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!

... onwards.

So, I'm pretending that we aren't in fact moving house anytime soon, and have decided to Get On With It. I'm feeling better already. The studio is vacuumed (it was disgraceful, the floor had been almost obscured by shredded paper and plaster dust for months. There were a few alarming rattles up the vacuum hose but I guess I'll figure out what they were when I go looking for that tool and can't find it.) and the room is feeling again like a productive workspace rather than a niggling job on my cleaning list.

To celebrate, I've been making some more mess! I've been meaning to expand on my seedpod wall hanging range ever since, a while back, I found a tiny sweet pine cone among my grandmother Mard's seedpods, which she collected on her travels around Australia with my grandfather. Followers of Kuberstore on Instagram will start to see the emergence of a pine cone theme.

Along with the pine cone, which I thought might mould up nicely, I recently found a handsome and suitable gumnut that I thought might also work. This morning I busted out some Pinkysil and went for it. I'm still in love with Pinkysil as a mouldmaking material - it sets so fast that you can go from 'no mould' to 'removing first casting' within an hour. Suits my impatient soul!

Inbuilt mould identification for the first time ever! I wish I'd thought of this before now, because I often find myself squinting into similarly-shaped moulds to try and figure out which one I want. This time I wrote (backwards) into the base layer of plasticene with a sharp pencil before pouring the silicone. Yay!

It's so exciting to crack open a mould for the first time and see the cast result. Double joy for me this morning!

 Pine cones and gumnuts... and wall hangings to come. Progress! AT LAST!