Home Depot Paint Sales Associate, thats me!

So, a few weeks ago I gots me a job. As some of you might know, I want to be an electrician someday. I know, sort of random change from Jewelry and Embroidery pattern maker, but well, I’d like to pay the billz while making art, and art just wasn’t cutting it on its own anymore in this economy. As you also might know, I am sort of obsessed with home projects, and so becoming a residential electrician seemed like a good idea! I like crawling around in attics, I like making homes more useful, and I’m not scared (anymore) of electricity!

But well, getting into the electrician’s union and becoming an apprentice takes time, and I needed money now! And so I applied at the Home Depot’s online application thingy. And a short and crazy week later, I had a job as a Paint Associate! Paint!? How perfect! I LOVE paint! So many colors…. so many things to paint….

And its fun. Ya know, as much fun as a joby job can be. The people there are all super nice (sorta freaky nice, but in a good way), the store is HUGE and full of things I want to buy, and there are all those paint chips.

It turns out that I like customer service, which is something I never really thought of before. I mean, I’ve worked CS jobs all my life, but I never really thought about it, ya know? But I like solving peoples problems, and I like educating folks about stuff. And here I get to solve their home improvement problems and learn about how to fix my own stuff and its great! I don’t want to work here for the rest of my life or anything, but for a part time, hold me over til the electrician thing happens thing, it is perfect.

Which brings me to the point of this blog post: I am resigning from the Saturday Market. Thats right, no more weekends sitting in a tent outdoors for me! After eight years, some great, some not so, I am done. I emailed off my resignation yesterday. You see, Home Depot people have to work weekends too. But on the up side, its for a max of eight hours (instead of the ten or so at the market), get lunch breaks, and can request time off! Good deal. Of course, on a nice weekend I don’t make as much money, but I’ll take it for now!

My website is still up and running, you can still order from me there! You can also find my jewelry at Splurge on NE Fremont and 14th street, along with pins at Made In Oregon stores. I’m not going away, I’m just changing things up a bit!

Oh, and I’m picking up some new baby chicks on friday.

Maggie

Goin’ back to the Market!

That’s right, I’m heading back down to the Portland Saturday Market starting Memorial Day weekend I believe. I’m looking forward to it. While it is a bit of a pain in the behind some days, I really do love it it turns out. I miss my friends, and the energy down there. So I called up the market last week, and asked if I could pretty please come back! And they said yes!

So now I am working away on building up my stock and getting ready! Hope to see you all down there!

Maggie

Work Day!

Well, the 100 plus degree weather here in Portland finally forced me to stay home and work today! The last two days I’ve spent at my friend’s parent’s house working away getting a new ceiling sanded, then painted, along with the walls, and waxing the floor. We’ve been working on their house for about five weeks now, and got them to head to the beach for the last couple days so we could really push through those last time consuming bits! While I have loved working on that project, its been consuming most of my time! Today it was deemed to hot to work there anymore, so I got a much needed day at home. The air conditioner has been blasting steadily all day, even though it is set to a pretty high 78 degrees. Whew! When its hot here, its hot!

I’ve been taking advantage of the unexpected day off working away in my studio, and finally took a break to rest my tired fingers (filing and sanding is hard on them) and take some pictures of whats been going on lately! And some of them are shown below:

Okay, so I didn’t make these two felted earrings today, but I did clean up the pictures in photoshop just now! I will be teaching a class on felted earrings in October at Collage on Woodstock, but more about that later. Or go to the DIYlounge wesite and look them up! Lots of other fun classes too.

Below are a few of my new teeny tiny (around a half inch) charm pendants. I am in love with them, and so it seems, are my customers at the Saturday Market. I’ve gotten into the nasty habit of selling them before I get pictures taken, so they haven’t made it onto my website, and they need to! I’d be happy to take custom orders if anyone is interested… They retail in the $32 to $42 range, very reasonable…

I like ‘em, hope you do to! Here’s hoping the heat wave breaks in the next few days, I don’t want to die of heat stroke at the Saturday Market!

