugging along. Right now, my worktable looks like a plaster garden of delights!

Lots yet to do, but I'm tackling it in a methodical and very 'listy' fashion. Here's hoping that the next  three weeks are calm, and then maybe I'll see you at the market!

Hot cakes, Bah Humbug and other Kuberstore news.

Over the past few weeks I've been experiencing a phenomenon that I thought I'd never see again - my Etsy shop has been on fire. Figuratively. I've been filling a glut of orders that has seen me buying not one but three new rolls of packing tape, and I'm expecting another delivery of shipping boxes today. I haven't seen anything like it since those heady pre-GFC days in 2008 when I was sitting at work watching those thrilling 'Etsy Transactions' emails coming in and panicking because I didn't know how I would fill them all in a timely manner! This time my main concern is running out of the particular plaster I use - I bought the last three available kilo jars from Barnes two weeks ago, and the next shipment isn't arriving until January. Eeek! (I think I'll make it. Just!)

I do know what started the rush - one of my items was chosen as a feature image on Etsy's 'Home and Living' browse sections page, heading up the classification 'ornaments'. I've been making my little cast pine cones for a while and never (before this year) thought to list them as a set of hanging decorations - silly me, as it turns out, because this year they'll be adorning Christmas trees in Switzerland, Finland, Germany, Ireland, New Zealand, all over America (including my first order from Hawaii!) and within Australia, too.

I've mentioned before that I love Christmas... I love trees and decorations and wrapping presents and making cards - and it just gives me so, SO much joy to think of these little pine cones arriving at their destinations, being unwrapped and included in someone else's festivities. I feel humbled and grateful and delighted and excited every time one of those 'Etsy Transactions' emails arrives - a buzz that has never, ever gotten old! These 'hot cakes' moments are rare, and thus treasured.

New in my Etsy store this Christmas are my 'Bah Humbug' plaster coal decorations, which have also been selling quite well at the markets - people seize upon them as a Secret Santa gift for someone who is, perhaps, less than enthused about the festive season. Referencing that story about naughty children receiving coal rather than gifts in their Christmas stocking, these painted hanging ornaments are cast in a mould made from a stone I've had since I was little. I kept it because it had two little sun-shaped fossils on one side, and the fossils came out excellently in the cast result. Hooray for Pinkysil!

Market news... I've been enjoying doing the markets lately. At the breezy Green Heart Fair at Carindale a roving photographer took what could be the nicest pic anyone's ever taken of me and my stall - generally I turn out looking a bit uncomfortable and gumby-esque. Here I am:

The BrisStyle Bazaar in the Whale Mall at the Queensland Museum was a busy day - and a great spot for a market as it nabs lots of passing trade and is protected and coolish. Plus the lights under the huge whales cast the most incredible electric blue and yellow shadows!

You might see on the left of the photo above that my new painted cast plaster necklaces have made their market debut. Followers of Kuberstore on Instagram have had a blow-by-blow account of their development, and I'm pretty excited about how they've turned out... stay tuned for a blog post about them soon.

I'm currently using up the last of my plaster to make a few final pine cones... my last market for the year is this coming Saturday at Brisbane City Hall - this special (and final!) BrisStyle pre-Christmas market has the extended opening hours of 9am until 4pm, and I'll be there. Perhaps you will be too?

... on Finders Keepers countdown.

With two weeks to go until the next Brisbane Finders Keepers market, there's been a lot of preparing going on around here, and it's just stepped up a notch. Before it gets out of hand, I thought I'd let you know what I've been up to, and what you might see should you come visit me at The Old Museum on July 5th and 6th!

Recently I found a handful of tiny spotted gum nuts that immediately called out to be be-moulded and cast. I liked that they were somewhat warty and carbuncled - I've found that these textures transfer really well to plaster, so I gave it a go. I fancied I could make the wee gumnuts into wall hangings and maybe a necklace, but as soon as I saw the cast result I wanted to put them onto sticks - a handful of which would look a bit nice standing in an old glass bottle, or maybe just one tied into the ribbon of a wrapped gift.

