... on new things and being out-of-place. And eggs.

Well, it's done. We've moved house. I'm sitting here facing a strange wall in a strange room, surrounded by boxes, and I'm hoping that it will start to feel less odd very soon, as (I may have mentioned before) I'm not that great with big changes and associated upheavals.

In the midst of all the ruckus, Violet (the solo female from my batch of five Pekin bantam chicks last year) has laid her first egg, which was very sweet and small and brown. Here it is next to an egg from one of the grown-up ladies.

I'm always delighted when a young hen lays her first egg. In the nestbox, too. Clever chicken.

My Ma found an intriguing egg for me on the beach at Bilinga, where she now lives. She said it was just poking out of the sand a little bit, and at first she thought it was a ping-pong ball, as it was about that size. 

See, it has some tiny pink barnacles attached to it! For some reason this egg had been floating about in the sea long enough for barnacles to adhere to it.

It had distinct pores, and one end is almost spherical, the other quite pointed. It was quite ominously heavy. To my horror the day after my Ma had given it to me Something Started Oozing Out of it and stinking up the drawer I had placed it in to prevent Ollie breaking it. Ugh. This curious egg is now residing in a sunny spot well up the (new) back yard away from the house where it might dry out. I do hope it will, as some of my other egg specimens have done when given enough sunshine and time.

Pew, what a pong, though! It was the sort of magnificent stink that lingers in your nose and taints the taste of everything you eat for some time!

*

Anyway, like the egg floating in the ocean (how? why?!) or the barnacles attached to an egg (huh?) I'm somewhat out-of place. I can't remember what's in all these boxes. Better go and find out, hey?

... on good news!

Some lovely and grin-inducing news quite late last night - I've been accepted into the next Brisbane Finders Keepers market in July. Hurrah!

There's probably no need to tell you that I'm rather excited about this, and I'm extra happy because knowing so far in advance makes preparing for it seem much more manageable. Plus, judging from my media feeds this morning, there's quite a few Brisbane makers who I admire heaps who will also be stallholders, and I look forward very much to seeing them there and perhaps stealing a quick chat.

I've got a larger space to fill this time, and I'll be inside one of those lovely rooms at the Old Museum. I'm keen to rough out some new display ideas and am strategically eyeing off a big pile of old fence-paling offcuts that C has stacked in the yard!

Much to do. Oh so much to do, because we appear to be finally (but suddenly) moving house - THIS SATURDAY! Time to pack. Oh boy is it time to pack!

... 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 photographs and confessions.

Earlier this year I took it into my head that I wanted to take a photograph of my worktable that I could use as a general Kuberstore marketing-thingy-type-image, something that shows a little of both my aesthetic and my work process. I climbed up a ladder with my camera and took this:

Great. This looks like my aesthetic is 'hoarder' and my work process is 'cataclysmic'. Obviously my table in its natural state wasn't going to cut it! Once I'd sorted out the carnage I roughed out a basic composition:

Getting there, but I felt like I wanted to fill the table more, so I added in some more stuff:

Whoa. Too much. I decided to remove anything that was acting as a 'prop', leaving only the items that I would conceivably be using to work with to make my seedpod and egg wall hangings.

It was at this point that I noticed that nothing in the top right corner of any shot was in focus. Gah. My beloved Canon G7 (admittedly, some 7 years old now) was failing me. Although it does produce lovely macro shots, plainly this middle ground non-macro stuff was beyond it, at least in that top right corner:

It pained me a little to do it... but I picked up my phone, and took a test shot:

Better. In focus, at least. Focus was going to win over file size. This was more or less the composition that I wanted, too - space for text, no unexplainable items, but I needed some 'bleed' (extra bits around the edge) if I was going to use it for a postcard. Up the ladder again:

Satisfied. But not with the colour, as my eye just kept jumping to those pink moulds. In the end I went with a black and white version with a slightly warming (yellow) filter applied:

And then, because I can't help it, I photoshopped out the big crack in the table, and any other nasty mark that I didn't fancy. Here's the end result:

In the end it took 9 days, 38 photographs, lots of waiting for the optimum natural light, innumerable trips up the ladder and a disappointment in my digital camera, but I got there. 

I've just had some postcards delivered so if you'd like one I'll be at the BrisStyle Indie Market at City Hall this Saturday between 9am and 3pm - do come and say hello. Alternately drop me your address in a comment - I won't publish.

Now, as this has turned into a post about documenting a process of documenting my own work process (if you get what I mean), I'll make another photography confession. I say 'confession' because even to me it's sounding like maybe I think about this all rather a bit too much?!

*

Task: to take new photos of my plaster seedpod wall hangings, of which there are now four designs.

Thought: that I wanted a single shot of all four hangings, so that one photo in each individual Etsy shop listing shows the whole range.

Limitation: I didn't really want to make any more holes in the wall (as we're moving soon), so I would have to use my white-painted noticeboard as the background.

I set up what would probably be a perfectly adequate grouping of items, wait for the right light, take some photographs, open them in Photoshop, and then roughly chop up the composition. After moving things around into what I suspect will be an even more pleasing arrangement of items and acknowledging that my retouching skills aren't up to fixing up the joins (repairing shadows is intense),  I go back and take the photographs again. I'm mad.

