Website update, moving web address, and other online related news

As the winter begins to lift just a little bit here in Seattle and the sunlight starts coming back, big changes are afoot at the NightshadeRose Studio Website. Over the coming months we'll be moving to a shiny new site, with a slightly (but importantly) different address. I expect the new site at studio.nightshaderose.com to be live sometime in the next week. The new site will be cleaner and shinier, have better photo organization, be easier to navigate and update, and not look like it was hacked together on one vodka-fueled weekend by someone who only vaguely knew what they were doing (i.e. me). There will eventually even be an integrated online store, but that's another month or two off. There will probably be some overlap between the new site coming up and the old site coming down, but eventually the old address will just be a redirect to the new site. I hope y'all love the new website. I certainly do!

In other internet-related news, we've been posting daily inspirations of other people's art, design and craft, as well as gemstones and antique jewelry, over at the studio Tumblr (http://nightshaderosestudio.tumblr.com/). Occasional studio and sale announcements as well as musings about the nature of art, craft, and business go up over there as well. Studio/sale announcements and the daily inspiration also go to our Facebook and Twitter feeds.

Speaking, of studio announcements, I'll be making some fairly big show announcements in the next week or so as well.

I hope everyone's spring goes well, and y'all all get what you need.

website problems

Most links should be working again, but if you're trying to get to the main front page (www.nightshaderose.com) you need, for the time being to drop the "www. and just use "nightshaderose.com". This is only a problem for the main front page. everything else should be good with or without "www."
I'm in the process of migrating nightshaderose.com to a new web host, and there are a few things I'm still figuring out. This is why I'm an artist and not a sysadmin. :)

Black Friday, Cyber Monday sales!

Just a Heads Up for everyone: Everything in both the Etsy and Artfire shops is 25% Off through Monday. Protip: Etsy has more of the finished jewelry, Artfire has more of the buttons.

Fall into Winter

Well, the Seattle summer ended rather definitively, with the wettest September on record. That's not great for my energy levels, but good for longer kiln-running hours. I've been in heavy production mode lately, getting ready for the Northwest Bead Society Bead Bazaar this weekend. It's October 5th & 6th in the Hansen events center at Comcast Arena in Everett, WA. I've been making a lot of buttons, in various styles, but quite a lot of handpaint.

Works in progress

Hand-Painted Knots

I've also been working on a few special cloisonne pieces as examples of the custom work that I'm capable of:

Before firing #4

After firing #4

 I did manage to actually finish a few, too!

The tiny blue star, the derpiest jack-o-lantern, and the awesomest rose

I hope, if you're in the area, you come out to the Beed Bazaar! If not, look for a steady increase in listings on Artfire and Etsy as we get into the holiday season.

WorldCon

Well, that was big.

To be perfectly honest, I broke my one show sales record by a couple hundred dollars so I should be happy, but it's not as much as I was hoping for, given the expense involved. Venturing back home to Texas for a show reminded me that Fandom is not walled off from local culture. I was preparing for a Pacific Northwest show, with lots of claws and some hair pins and a particular jewelry mix, since that's what I was accustomed to, but it turns out that Texas fandom has different desires. I'm completely sold out of forged hair pins, both bronze and sterling, and could have sold more if I'd had them, but the great majority of my claw sales were to people from the PNW. This shows me that I need to do some more research into the fan culture in Detroit before NASFiC next year. Beyond that, I met a lot of interesting people and made a few new friends. I had a pretty good time, though I hardly got to Con at all. After the dealers room shut down, and I rested and ate, most of the panels were over. I did get to see the Masquerade, though, and that was fun.

I like my new booth setup quite a bit since I'm keeping so many  of the pieces in their tins all the time. It takes a little longer to set up and tear down, since all the display pieces have to come out of and go back into their tins, but I think it's worth it for the nice, slick look of the table.

The New Product for this convention (in the way that award badges/medals were developed at Norwescon) is Badge Lanyards. Pictures will be forthcoming in the next few days as I photograph and list the remaining pieces.