I have filled the interior voids of these spotted gum nuts with plasticene prior to taking a mould from them. This makes the casting and demoulding process a bit tidier.

These are the smallest items I've ever cast - they are only as big as the end of a finger.

I've rummaged about in the garden and found lots of little spotted gum branchlets, and given them a bit of a pruning and sanding. I'm drilling a hole in the plaster gumnuts and glueing them securely to the sticks. I'm quite liking the notion of using actual spotted gum branches for these spotted gum nut casts.

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I have also been making some special painted plaster eggs to wear as necklaces. I've figured out how to drill right through an egg without it blowing out, and it requires accuracy, patience, and very strong fingers. As I'm a bit un-blessed with the 'patience' part, C has been doing it for me!

I wanted these necklace eggs to be extra-lovely, so have been building up layers of colour with watercolour and acrylic paint, wiping and/or sanding back the plaster and then painting more, to create a really rich background to add the speckles to. I've written before about how the differing densities of the plaster in each egg allow it to soak up more or less pigment, and I've allowed parts of that variation to show through. I've also tried to make sure that the two sides were a bit different, giving the wearer two options depending on their outfit/mood/preference.

These necklace eggs are ready for speckling.

Two different eggs... extra-careful speckling going on here.

I trialled a few cords, including waxed linen and cotton, unwaxed hemp, and woven polyester. Although I initially wanted to go with a natural product, I settled on the polyester as it proved to be durable, colour-fast and super-comfortable to wear. The cord I've selected is a quality American-made type that makes an excellent adjustable/sliding knot. Wear it any length you choose.

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There's also a lot of list-making going on, and I'm looking forward to getting a few more things crossed off. I suspect the list has yet to grow before it gets smaller again but I'm starting to get excited, now. I've got little piles of postcards and business cards and stickers, a stack of my sewn brown-paper packing bags, and two lovely reams of recycled tissue paper to wrap everything up in. That part, at least, is under control!

Now I just need to finish stocking up, sort out my new display pieces, pack up, and make my lunch. See you there!

... on finding something, and using it.

I found my rotary tool a few weeks ago. I'd had it for years, but never figured out what all the various attachments were really for. When I was making things out of corrugated iron I'd tried it out on the rough edges but found that it didn't work how I expected, and then I thought the extension arm thing broke, so it was packed away and put on the shelf of tools-that-might-have-been-good-but-weren't.

I'd been restocking a few of my watercolour eggs, and in the process of watching how the pigment settles in different ways according to the density/texture of the plaster, had suddenly wondered how engraving into them would go. I dragged out my rotary tool and gave it a whirl. It wasn't broken - I'd merely forgotten how to put it together, and with C's help the extension arm thing was reassembled. After a trip to the hardware for a new set of Dremel engraving/carving bits, I was set.

I had in mind a new style of hanging egg decoration - something jewel-like and intricate, with bits of worn gold and silver patina, a dark watercolour wash with splashes of messy bright colours over the top. Something a bit unlike anything I've done before - 'tarnished bazaar'.

Sorry about the manicure. What can I say? You should have seen my fingers after I'd used them to apply the gold and silver Rub'nBuff. Yuck.

 I kept the engravings simple.

This 'dotty' version ended up being my favourite. Adding a bright colour over the top of the engraved areas made it really shine.

Here they are, varnished and be-ribboned and ready for market.

I had a small batch ready for last weekend's BrisStyle Indie Market in City Hall - my first market for the year - and they will soon be landing in my Etsy shop, too.

Here's to rediscovering forgotten power tools! Now, about that bandsaw wrapped in a sheet under my desk...

... on a mystery, solved!

Quite some time ago I wrote about finding these seedpods, which I then made a mould from and began casting. The resulting plaster versions have been featuring on one of my wall hangings ever since, but when people asked me, I had to admit that I didn't know what kind of a tree they were from.

I'd posted the question on an Australian plant forum, where it was suggested to be an immature Crow's Ash seedpod, which I thought was a possibility until I found a tree in the park and saw what the young pods looked like.

