The Mountain and the Tree

Once upon a time a young girl dreamt of a playground. It was filled with beautiful men and handsome women. They told stories not just with their voices but with the whole of their bodies. With fire, water, ice and a nipple tassel or two. Now, for one night only, she has taken over a beautiful, Victorian town hall to make it happen.

Alchemist Dreams present a narrative extravaganza at Limehouse Town Hall, with operatic circus skill performances, boylesque, "the myth of Medea... with a naughty twist", delightfully complex & unusual games run by spiker_uk, and their own artisan spirits & unique cocktails.

I'll be there with a stall (and with merrythebard as my beautiful assistant), selling jewellery, art prints, cards, and miscellanea, all at very reasonable prices and many with a storytelling theme.

I'm told the other stalls will involve delicious baked goods, fine corsetry, and interesting brass jewellery, but I don't have names or links yet.

Tickets are £10 early-on, £20 in advance, and £30 on the door if there are any - last time, everything went very fast, so I recommend getting in early!

[If you're on Facebook, there's an event here too.]

This is one of the rowan trees along my road; I took a photo, used Gimp to make it clearer & starker, chose a small section of the interlacing branches, and added a frame. Inkscape let me turn it into vector graphics, smoothing off the edges and eliminating speckles and inconvenient bits, and then exporting that as a DXF file let me feed it straight into the London Hackspace laser cutter. That worked to outline the image onto a piece of reclaimed hardwood (skip-dived, though not by me), and then I carved it out with my normal woodcarving tools; the laser lets me use a much more complex design than I've managed in the past.

It's now basically ready to print, or at least if I need to do any more work on it then I won't know until after I've inked it up and pulled a proof.



These are made from 300gsm recycled paper; the design is a vectorised & messed-about-with scan of an actual nettle leaf, from my garden. If you click through to Flickr, there are a lot of WIP images of the leaf in various stages; I'm entirely happy to let any of you have the SVGs if you fancy playing around with them.

I already have a customer for this pair, which makes me extremely happy! I've got two others on my worktable too, and they're quite quick to reify now I have the completed digital file. It may have taken me 8-10 hours of vector art to get the design right, but now I can just print off a dozen pairs, get out the scalpel, and apply a few layers of ink & glue. It's an interesting inversion of the printmaking technique, and it makes me very happy.

As all of you who make & sell things will know, pricing your work is both really important and really hard. I've settled on some price points, I think: the new double-thickness (and double-strength) pendants I've been making (see left, and/or ask me for a look at one when we see each other—I'll usually have one somewhere) will go for £5-£10, and from now on I'll keep the single-layer pieces for brooches and sell those more cheaply. The laminated paper chokers... I'm still thinking I need to do a bit more research & usability testing to find a single comfortable design & a good production workflow. Masks will range from £12 or so to about £30.

On the other hand, let's be realistic about this: I'm not in this business to make much money. It would be extremely nice if I did manage more than the small net profit I currently get, but as far as I can tell all the available levers for increasing internet-based sale volume involve hard work on marketing and promotion, and that's not only something I hate doing but something I'm extremely bad at.

I am, fundamentally, in the jewellery business in order to make art, or at least pretty things. The problem there is that a) finished Stuff accumulates, and b) I'm hesitant to give it away unsolicited, either because then it'll just be accumulating dust for someone else instead, or because they might not like it or ever wear it. I'm a good judge of what would physically suit someone, but that doesn't mean it would be in their comfort zone or preferred style, and that's entirely fair enough.

Anyway, the point of this post is basically threefold. First, I have an Etsy shop (nowhere near everything I have in a sale-ready state is listed there, just the best ones I have photos of so far). I like commissions, so long as they're not too detailed—my ideal is "make me something you think will suit me", but I'm also very happy with a colour scheme and an idea of the sort of patterns you like.

Second, I am entirely happy to accept barter. I prefer food, books, & beer, but if you do it and I have a possible use for it then I'll be delighted. (Just to be clear, I expect you to match sale price to sale price, rather than what-it-costs-you to what-I'd-get-on-the-market. If you normally give it away for free, I'm still happy to consider it.)

Third, and possibly most importantly: if you like what I do, and especially if it's the kind of thing you'd wear, please let me know! After all, everyone has a birthday now & then.