The Etsy and Artfire shops are back up, and will be slowly filling as I get caught up. There should be more hair pins in a day or two.

Next up: The Northwest Bead Society Bead Bazaar! October 5th-6th at the Hansen Conference Center at Comcast Arena in Everett, WA! This show will be almost exclusively buttons and findings (hooks/eyes, etc), so drop by and see what's come out of R&D this summer, along with a lot of handpaints and a little bit of cloisonné.

The Museum of Flight!

Today's big Announcement is that my Different Worlds line has officially been picked up by the Museum Of Flight Store! I delivered the first order yesterday, and stuck around to explore the museum.

So, to be perfectly honest, I really thought I was going to spend a couple of hours looking at antique planes, get lunch and go back to the studio to work for the afternoon. It didn't really work out like that.  In fact, "a couple hours" turned into 6 hours, and I didn't leave the museum until 4:30pm! There are plenty of antique planes, but they're awesome antique planes.

I don't know if this ever actually flew, but wow.

wright bros. flyer repro

But the museum's strong point is that all the history surrounding the antique planes is made exceptionally clear with signage and multimedia presentations. This is not "book history," this is real, relevant, awesome history. I spent 6 hours happily learning things.

Things like:

When they talk about the "birth of commercial aviation," no one ever mentions that the midwife was the U.S. Postal Service

This is probably the type of helicopter my dad worked on most often in Vietnam.

Rosie the Riveter was a Seattleite...

and she came in ALL colors.

These amazing pilots would ferry military planes around during WWII, and would single-hand planes labeled "minimum crew: 3".

Russian space capsules are tiny

And history repeats itself. 

I also picked up a lot of reference pics for future projects (an awful lot of these guys include some enamel):

All in all, I had an incredible time, and I think everybody should visit this place.

Big Things A-Brewing and Continuing Education

But First, Housekeeping: A new batch of claws came off the bench last week, and all the Etsy and Artfire listings have been updated with the new quantities.  Subtle design updates will be happening in both the shops and the website this summer, and there will be new products being rolled out.

Big News #1: My Jewelry can now be found available to purchase in the wild at Ventures: Gifts for Good on the mezzanine level at Pike Place Market! Ventures is the retail incubator store of Washington C. A. S. H..  I spent April and May attending their Business Development Training class, and it was incredible.  I got a fresh look at my business and my goals, and a better handle on the direction the studio is headed in, and a consignment slot at Ventures.
The interesting thing about all this is that when I started NightshadeRose Studio, my intent was to be an artist.  I was going to be making fancy one-of-a-kind jewelry and big illustration pieces. It turns out that I'm not really suited to that kind of work.  Flights of fancy are great for product development and goofing off, but not for paying rent and putting food on the table.  Doing something completely new every time, and then selling it retail in-person is a) exhausting, and b) outside my capabilities. So, rather than being all over the place all the time, I'm mostly narrowing down to specific themes and styles that are the most interesting to me to make and to customers to wear.  The business development training gave me an opportunity to talk to buyers for established, respectable retail shops about the sorts of things I'm doing, and it turns out that not only is my current work (like the coffee pieces) marketable, but some older ideas that I thought maybe weren't going anywhere in fact have legs.

Y'all remember the Different Worlds pieces, yes?

\

Well, the idea is being revisited in a neater, more put-together line:

Earth

Mars

2 Venuses

3-phase Moon Bracelet

Hemisphere Earrings (an Earth-like planet)

Waxing & Waning earrings

The reason I focused on these things in particular is that one of the buyers I met showed specific interest in space-related pieces, and will likely be giving me my first real wholesale order at the end of the month.  It's not a done deal yet, so I'm not going into detail  just now, but when the order is delivered, I'll brag about it to the high heavens.

In other news, I've decided I need to knock off Lucretia Borgia's comb from the first episode of Warehouse 13.