Crow's Ash (Flindersia australis) seedpods. The large open one was collected by my grandmother Mard somewhere on her travels, and the small one is an immature pod that I found beneath a tree in the Seventeen Mile Rocks park on the bank of the Brisbane River.

At the Finders Keepers market, one visitor said they looked just like bitter melon, and they do, a little... except bitter melon are green and large and the mystery seedpods were woody and small. No go.

It's funny - sometimes if you wait long enough, the answer to an old question will just... appear.

On my morning walk yesterday I took a route that I hadn't been along for some months. I was halfway up a particularly vicious hill, bordered on one side by a patch of bushland. As there was no footpath and the side of the road was gravelly and rutted, I was watching where I put my feet. Suddenly, among the spiny lantana branchlets grabbing at my socks, I saw a woody seedpod. It had opened up into three parts, but I could see that it had five lobes, and a rough exterior texture like my mystery pods. I peered up at the tree above, a towering rainforest-y type with large leaves and a smooth, mottled trunk. Could it be?

The mystery seedpod is as big as my hand... but what IS it?

Although Google had previously been no help to me, now I had some more information. I knew it was a tall rainforest tree native to Brisbane. I found a comprehensive list at Greening Australia, and started at the top. Some of the species had photographs of their fruit or seedpods, but for those that didn't I searched the scientific name in Google images. That's where I struck gold. My tree, with my pods. HURRAH! It's Queensland Maple! Flindersia brayleyana!

The interior of the Queensland Maple (Flindersia brayleyana) seedpod has the most wonderful texture - silky and papery and yet somehow woody at the same time.

I was on the right track with the Crow's Ash, even though they look like such different trees (and such different immature pods), as they both turned out to be Flindersia. I am so delighted to finally know what this is, and extra-happy that it's a Brisbane local!

Mystery solved. At last!

... on countdowns and crossings off.

Well, the countdown is almost over - it's Finders Keepers this weekend. I haven't done it before, so it's  a shot in the dark, and I'm apprehensive because I have no idea what it'll be like or how it will go and whether the wind will blow my veranda stall away and will the folding table bear the weight of my display and what are 'fire resistant timbers' (I'm just ignoring that little piece of info in the stallholders manual!) and what will I do if I run out of change and... and... can you tell I'm anxious!?

But, I'm almost there. I've got lists, MULTIPLE lists, with lots of things crossed off them, and only a few more major (but achieveable) things to do before bump-in tomorrow evening. I've got stock levels that I'm comfortable with in two ways - if I sell out of a particular thing that'll be surprising and delightful, and if I sell none of a particular thing then it's not too much to have on hand. I've got a new cast plaster letter display that fits in much better with the look of my stall.

The map of stallholders has now been released, which I have popped up on my Facebook page. I'll be at stall D10 which is on the veranda near the stairs going down into the garden. Visitors who stop by can have a first look at my newest wee linen nest, containing an extra-special speckled egg.

In the spirit of getting things done, recently I crossed a big thing off my list of things to do. You know you're a bit slack in the 'do website' department when you get an annual hosting renewal notice before you've managed to get around to designing your site. Hello something-more-than-a-holding-page-at-kuberstore.com!

I've done this using Squarespace, as their level of customisation potential was able to balance my 'desire to make it look a certain way' with 'I am a web design gumby' and 'I'd like to be able to change this whenever I want'. Doing Finders Keepers was the kick I needed to get my website sorted out, and I'm glad, as quite a lot of traffic is coming from the FK stallholder profiles right now!

So. Fingers crossed for mild weather and smiling faces and non-collapsing tables! See you there if you're going, or stay tuned for a Finders Keepers wrap-up next week. Cheerio!

... on finding, keeping, and other excitement.

Excitement comes in funny forms around here, sometimes. One recent burst was a result of a delivery of recycled shredded paper from Ecocern. It was some days late, having been misdirected from Sydney to Perth, but seemed none-the-worse for its WA holiday. Not so hot on the carbon miles, however!

