FOXY Fusions Blog

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!

As the school year begins, I am busy with preparations for leading this year’s Reflections program at my sons’ elementary school. I just love inspiring young minds!

For those of you that may not know about it, Reflections is a national PTA program designed to give students an opportunity to explore and learn about various art forms including music, photography, visual art and literature. Every year they have a theme, and this year’s theme is “Beauty Is….” Take a look at the website (www.pta.org) and view the slideshow of the artwork that won top awards last year. These kiddos are amazing!

At our school, we will show off our kids’ creativity in a two-week exhibit of entries down the main hallways. It’s a great way to get those beginner artists used to public commentary (which is not always nice by the way!) and being on display~! And it’s good for inspiring the kids that didn’t create an entry too…maybe next year they will!

When it comes to fused glass, there are countless approaches people use to create kiln-fired pieces. But it really boils down to this: do you prefer creation by accident, or by design?

Let’s consider the importance of personality in answering this question. For example, I am a control freak and totally obsessive-compulsive…(although I have an uncanny ability to ignore a mess in my house … hmmmm … contradiction!).  So venture a guess as to the type of creation I prefer.

If you guessed “by design”….You are RIGHT! I like to think that I planned for my work to come out of the kiln that way. I like structure, intentional design, and reproducible results. I willingly accept the “chaos” inherent with glass that each piece will slump differently in the kiln, have a different section of dichroic glass that changes the color…in essence, that each piece will be unique. But with creation by design, your work comes out of the kiln reasonably close to how you intended it to look.

Creation by accident is really fun for those who generally like to leave things to chance. I can’t describe this person very well because I simply don’t understand them from my OCD perspective, but it seems they actually enjoy letting go. One way to create by accident with fused glass is to do a pot melt. The result is a fully fused block of glass with completely random patterns and colors that formed by accident as the glass melted and dripped down to the kiln shelf. Another way of doing this is by layering glass on top of a sheet of steel mesh that is suspended between two kiln blocks inside the kiln. The glass drips down through the mesh as it melts, forming random patterns and swirls of color.

So as I try to grow as an artist, I realize I do need to accept a little accident into my life. I do think the pot melting technique produces interesting results … maybe you’ll see it emerge as a planned element in my future designs!

I really like getting my glass hot…but sometimes, I don’t want it to get too hot because I like retaining a structure for my designs. For example, I’m careful not to heat my FOXY Rectangle designs too hot or too long because I want to retain that clean linear shape, that picture frame effect between the bottom and middle layers is soooo satisfying to me. So for my FOXY Rectangles, I use a tack fuse. This means I heat the layered pieces of glass until the glass just sticks together, allowing each layer of glass to keep its own individual texture, shape, and character. Every kiln is different (I told you this wasn’t going to be easy!) so for my environment, this means I don’t heat the glass hotter than 1450 degrees…and I don’t let it soak longer than a few minutes. The longer glass soaks at a hot temperature, the more it wants to round out the corners…and I want my rectangles to be rectangles!

For my FOXY Circles, my methodology is completely different. I need all the layers of glass to completely melt and fuse together, forming a block with a flat rounded surface, in what is called a full fuse. A full fuse occurs somewhere between 1450 and 1550 degrees, and the glass needs to soak a long time to fully bond together, and then it needs to anneal a long time as the temperature reduces to let the glass settle. After I’ve made the block of glass, I use a drill press to core out the circle pendants, I coldwork the pendants using a glass grinder to give them a nice shape, and then I refire the pendants using a fire polish. A fire polish heats the glass to its melting point to give it a shiny appearance, getting rid of those rough edges from coring and cold-working the glass to form the pendants. Typically, a fire polish is somewhere between 1300 to 1400 Fahrenheit.

I hope this has helped you understand a little bit more about what I do to create FOXY Fusions designs!

The glass I use starts out as sheets of hard, breakable stuff. So how do I make this very hard material change shape, become malleable, and permanently stick to other layers of glass? The trick is to heat the glass in a kiln to such high temperatures that the glass actually melts. But there’s more to it (it’s never that simple is it?)…

Some glass cannot ever fuse together. Here’s why: when the glass melts, it expands; when it cools, it contracts. This rate of expansion/contraction is actually what determines whether one sheet of glass will bond to another sheet of glass. It’s called the Coefficient of Expansion or COE.

Not all sheets of glass have the same COE, and you can’t bond two sheets of glass together unless they have the same COE. If you try to bond glass of different COE, the project will crack when it cools because the sheets of glass will each contract at their own special rates…which won’t be the same. So the first clue to making sure that layers of glass will fuse in the kiln after they’ve melted is to use the same COE for all glass in your project. I use glass with a COE of 90.

By the way, this is also why I can’t use scraps of recycled glass for my projects…even though I’d love to do it…because they’re not COE 90 and won’t fuse to the dichroic and other fusible glass that I use.

When glass is heated, it softens and if more heat is applied, it begins to melt and flow. When two or more pieces of glass are heated together at first they will stick, or tack together. When heated further, they will melt together, flatten out, and become one solid piece of glass.

Once layers of glass are fused together, they do not spontaneously unfuse. If layers of glass separate after having been fused together, it is because the piece was traumatized by some kind of force (like dropping on the floor) and the point of breakage will be the weakest area near the impact.

I once had a customer find me at a show and tell me her FOXY Rectangle pendant spontaneously split into the 3 layers. Since I know glass does not unfuse once fused, I knew right away the piece had been dropped or banged against something.  Still, an unhappy customer is not very FOXY, so I offered her a very significant discount towards a new piece. My customers must be FOXY at all times!

If you have a FOXY Rectangle that has split cleanly upon impact into the respective layers, it is possible that I can refire and repair the piece. Send me a photo and I’ll give you my expert opinion. Worst case, you’ll get a hefty discount on a new piece!

If you have a FOXY Circle that has fallen and broken or been chipped, I may be able to refire it as well and fix it. These actually are a little easier to repair…so send a photo if you need this service.