FOXY Fusions Blog

Sitting in GrapeVine Texas at the annual GrapeFest festival, I thought I would write a little something about them FOXY Charms….since this festival is all about the wine! But don’t stop reading if you don’t like wine…you can use FOXY Charms on any stemware: margaritas, martinis, champagne, you name it. (Can you tell I’m well versed in the drink menu?)

My daughter Shana cringes when I tell her “We’re making FOXY Charms in the studio today!”  These little gems are tough and tedious to make. First I cut each base piece which is roughly 0.5″ x 0.75″, making sure the edges are rectangular, and cold-working any weird edge that occurs when snapping along cut lines. Then I cut the second layer which needs to be placed like a little picture frame along the bottom edge of the base piece.  Then we use some fiber paper cut into very thin strips to make the “channel” for the wine glass hoop. And the piece de resistance: an ultra thin piece of glass (the “strap”) along the top of all layers. Shana hates this last piece because it always wants to lean one way or another, and not lie flat like a good little piece of glass.

Then we load the kiln with all these little gems in the making.

This picture shows a half-loaded kiln that, working alone, took me about 4 hours to fill. If I were to package these FOXY Charms into sets, I would get 28 sets.

After these little charms come out of the kiln, they need to have the fiber paper removed, be cleaned up, and be added to boxed sets of FOXY Charms for selling.

FOXY Charms are truly a labor of love. And wine.

And now…for a glass of wine.

Warning: I am stepping on my soap box~!

An interesting aspect of this past weekend’s show in Arkansas was that it was held at an outdoor mall. Partially this was a great thing because of the mall security already built-in to the environment…artisans did not need to worry about their booths being vandalized overnight. And initially I thought it would be good for business as well since people who did not know about the festival might discover it when they arrived at the mall…already in the “shopping” mindset.

However, in Rogers Arkansas an interesting phenomenon occurred. People shopped at Dillards, Eddie Bauer and other established retailers….and did not purchase from the crafters and artisans lining the streets in front of these shops. It was such a mystery to my booth neighbor why she was not selling her handcrafted jewelry when there seemed to be a steady stream of shoppers walking past that she went inside Dillards to see if anyone was buying in there. And lo and behold…gathered around the jewelry counter were gaggles of women buying Fossil and other national brands.

Back out on the street, crafters were uniting and chanting “No lemmings allowed!”  (It wasn’t like chanting actually…more like muttering under our breath!)  Which leads me to the point of this blog….

Why should consumers favor products from crafters in an art fair rather than products from established retailers? Here’s a quick list I can think of without trying too hard at all:

• Karma and positive energy. Crafters passionately create their products individually by hand in a studio or other friendly environment. National retailers sell products made without passion by workers in factories.
• Buy local, support the local economy. Crafters at art fairs in your local community are from the United States, and probably from your state or town. If you spend your dollars with local business, it stays in your community.
• Handcrafted=Special. Products you buy from crafters are one-of-a-kind, unique, and special. No one else will have one just like yours. This makes you special. Don’t you want to be special?
• Better quality, lower cost, higher overall value. Products from crafters are often made better because artisans pay attention to detail. And it seems like a contradiction, but products from crafters are often less money than similar products from national retailers because we don’t have all that overhead built into the cost structure. All we have to pay for is our home.

What are you waiting for? I challenge each of you reading today’s blog to make your next purchase from an artisan…check out www.etsy.com if you need a place to start!

This morning I ventured out to Pea Ridge National Military Park in Garfield Arkansas for my 7 mile jog, one of the first long runs for this season’s marathon training. The one-way Telegraph Road loop winds through historic grounds where Cherokee indians migrated to Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears during the winter of 1838-39, and Confederate and Union soldiers clashed during the Pea Ridge Campaign in March of 1862.

For a land that witnessed so much human misery, it was quite peaceful and beautiful on this overcast and cool morning. Graceful tree limbs arced overhead as I jogged the gradual uphill climb to the East Overlook where exhibits explained the fighting that took place in the battlefield below over a hundred years ago.

As I read the exhibit at the first stop and saw that the Trail of Tears passed through this land, I wondered if my ancestors could sense the presence of kindred blood. My maternal grandfather was born to a full blooded Cherokee woman and the European man who fell in love with her. She died shortly after his birth, and family history was rewritten with a new caucasian mother who enabled a smoother integration with polite society. As a genealogist, my mother has searched and searched for the identity of my great grandmother to no avail…she has all but disappeared into history.

I jogged along this road where my ancestors walked over a hundred years ago, and thought they would be comforted to know that they are remembered, and that their progeny walk the earth freely and happily.

Every season I decide that I’m really not loving a couple designs anymore, and I get traitorous and replace them! The good news is that I replace them with young upstarts that have lots of FOXY style! Check out the two new FOXY Circle designs for this fall…I am LOVING them.

These new FOXY Circles will be up on my website soon.

Notice how these two photographs look different from the photos on my website? I’ve been working on getting new, crisper photographs of FOXY designs so they’re easier to see online. Hope you like these pics better!

