Collections

I have recently been giving a lot of thought to designing "collections."  By this I mean designing a series of items that aren't spontaneous one-offs, but rather a cohesive group with a unifying look, theme, and inspiration that is at least partially planned out ahead of time and that can be summarized and explained by the designer.

I'm not sure that I have many coherent thoughts on the matter so far, except that designing collections is hard.  Over the summer, I received a suggestion to organize my shop by collections, but the fact is that my pieces were too eclectic and I was unable to shoehorn them into categories.  So, while those existing pieces will remain in the shop (which is currently organized by medium... for example, "metal collage," "beaded," "knitted," etc.), designing a cohesive fall collection has been high on my list.

The problem is that it can be hard to design a collection without feeling restricted by the theme and look upon which you've decided.  What if you have an idea that doesn't fit in?  What if you start working and the concept changes and evolves?  What are the benefits and drawbacks to designing in this way?  Are you limiting your creativity?  Are you limiting your customer base?

For my readers (I think I'm up to 26 now... yay!), I'm curious... have you ever designed a "collection" before?  If not, would you try it, or would you find it to be too restrictive?  If you do design in collections, what are the benefits?  What is your process like, how do you choose a theme, and how do you handle changes during the creative process?

Images from Sarah Burton's first collection for Alexander McQueen, Spring 2011.

ACEO

As you can probably guess from my previous blog posts, I am someone who really likes to be surrounded by art.  I have a collector's mentality when it comes to beautiful things... I want them in my possession, and on display, and if they happen to be rare or unusual, then all the better.

When I was an attorney, collecting art (and other stuff) was no big deal.  I was never rich, but I made enough to get by and to spend some money on the things that I felt were important.  When I made the decision to stop practicing law, I knew I'd have to give a lot of things up.  Unfortunately, there's a huge difference between giving up fancy highlights and Chanel nail polish (ok, maybe I didn't give that up so much as space out my purchases a little more) and having to give up a hobby or a creative pursuit.

That's why I was really excited when I discovered ACEOs.  ACEOs are these little cards, the size of baseball cards, that artists make and then trade with each other or sell for a couple of dollars in places like Etsy.  Here's the official definition from the Etsy ACEO Street Team:

ACEO stands for "Art Cards, Editions and Originals". They are 3.5 x 2.5 inches 6.4 x 8.9 cms - the size of a trading card. They can be created using any medium.

Art Cards were originally traded between artists. While artists were happily trading cards, the general public was left out in the cold, having no Art Cards to trade. A group of artists realized this, and quickly made their cards available for sale! Artists from all over the world are creating, and selling these little works of art in different mediums and subject matter. You can use ACEO's as traditional art and hang them on the wall in frames, or you can place them in an album for a unique coffee table book. Extremely collectible art, you can't stop at just one!

At first, I didn't really see the point of ACEOs - what was I going to do with all these tiny trading cards?  Then I bought one... just one... and I was hooked.  Not only are they cute when framed and hung on the wall in big bunches, but the key thing that I realized was that with ACEOs, I could have any art that I wanted.  It was like shopping at Target instead of Prada, and the only potential obstacle was the artists' willingness or unwillingness to produce their artwork in ACEO size.

After collecting for a couple of months, I couldn't resist - I had to try my hand at making my own.  I did some mixed media collages first, and then decided to return to a favorite medium of my high school years... oil pastels.  I hit upon the idea of incorporating my own handspun yarn, and the "Art of Yarn" series was born!

So when a fellow Time Traveler, agentofchaos, suggested a team ACEO swap, I jumped on the project.  Agent held signups and then put all of our names into a random number generator.  We each sent out three ACEOs, and got three back in the mail.  Although everyone's ACEOs totally rocked, I really did score in that the three ACEOs I received were from artists whose work I really admire and would probably have bought eventually anyway:  poppydreamz, kuhlwhip, and amth13.

From left to right: Poppy's card, Amth's card, and two cards from Kuhl.

Amth's card is entitled "The Moon" and it came with a wonderful message: "The moon encourages us to listen to our intuition and pay attention to our dreams."  Now how did you know, Amth, exactly which inspirational message I needed to hear at this moment?  :)

I encourage everyone to visit these three artists' fabulous shops, and to explore the possibility of ACEO collecting.  If you need some suggestions, here are three more shops that have a wide selection of amazing ACEOs from which to choose, as well as excellent customer service:

http://www.etsy.com/shop/TheVenusCollection
http://www.etsy.com/shop/meliafroggy
http://www.etsy.com/shop/ArtSnark

If you want to try making your own ACEOs, you can cut your own blanks out of cardstock, or purchase blanks in a variety of paper types at art supply stores or in general craft stores like Michael's.