Portland Saturday Market, opening weekend 2009!

Thanks to my parents for the sweet tiny digital camera that I got for Christmas, I could just throw it in my pocket and take pictures! So heres the opening weekend of Saturday Market in Pictures:

My booth, lookin’ snazzy in its new setup

Leah is my neighbor behind me this month, super sweet and we manage to entertain ourselves in our own booths, whereas before we’d have to wander to other booths for fun. Thats her in the green jacket.

Naomi busy eating the delicious veggie chili in her pretty booth

perhaps not the best pic, but heres my glass cases now in the center of my booth, and they are showing off my new lines of jewelry, which got alot of attention this weekend, yay!

Best buds Anne and Ben posing for me in Anne’s booth. So cute they are

And last but not least, little Loki, ignoring the camera!

Hope to see you all down at the market next weekend and in the coming months! We need you to support local artists and craftspeople!

Time goes so fast!

The countdown is on to this weekend’s opening of the Saturday Market. My head feels like it is spinning, so many little different things to take care of! None the least is updating my webpage, for I think the third time since December! Seems I can never be happy with it just the way it is, I always come up with a better way for it to be right after I send it off to my brother to post online for me! Sigh, the trials of being a perfectionist (or rather, a close-enoughist).

This was just a quick one, I’ve got to get into the studio, but I wanted to try to post more often again, which means some fits and starts with the short posts!

Sneak Peek!

February has really flown by! I had no idea that it has been weeks since my last post! To be honest, I’ve hardly spent any time on the computer, except for one long day where I spiffed up my bottlecap and scrabble tile catalog, and messed around with some pics for the webpage. Not much time spent on the ol‘ internets, or even reading blogs! Which makes it kinda hard to remember to post my own…

And I’ve been doing my darnest to get my new lines out! But well, creating something new, entirely from scratch, and with limited time and funds… well, it takes a while, and some serious brainstorming! I’ve got lots of things I want to make but they are all over the board design-wise. So I had to pull back a bit so that I could have a cohesive collection or two to start out with. So while they may not be big collections to start with, the pieces do go together!

First things first, I guess I should say how I went about deciding on the collections. I started by drawing out a bunch of images that I thought would be fun to cut out of metal and wear as jewelry. My first piece was a chicken, cause well, duh, I like chickens and I thought it would be a funny thing to wear. And that is how I came about designing my lines: they all had to be fun to wear. I had to say, hey, I would love to see someone wearing that little thing, and knowing that they get it too! That anyone who liked my jewelry would kind of be in on the joke. Thats not to say that my lines are “joke” lines, or anything, cause they are not. Its just to say you have to have a sense of the ridiculous to enjoy them properly. That being said, I came up with alot of things I would like to make, and many of them didn’t match. But a few of them did, and they became the start of two separate lines. These two lines correspond with two things I am reasonably obsessed with: creatures of the ocean, and well, my house.

The pictures below are not of my entire line, heck, there are even a few pictures of my SEPARATE new line of felted earrings thrown in at the bottom, but they give you an idea of whats going on. Most of the things in the first picture are going in my house collection: the house, obviously, the clouds (this is Portland, after all), the fruit tree (we are putting in some pears this year out front). These pieces are in the very rough first stages of being made. I am working mostly in brass and copper at the moment, with silver accents. Silver versions of all my jewelry will be available too (mostly on made to order status right now).

This whale pendant is the left over part of whale pendant you see pictured in the next post down from this one. I thought he ended up quite adorable with his little water spurts coming out of his blowhole.

My tree and house earrings, the first pair of earrings I ever made in the silversmithing class I am taking. Well, I mostly made them at home, but did the soldering there. I wear these ALOT.
Some copper clouds I made yesterday. These happy little clouds will have a sad cloud pendant counterpart, complete with little silver chains of rain dangling from him. I can’t wait!