It came in a large tightly-rolled bale, 20 kilograms of it. As it wasn't available in Brisbane I found two other BrisStyle girls to share the costs with, and once unrolled, each share filled a huge (wheelie-bin sized) garbage bag. I've got enough shredded paper to last forever, as you can see by my little foot in the photo below. Mountains of it. 

As soon as the paper arrived, I just had to pull a bit off to try out an idea I'd been chewing over. I wanted something to display my large hanging egg decorations in at the markets, and I had in mind a messy shredded paper nest on a sanded branch sitting on my linen tablecloth.

That's a work-in-progress photo, but you get the idea. A couple of those will almost certainly work a lot better than my previous paper-bag-with-the-top-rolled-down technique, which was admittedly only a temporary fix!

So, now to begin preparations for the upcoming markets. The next City Hall BrisStyle market is on the Saturday-after-next, on October 12, and I'm currently making a batch of my large natural-toned eggs. 

Dry, trimmed and sanded, these cast plaster eggs are ready to be drilled.

Once they've had their little metal rings glued into them and the glue has cured for 24 hours, it's time for the eggs to be painted with their base colour.

Maggie Beer's fruit paste containers make excellent mixed-paint pots. Thanks, Maggie!

Now for a most exciting happening. I did a happy dance in my seat (you know the one) the other day when I received news that my application for the next Finders Keepers market here in Brisbane had been successful. I'll be occupying a debut stall site on the veranda of The Old Museum, so let's all cross our fingers for calm weather, or I'm sure Kuberstore will be taking flight (in many, many pieces) out over the RNA showground! Weather predictions aside, I'm so delighted to have this to prepare for, and I'm sure the next six weeks will simply fly by. Eeek! But HURRAH!

... on a seedpod adventure.

At the end of the market last weekend, my stall neighbour Brenda gave me a seedpod that had been part of her table decoration. I had noticed it earlier, and we'd talked about how it was most likely the 'nut' version of the same macrocarpa eucalyptus that I used (in bud form) for my most recent seedpod wall hanging. When we were packing up she gave it to me.

We had both wondered whether I would be able to make a mould from it. It had some fairly deep openings, but Pinkysil is very forgiving and I thought it might just work.

It did work... that is, until it didn't any more. Pinkysil IS very forgiving but it can only handle being stretched to billy-oh for so long. Even though I cut down through both sides of the mould to gain access, the interior voids of the nut were quite intricate, and extricating the plaster cast required some degree of force. After only a couple of casts, pop!

The mould broke. Bugger!

Still, I did manage to get three decent casts from it before it busted. Never mind.. this is one of the perils of mould making. Sometimes you make it one way only to realise it would have worked better another way. For example, this one would probably work better as a two-part mould, but even so, interior spaces are difficult to deal with, and it still might not have worked.

Always learning.

... on 'to do, or not to do?'

A while ago I had an idea for a speckled egg wall hanging that would be extravagant. It would be glorious, and it would be expensive, and it would be Anthropologie-worthy. It would be so lovely that orders would flow in, and I'd fill them in a haze of plaster dust and an ever-changing bloom of delicious colours. When I left my workroom at the end of the day my hair would be full of rainbow speckles of acrylic paint. Bliss!

My friend Jacinta makes the most fabulous cakes, and when she's designing a cake for a client she will often do a digital mockup - there are some of these (and the resulting cakes) on her lovely Facebook page. Thinking of this as a design process I too could try, I sat down in front of Photoshop to create my first virtual wall hanging. Something that looked like it could exist. Like something I could have made, but haven't. Here's what happened:

Like most ideas, what came out was different to how I initially imagined it, and I've no doubt that if I actually tried to make this wall hanging, it wouldn't turn out the same as this. I have concerns, too, about how I could put this together successfully, given that the number of eggs would make it quite heavy, and they would need an awful lot of little findings, crimps and cable that must each be sound.

I'm currently off the boil about this idea. I find it quite curious that I'm off the boil before attempting an actual prototype, as a result of making a digital one. Problems seem apparent, even though the process of actually making this might prove less difficult than I imagine.

The question is, do I try?