He's got the mustache, and the diddly! Now do Wiggum.
I sparked a discussion on one of the jewelry groups with my posting of 'Woden' about designing jewelry for men and what a challenge it can be. I felt inspired by the challenge and created another necklace over the weekend with a masculine look intended. It's called 'Forest Floor' and features a large tumbled moss agate bead in the center and two smaller, matching ones about an inch and a half out from the center on each side. The rest of the beads are light brown wooden tubes, 4mm tourmalinated quartz rondelles, 4mm round tigers eye, 6mm oval malachite, and four 8mm round tigers eye beads. Unfortunately, when I was trying to get some pics of it, I noticed one of my worst fears when creating a piece for sale. There's a flaw in my design, or more so the execution of the design! I intended the center moss agate bead to have two 4mm round tigers eye beads on each side of it, then following the tigers eye, two of the tourmalinated quartz beads. When I looked at it closer, instead, I transposed those two beads on one side of it. D'OH! So, a restringing is in order. Frustrating to have to redo the whole thing for such a small flaw. But I'd be pissed if I paid $50-$60 for a necklace and found a flaw in it.
In trying to price the necklace, I also created a spreadsheet to inventory all of my materials. I've been having trouble with pricing because I'm never sure if I'm covering the cost of my materials and time spent on the piece. Thus far, I've been doing pretty well at making guesses. But as I get into more expensive materials and trying to actually make a profit at this, I don't want to rely on my own perceived value to price the pieces (at least not until I have more experience with such things). So, I now have a list of all my wooden and gemstone beads, the clasps I use the most, and a couple of sizes of jump rings and formulas included to figure out how much each one costs me per bead/clasp/ring/etc. I also included the AccuFlex wire I use on there for stringing and broke it out into a price per inch. And I've come up with a reasonable hourly wage. Obviously wire wrapped pieces that are labor intensive are going to cost more to produce. I wanted to make sure I didn't sell myself short on the hours I put into things.
Eventually, I hope to incorporate this into the eventual website. Working with my resident programmer (heh), I hope to be able to keep inventory of both materials and finished pieces, and possibly even generate shopping/restocking lists based on the pieces I've finished, all to be run in the background of the site. I was just pretty proud of the whole format of the thing. It started really simple, just maybe 2 or 3 fields, but grew into something really valuable as I realized, "well, if I separate this information into it's own field, I could use formulas to automatically calculate this stuff as I type it in, and later I can sort by it, and. . ." Oh, and I also have a table of approximately how many beads per inch on a strand based on what the size of the bead is, which is rather valuable since most beads are sold by 16" or 36" strands. It goes from 1-25mm. I used formulas on it too. Basically take 25.4 (which is how many millimeters there are in an inch) and divide it by the size of the bead (in mm).
So, enough about that, back to sewing. I haven't progressed on the wedding gown, felt lazy last night and Tuesday night was the brew club meeting. Monday night I think we did some cleaning instead and I just never got to it. Week nights are still jam packed, even though there are no more late nights now with Chris out of school.
However, I spent maybe 30 minutes last night playing with a wrap skirt design using the silk velvet that I tried so desperately to turn charcoal grey. It's a lovely color in itself and I think I'm going to follow through with this design for some everyday clothes (with just a touch of elvish flair). The color of the velvet goes so lovely with the silver sash belt. I took some pics of it, but I think I might also try to sketch out an idea. But no projects will get attention until the wedding gown is done. I've also got on hold a silk shirt using a paisley jacquard (that needs to be dyed) and paisley silk velvet for the sleeves. If the dyes come out like I hope, it would go nicely with this skirt.
In trying to price the necklace, I also created a spreadsheet to inventory all of my materials. I've been having trouble with pricing because I'm never sure if I'm covering the cost of my materials and time spent on the piece. Thus far, I've been doing pretty well at making guesses. But as I get into more expensive materials and trying to actually make a profit at this, I don't want to rely on my own perceived value to price the pieces (at least not until I have more experience with such things). So, I now have a list of all my wooden and gemstone beads, the clasps I use the most, and a couple of sizes of jump rings and formulas included to figure out how much each one costs me per bead/clasp/ring/etc. I also included the AccuFlex wire I use on there for stringing and broke it out into a price per inch. And I've come up with a reasonable hourly wage. Obviously wire wrapped pieces that are labor intensive are going to cost more to produce. I wanted to make sure I didn't sell myself short on the hours I put into things.
Eventually, I hope to incorporate this into the eventual website. Working with my resident programmer (heh), I hope to be able to keep inventory of both materials and finished pieces, and possibly even generate shopping/restocking lists based on the pieces I've finished, all to be run in the background of the site. I was just pretty proud of the whole format of the thing. It started really simple, just maybe 2 or 3 fields, but grew into something really valuable as I realized, "well, if I separate this information into it's own field, I could use formulas to automatically calculate this stuff as I type it in, and later I can sort by it, and. . ." Oh, and I also have a table of approximately how many beads per inch on a strand based on what the size of the bead is, which is rather valuable since most beads are sold by 16" or 36" strands. It goes from 1-25mm. I used formulas on it too. Basically take 25.4 (which is how many millimeters there are in an inch) and divide it by the size of the bead (in mm).
So, enough about that, back to sewing. I haven't progressed on the wedding gown, felt lazy last night and Tuesday night was the brew club meeting. Monday night I think we did some cleaning instead and I just never got to it. Week nights are still jam packed, even though there are no more late nights now with Chris out of school.
However, I spent maybe 30 minutes last night playing with a wrap skirt design using the silk velvet that I tried so desperately to turn charcoal grey. It's a lovely color in itself and I think I'm going to follow through with this design for some everyday clothes (with just a touch of elvish flair). The color of the velvet goes so lovely with the silver sash belt. I took some pics of it, but I think I might also try to sketch out an idea. But no projects will get attention until the wedding gown is done. I've also got on hold a silk shirt using a paisley jacquard (that needs to be dyed) and paisley silk velvet for the sleeves. If the dyes come out like I hope, it would go nicely with this skirt.