And the felty critters I promised! I am going to have five different versions of the birds below listed on my webpage to start, maybe followed by more later. You can of course, email me and ask for custom colors too… They are SUPER fun to wear, they weigh nothing and turn around and around on their little silver wires.

For fun one night I started felting polkadot balls. These made me so happy, they became earrings. I can kind of picture the teacher from the magic schoolbus (anyone remember that show on PBS?) wearing them.

And to come in future blogs: the new shed we are building in the backyard (cause well, who doesn’t need ANOTHER outbuilding, now at five and counting…), the removal of our very pretty but in the way of light for the garden maple tree, and the planting of some espaliered pear trees and the building of coldframes!

Oh, and of course, the Saturday Market starts up again next weekend! Come and see us!
Maggie

Felty ornaments and snow

So last week I participated for the first time in the Pioneer Courthouse Square Saturday Market’s Artisan’s Market. Wow, that’s a long title. It may have a shorter name, but I think that one sums it up. And it turns out it was a good gig. I’ve never done it before, and its been going on for four years or something, but I think I will do it again. I made some money, and the weather was great, at least for the first three days. The last day would make you rethink the thought that you would ever want to do this again. It was a fraking rain and windstorm, that was hellbent on destroying our booths! And it succeeded in destroying a few, but not mine. Naomi and I bugged out a couple hours early (but a couple hours later than many) when a few huge wind gusts came up and blew my jewelry all over the wet ground, and tried to take our tents away (and we had really heavy weights on our booths!)

But, if you forget that last day, it was great! I was set up between Yedomi Jewelry and Eden Kitty, and had a great time with both of them. Naomi and Yeder were nice enough to share their most excellent propane heater with me by keeping a wall open between us, and Naomi and I got some serious crafting done while we waited for customers. Check out all the felted critters I finished while there. Well, critters, and a broccoli (I was running out of ideas, and that was her suggestion).

In between feltings, we also finished planning and making invitations for our friend’s baby shower. We are some multi-tasking, crafty bitchez! I don’t have pictures of them though. And yes, that is a pink whale with a green beret in the above photo. And I liked the first chicken so much I made a second one. And a wolf’s head, and a goldfish and Siamese fighting fish. I guess I really like swimming things and birdies….

And so after that great week, it was the Saturday Market, which was not so nice. Saturday rather sucked, and well, we all decided NOT to do the Market on Sunday because of threat of snow. Which usually means no snow, because as market superstition goes, “if you don’t do the market due to predicted weather, it will instead be a perfect market day.” But it snowed! And it was beautiful. If you are reading this from somewhere other than Portland, you might wonder why we get all crazy about the snow here. But the fact is, it might snow once a winter here, and well, we have to take FULL advantage of the snow. So nothing happens here. People don’t drive, stores and schools are closed (even just an inch will due), nothing happens. So we sat inside and watched the snow. Here are pictures of it from my living room:

The birds didn’t like it so much. The ducks pretty much just ignored it, and sat in the water bowl I brought out to water them since their water was frozen. Weirdos. The chickens, well, three of them had enough sense to go inside their henhouse to get out of the wind, but Martha, well, she decided to sit on top of the henhouse, by the frozen water thing. I finally got tired of it and stuffed her in with her friends. I think she appreciated it.

Well, we’ll see if this clears up in time for the festival of the last minute at the Saturday Market. I could use a few more selling days before Christmas…

Happy Holidays!

Another rainy weekend…

Heres me this weekend peering out through Leah’s booth, she was my neigbor all weekend, we had a super glass booth.

Gotta love these late october/early november market weekends. They are rainy, long and chilly. But being the native Portlander that I am, I kinda love them. I find that I am much more polite and friendly to my customers. Although that could be because there are so much fewer of them! But I LIKE this weather, except when it comes to my garden. I hate squishing around my yard. But I love the leaves on the trees. But I hate the leaves on the ground. And I HATE cleaning out the chicken coop. Ugh, that is nasty biz when the straw and food and poo is wet. Yuck.