Yes…I’ve finally managed to make HOOP earrings out of fused glass! This was the most challenging project I’ve given myself yet, and I had the most wasted glass yet of any project as well with all the breakages! Take a look and let me know what you think!

I made these earrings by making blocks of glass following the patterns in my FOXY Circles line, fusing these blocks a really long time, then drilling the blocks with my coring bits.

Coring glass with a drill press is very dangerous and difficult. In fact, the local art center (Art Glass Fusing Center in Austin) does not even have a drill press anymore because of insurance risks…a student sliced her hand open coring glass during a class!

The bigger the drill bit, the longer it takes to core glass and the wackier the glass block behaves as it’s being cored. It can split entirely in a second and catapult its sharp broken edges into your hand…this is likely how that student sliced open her hand. The glass makes all kinds of weird noises as it’s being cored, all of which makes a person skittish during the actual coring process, so this is not for the faint-at-heart!

Using a drill press to core glass necessitates violating several key rules of shop class:

• Never put your hands near the blade. Well, you have to steady the glass block until the drill bit takes hold and starts cutting the glass, which means YOUR HAND IS NEAR THE BLADE. Luckily, the diamond grit on the coring bit feels a bit like a cat’s tongue when it’s in motion, so I don’t really think this is the dangerous part.
• Never use water with electrical tools. Again, you gotta break this rule because water is the lubricant needed for the drill bits to cut through the glass. You need water, and lots of it.
• Protect your hands and eyes at all times. Actually, this one you SHOULD adhere to. I wear gloves and eye goggles when coring and coldworking glass. Glass is sharp, and if you don’t wear gloves the very least you’ll experience are a thousand papercut-type wounds on your fingers.

So…now that you know what I’ve been through this week, and you see how BEAUTIFUL these FOXY HOOPS are, you’ll totally agree that these puppies are well worth the $50 price tag I’m giving them. 8-)  Happy Thursday!

After two days of immersion in projects, I have returned to the FOXY blog to give ya’ll an update. Here’s an insight into the life of an artist…my life is probably very similar to yours! As a mom/artist, I juggle getting kids off to school, volunteering with the PTA, and after-school homework and sports practices with time in the studio, marketing FOXY Fusions and other administrative tasks, and….drumroll….”real” work. Yep! I do some freelance consulting work to pay the bills and keep the lights on in the studio when I’m not at shows selling jewelry. So the past two days I’ve been using my left brain instead of my right…and it is tired and wants the right brain to do some work!

Right brain…activate!

Tonight through next Thursday I’ll be working on my new earring designs…HOOP earrings made out of glass, one set in each design from my FOXY Circles series! I am so excited about these earrings! I made a prototype and Shana and I both loved the earrings…they’re nice and big, with the hole offset in the middle, and they’re not too heavy at all….Loving them! (I’ll upload a picture once I complete them so you can see!)

We’ll see if FOXY customers think the FOXY Hoop earrings are as swanky as I do at my upcoming shows:

• September 11-13 I’ll be in Rogers Arkansas at the Pinnacle Hills Art Festival. I haven’t done this show before (in fact, never shown FOXY in Arkansas before), so I’m looking forward to the adventure. (Website)
• September 17-20 I’ll be in GrapeVine for the annual GrapeFest celebration! I’ve heard this festival is chock full of customers and really good family fun, so I am very excited to participate. (Website)
• September 26 I’ll be in Dallas at the All About Uptown Festival. I love Dallas, and my hubby will be going with me and taking me dancing after the show! (Website)

It’s going to be a busy month! Hold onto your hats!

When you own your business, and it’s only you, at first you have to be an expert about everything. For the last four years running FOXY Fusions, I’ve become knowledgeable not only about working with fused glass, but about making leather cord necklaces, wire-wrapping earrings, processing credit card transactions wirelessly, setting up a booth display, designing product merchandising, weighting down my tent so it doesn’t fly away, writing content and building pages for my website, implementing an online store, designing business cards and advertisements, taking photos of my pieces (still hate this part!), talking with customers and making sales, researching “good” shows and getting into them, registering trademarks for my company, filing taxes, and a myriad of other skills that I never knew I would have to learn to start my own jewelry business.

For the first time since I started my business, I’m hiring someone who is an expert! And I am so excited! Karly Hand is a graphic and web designer and she is going to give FOXY Fusions website an overhaul in terms of look and feel, navigation, and integration of my online presence. She’s going to make me look like what I am–a glass artist!

It’s still so funny to me that I am an artist, I learned how to do graphic design, and yet when I make a look for FOXY Fusions it is totally corporate. I’m not a corporation! I’m an indie artist, self-representing, living in the funky town of Austin! FOXY Fusions isn’t mass-marketed jewelry…it’s one-of-a-kind handcrafted artwork for your body that I make out in my studio with my neighbors’ cows looking over the fence at me!

Stay tuned for the real FOXY to emerge online! Can’t wait!