Please comment and let me know if you're already an ACEO collector, have recently discovered them or made some of your own, or if ACEOs are entirely new to you.  I'd love to hear how others collect and display these awesome little works of art!

NaNo Fail

I'm supposed to be doing NaNoWriMo right now.

For anyone who doesn't know, NaNoWriMo stands for "National Novel Writing Month." It happens every November, and the goal is to write an entire novel in one month. It's pretty popular... there's even a website through which you can arrange local meetups and chat with other writers about your ideas. It's a big crazy writing party, basically... at least, from what I've heard. I tried to do it in 2008, and wrote about 15,000 words of a crappy vampire novel before I got totally overwhelmed and quit. Every year since then, I've promised myself that I would participate again, and every year something (Christmas knitting? Final exams?) has happened to prevent me from doing so.

This year, the powers behind NaNo decided, quite rightly, that November was a pretty craptacular month to have to write a book. So, for people like me, they set up "Camp NaNoWriMo," to take place during the entire month of August. I got really excited about this, thinking I'd have plenty of time to write, and I contacted a friend and we agreed that we would both participate. Fast forward to yesterday, when I realized that it was three days into August, and I had never even signed up.

The sucky part is that I actually feel guilty about this, even though it will probably have absolutely no impact on my life. I could still start, of course, and try to make up for the lost time. I also have what I would consider to be more important things to do... job hunting, managing my Etsy shop, and bringing my cholesterol down, among others. But I feel like I'm letting myself down by not doing NaNo yet again. When will I get around to this? Will it become like the enormous stash closet of yarn that I will never knit up because it so far exceeds my life expectancy? Or the "to read" list that still includes unread titles from 18 years ago?

Arg.

Anyway... I don't know what I'll be doing about that, but having gotten that vent out of the way, let me focus on a few things that I HAVE been doing.

First of all, the Glee Cast Knit Project seems to be a go. If you haven't visited the Rav group yet, then definitely check it out. It seems that one of the team leaders has been in touch with someone from the costume department and is photographing all of the items before sending them on. Whether or not my scarf ends up on the show, my dream is for Naya to tweet about it. Everyone should be following her at @NayaRivera on Twitter, because she's just fantastic.

From the scarf, I moved onto a couple of new projects. I'm actually knitting for MYSELF for a change. I'm working on an Amiga cardigan, the pattern for which can be found in the spring/summer issue of Knitty.  I'm also test knitting a really cute felted witch hat pattern for everywitchway on Etsy... check out their store to see the pattern, as well as a lot of adorable Pagan-esque quilting patterns (they will appeal to non-Pagans as well; for example, the "Samhain" pattern will easily fit in with anyone's Halloween decor.)  They have an awesome shop, and I'm excited to be trying out one of their patterns.

I've also been doing quite a lot of metal collage and assemblage work.  I'm probably going to do a post about metal collage at some point, but for now I'll just say that I've gotten some awesome things up in my shop, and am working on getting a few placed at a local gallery (because I really think that metal collage pieces look a lot more spectacular in person.)  Here are a few of my newer listings:

I sent in my contribution for the August Phat Fiber box, the theme of which is Bollywood.  To be honest, I wasn't nearly as into this theme as I was with the Art Nouveau one last month.  I'm not crazy about Bollywood, so I didn't take any particular film as inspiration; I just sort of conjured up some Bollywood type colorways and sent in a variety of samples:

Even though the theme wasn't really my thing, I am thoroughly enjoying these contributions.  I'm definitely going to continue with this... the September theme is "Enchanted Forest," which is a bit more appealing to me, so I'm already thinking over some potential colorways.

Finally, I am seriously gearing up for Halloween!  Though I appreciate the idyllic summer I've been having here in the countryside of Pennsylvania (last summer I was doing an internship in Boston and sleeping on the floor in an unfurnished apartment with no air conditioning), I always get antsy for Halloween around this time of year.  The Time Travelers Team on Etsy held a big surprise Halloween event on Monday night, and it was a raging success.  I think people are getting ready for fall, and I'm excited to start putting up more yarn and knitwear and other cold weather stuff, not to mention knit myself some fall sweaters.  What do you guys think... are you ready for fall?

And I wonder why I don't have time for NaNoWriMo!  This blog post probably has enough words to make up my daily installment and then some!  Ah, well, you can't please all of the people all of the time (or even yourself for that matter.)  Perhaps I'll start late, perhaps I'll wait until November, but either way, I can't say that I haven't been busy.  :)