But while the Market is slowing down, you get to slow down too, and enjoy your market friends a bit more. And we are having a GREAT time amusing each other this year. I’m by all the kids I like, and I’ve gotten to know them so much better this year. There are little kids, and pregnancies, and puppies (oh, teh puppiez…) and it is so much fun to be around. So yep, while it is wet and slow at the market, I would rather be there with those folks making what living we can and hanging out, that hanging out at home on a rainy sunday… At least theres some money to be made there, and fun gossip (i mean conversation) to be had there!

More Market Musings

So I am again at the Portland Saturday Market with my laptop, Rosebud. Its September now, and the market starts to slow. Okay, it doesn’t START to slow, it just SLOWS. So its a good time for a girl who needs to spend some time blogging, and trolling blogs for ideas and hopefully, links. Because I am finally breaking down and realizing that all my blogger friends are right, in order to get people to your site you need to visit other sites. But that is hard for me to do, since when I am home I have a huge list of other things that need doing (both business and home project oriented) that the whole “couple of hours spent on the internet thing” is really hard to justify. But at the Market, a person could almost spend all day on the internet and only feel vaugly guilty!

So thats what I am doing. And its been really great! Informative, entertaining, and something else thats like the above two things I listed but is not exactly that. I’ve looked at and bookmarked some really interesting sites to view again (with a faster internet hook-up) and perhaps contact. That is what I am bad at. I have a hard time cold-contacting people, and well, if you are in business for yourself you have to get over that!

I’ve also found the ring that might tempt me into getting married (which we are not, nobody get excited). Its fantastic, and made of wood. Wooden wedding rings, how awesome is that? And how Portland am I to get excited about a recycled, wooden ring? It does have a diamond though!

This ring is the coolest thing I have ever seen. They are made from old violins and whatnot. Check out their webpage for other awesome rings: Simply Wood Rings.

Other things I’ve learned: there are blogs about cool blogs and you can ask to be added to their list (if you are cool enough). There are blogs about clothes and jewelry and home goods that people want, and they have awesome stuff on them. And I’ve learned that if you want to get on those blogs you have to contact them and let them know how cool your stuff and or blog is!

So that is what I will be doing from home on Monday: contacting the cool blogs that I discovered today. I’d do it from here, but well, I think that this place is a little to distracting for me to do a very good job of it. That and the internet connection keeps going in and out.

Sitting at Saturday Market on Parade Day

So today is the Grand Floral Parade in Portland. And its raining. You put those two things together and you get a dead day at the Portland Saturday Market. I was expecting this, so I brought my laptop down in the hopes of free wireless Internet and getting some more things posted on my Esty account. Please go and check it out, the link is in the next post down! I spent all day on Wednesday (really, all freaking day) posting bottlecaps, and I’ve got some glass stuff that I scanned yesterday to post today. I’ve discovered that while free internet is great, its also slow, and had somewhat frequent adds that pop up. Fortunately, I possess the patience of a saint standing up on his cement pedestal and can handle all this wasted time with grace. Thats what I tell myself when I start feeling impatient. Thats why I’m taking a break from the posting on etsy to write this blog.

Things I’m thankful for today:
the tent over my booth keeping me dry.
the heat pad I’m sitting on.
my coffee, which is now cold.
my laptop, rosebud, who is keeping me entertained.
my awesome booth neighbors, who I should be talking to during this down time, but am instead ignoring in favor of rosebud.
Those awesome chickens of mine, who pretty much ignore the rain and just enjoy their chicken selves. I wish I was at home with a fire, watching them out the window.

Okay, so I wandered off my thankful list and into wishfulness territory. Bad Maggie! But I’m wishing I was at home! I can’t help it, its wet here! Tomorrow I’m going antique shopping with my Mama and I am soooooo excited! We are going to woodburn or silverton or something, I don’t care I’m just getting out of town to go shopping! Yay!

Okay, I’ll get back to selling now or something. I’d post a picture, but I think my connection is way to slow for that. Happy day people!