So finally I say to myself, “Get off of the computer and make something”. It’s the weekend and I’d better actually get busy with an order I have. Networking is fun but it hasn’t transferred into sales as of yet.

I go out to my garage studio that I used to keep at a low 47 degrees F until it was time to make beads and then I would crank it up to a comfortable temperature. Now with the cost of fuel I have had to curtail that. That and some unseasonably warmer temps here in interior Alaska . I go to turn on my digital controller which is the apparatus that keeps my annealing kiln at 940 degrees F and somehow it wasn’t turning my kiln on. I isolated the kiln from the controller and the kiln worked fine.

After a search for the manual for the controller I had something to go by but it was only telling me how to reboot it if it had a certain kind of error message, which it didn’t.Now you may think I actually know what I’m talking about here but I am not that electronically savvy. I called my friend that fuses glass and owns a kiln just in case he could help me out but no one was home.Wading through pages of instructions I decided to treat it as if it had an error message. Something seemed to be responding. I thought I had success. Then it told me to reset it to the default values from the manufacturer if I so desired. I SO desired! I thought but how the heck do I do that? It took me quite a while to realize that there were two nearly identical pages of instructions and the second page was telling me how I could do it. And guess what? I DID it! MYSELF! without calling the company in Ontario two days later.

A proud moment for this girl. Now I could go ahead and put in a few hours of my production work of rainbow whorls for a local tourist gift shop.These days as an artist I am finding you have to learn quite a few skills to market yourself and even maintain your equipment whether it’s learning how to scan, blog, photograph your work, make business cards, photoshop , it goes on. One of my next goals is to learn how to photograph my work better by using a lightbox. So far I’m recording most of my work with a scanner which is actually not too bad for smaller pieces but I find it lacking for the necklaces as it has to lay flat.I’ve tried to hire people for various aspects of my presentation such as web design but have had problems contacting when I need to make changes. The photography has been a problem as well which leads me back to the realization that I need to do it myself to have the control I need. It is exciting and sometimes daunting and sometimes I get lost on what my priorities should be.

Let’s see …Make something?…. work on tags?…brochure?….. network?……clean my studio?…. Photograph?… enter juried art shows?…. You’re all familiar  with this I’m sure.

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