'Probably a perfectly adequate grouping of items...'

'... chop up the composition.' Chop! Chop!

Sigh. Perhaps I do overthink these things, and I wish I'd ignored myself about using the noticeboard. I don't know how many pinholes I photoshopped out.

Here's the final Etsy listing pic. The greyness of the bottom left corner perplexes me a bit but it's the result of a tradeoff - natural light coming in from the right versus not letting the white plaster blow out too much against the background.

 

Okay, that's it for my photography confessions. I've revealed that I have a tendency to keep going back and trying to make things better, which results in a simple idea taking nine days to execute! GAH!

... 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!

... on hair. Grey bits, and Something I have just learned.

I found my first grey hair at age seventeen, with a predictable degree of disgust. For a few years I experimented with as much hair colourant as any young woman, veering from almost-blonde to darkest-brown, with a rather risque peroxide and mulberry streaking period sometime in the 90s when I was a hair model for a girl I worked with. I found, like many young women, that dyeing your hair all the time really screws it up, and the only way back to nice hair (for me) is to grow it out, which takes ages. So, I haven't dyed my hair for years, and I have to say that I've enjoyed having hair in my 'natural' colour - generally brunette: darker brown at the roots, with degrees of sun-bleaching about the ends which may or may not in some lighting conditions look a bit reddish. And grey, of course. They've been multiplying happily ever since that first grey at seventeen. Scrutinising this photo of me and Ollie the other day prompted me have another look at the back of my head with the aid of two mirrors. As you do.

I made an interesting discovery. Some of those greys are as long as the longest hairs on my head, which at the moment is hanging at around the middle of my back. I'd never noticed that before. I also realised that as far as the placement of greys goes, I'm starting to develop concentrated areas of greyness that may be described as... streaks. Yes, grey streaks.

Now, I started loving my greys years ago. As a twenty-four year old I'd been introduced to a girl, only just older than me, who had developed a strong grey streak in her fringe, and she was rocking the look. I was in deep admiration of her grey streak, and it changed the way I felt about my own regrowth. I thought that, over the course of a (hopefully long) lifetime, a girl really only has a short time to enjoy her natural hair colour before it goes grey, and chances are it'll be grey a lot longer than any other colour it ever was. So, I chose to enjoy. I'm sure some women can dye the hell out of their hair and suffer no adverse effects - not me. I'm not saying I'll never hit the bottle again, but for now, no.

Anyway, I'll be forty next year, something that I can scarcely believe. Another thing I can't believe is this little snippet about long hair care which I've only just discovered. I had thought that my hair had a 'maximum length' (for me, about mid-back), where it just wouldn't get any longer before shedding and breakage and regrowth somehow cancelled each other out. Then recently - a revelation. I don't remember where I read it, but it was about how you get water out of your hair. I've always been a bit of a 'throw hair forward, cover with towel and scrub the blazes out of it' type of girl, and it turns out this could be the cause of my problem with (ahem) breakage. I feel so dimwitted about this. Apparently long hair needs to be treated gently! Huh? Squeeze the water out! NO scrubbing with a towel! NO! Such a simple thing. WHO KNEW!?

Not me.

... on packing, or not packing, and somewhere inbetween.

A little while ago I mentioned that we're moving house. At the time it seemed like the most imminent thing but due to one thing or another (more like 'one thing AND another, and then many more other things') it just hasn't happened yet. What with the holiday season and a long delay to a certain process (we're waiting on YOU, concrete-floor man!) it seems that my builder's maxim ("Double the time you think it will take and you'll be halfway there") is ringing true for us moving house, too.

I feel a little bit in limbo. I've been hesitant to get too involved in making anything, and my Etsy store remains closed for the moment. There's a number of piles of weeks-old half-started things on my worktable, and this sits awkwardly with me. Small hurdles seem insurmountable (WHY can't I drill right through one of my plaster eggs without breaking the bit, damnit?!) and the idea of packing up my lovely studio weighs heavily. I feel like I've only just moved in to it, although it's been more than a year. The as-yet-unpainted bathroom door mocks me somehow - I'll need to do that (insurmountable!) before we get our little house on the market. The garden here is running a bit rampant in parts, and is desiccated and bare in others. After all, there's not too much point in getting more vegies going when we'll be leaving them, is there? My gardening head is already thinking forward to the removal of weeds and sunburnt bromeliads at the next house.

So, as someone who doesn't really embrace change all that willingly, the stalling of this one has put me out of kilter with the things that are most good for my soul!

But, on account of the fact that it is suddenly February already, I'm feeling like I need to take control of this wait somehow. My Ma has suggested that I reopen my Etsy store, and pack up most of the studio, leaving out only the things I need to fill any orders that may come through. It seems so simple, but I needed someone else to point it out!

If anyone has any advice about how to manage indecision, running a handmade business through a house (and studio) move, and also about a vague and persistent lack of focus, please do share! I'd be greatly appreciative!