Wow, it's been a while since I had a regular Friday posting schedule, but I'm back to it now! I figured I'd be gone through the holidays and come back in Spring, and it's about time for Spring and for me to start unloading all the wonderful fluid art and body jewelry I've been making.
I've made canvas fluid art paintings, at least a couple dozen fluid art magnets, and a handful of velvet chokers with various finishings and clasps, and my return and process of trying to sell them now has gotten me thinking about my future making and selling art.
Business on Twitter is very hard, follower count does not really correlate to amount of people that have the funds and are ready to purchase art, so visibility and sales are nonexistent.
My main plan has been to wait for summer and to sell my work in a booth at art fairs and conventions, so fingers crossed that that turns out well!
When I started making the chokers and plotting out my ideas for what kind of body jewelry I wanted to do in the future, I thought of using Etsy because it's a great place to have images of what's available in a scrollable gallery rather than showing one by one in a tweet or a blog post, and has been a good platform for handmade sellers in the past.
However, Etsy's customer service and fairness to sellers has taken a HUGE dive and I'm just not really interested in getting my hopes up to sell on Etsy only for it to fail. So, that kind of leaves me in an only-selling-to-friends-and-advertising-on-twitter limbo again.
My idea right now is that I might make a bigcartel store page, and post that on here and on my Twitter but again, reaching people for art sales through here and on Twitter is difficult. Either nobody has money, or nobody's seeing the ads. We'll see what happens!
So, while this post isn't going to be an ad or me listing what things I have finished, I want to share my excitement about jumping into a new vein of art, explain a little about why I began making chokers, and my plans for making more body jewelry in the future. Of course, with lots of pictures along the way.
THE CHOKERS
I guess the best place to start is with a little background. My newish obsession with chokers and certain body jewelry springs from my wanting to be able to express myself more, and trying to shed the issues with CPTSD and identity confusion that have gotten in the way of me feeling like I could express myself with style and jewelry.
I love chokers, but since my teenage years I haven't been able to let anything touch the front of my neck. Every crew neck Tshirt I own is always cut, (I made this GIF recently and it's a good example except that it's a pajama shirt and very torn at this point and tore farther down the neck than I usually cut)
and I wouldn't wear necklaces any looser than my pentacle. It's been a big annoyance and trigger for me, not being able to trust people fully.
A good example of this is when I have to get my TSH levels checked for my Hashimoto's Thyroiditis, an autoimmune disease that disrupts the function of my endocrine system and basically everything else because of that. The thyroid gland is in the neck, and mine has a nodule on it which may or not be involved with my thyroid hormone levels being crazy.
But this means it has to be monitored, meaning every time my doc has to massage my neck, poking around while I keep my eyes locked on my fiance's and he reminds me to breathe, and I do my best not to shake while my eyes fill up with tears that I hope the doctor doesn't notice.
So as you can imagine, chokers have been a huge no-no. But with focusing on recovering and having been with my fiance for 4+ years, I've been doing a lot of work becoming more okay with certain things. Still only my fiance can touch my neck without triggering panic, but that's incredible progress compared to when we started dating and it was basically the first thing I had to warn him about.
I wanted to start making chokers for myself, because being able to wear them is a big step for me but DISASTER, my neck is too small for the kind of chokers you see in stores, and if they aren't made with enough chain, I can't adjust them. So I started making my own, and then as I began to share pictures of the process of making them, my friends became really interested and started giving suggestions and making orders for customs.
The process starts with me online window-shopping, just looking at all the supplies I'd need, and then in true art school educated style, I slap together an idea in MS paint and save it in a folder of designs.
Then is my almost favorite step, the supplies come in and I scream and do a happy dance. I don't have much space for proper storage for all my art supplies, so I have them in a box in a *somewhat* organized way.
Then I begin construction. I cut the ribbon down, because it usually comes in 3 ft lengths. Then I put on the end crimps and connect the clasps with the right kind of metal loops.
The fun thing about making things for yourself is that you can pick exactly the finishings you want, so I did some playing around with clasps that I liked.
Once the chokers are finished, I find a sunny spot and do a photo shoot of them with my dress form, Victoria. Here she is in a few of my favorite finished chokers.
Thanks for letting me share my art making journey with you! I'll be posting about my new fluid art paintings and the magnet making process either next week or soon after that, it depends when my collab post will be ready to come out.
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