I’ve made a decision that I’m not going to sell my books on eBay anymore. I will if they lower this recent fee percentage, but I see that as a long term question for eBay to answer than something that is going to happen anytime soon. I suspect that eBay will never lower that fee, but my thought is that they could have increased their middle tier fee by a full percent and reaped as much if not more dollars to their bottom line than they could have with the increase to the initial FVF. But I digress this post isn’t about eBay and my analysis of what I think they could have done better, I could write a whole blog every day of every week for the next 20 years and never run out of material on that topic.

This is about my choice to not sell on eBay and only on Etsy. I have already removed my link on the left of this page for eBay and replace it with a link to my Etsy page. As a part time artist, I have made the decision that all of my art endeavors need to be self supporting. I don’t strive to make a lot of money on my art but as a former manager and buyer for a larger corporation it irks me when a company attempts to take advantage of what little I make on my work. I put a lot of time and energy into my work. I do it because I love it. I love to make books and art. I sell it to buy more materials and occasionally do something that I enjoy outside of the studio. It’s part of my rules- arts and crafts must self sustain. When eBay raised it’s prices it cuts into that small fraction of what I make, that little portion of money that my books bring home to me. I found it frustrating and irritating that a giant corporation chose it’s bottom line over me.

Granted I know that the bottom line is always what it’s all about but I work for a company in the Fortune 500 whose ethos state that the employee and customer come first and that the bottom line will follow. I have to say that as I’ve  seen it, it works when you place value on people, the people who work hard for you, they  make the company what it is. There is a reason that people stay working for the company I work for, it’s not glamorous work, but the fact remains that in all but a few circumstances they value the human element of their company and that value allows people to excel. When you allow people to excel your company grows and expands with those people.

That’s what eBay forgot- that its nothing with out its sellers. The current CEO might see his company as a "flee market" but those of us who were selling way back in 2000 and have been around, tried things out, grew with the company  are the people who are the backbone of the company. Buyers/customers will always be around but sellers, we’re the spine of eBay and without those of us who are tried eBay is a boring place to buy knock off designer bags and cheap electronics.

A scam is a scam no matter what you dress it in, gucci or not.

Yesterday I spent the evening collating pages with covers. I had spent some time this weekend breaking down a a large quantity of posters from the large 3’x4′ state to small 8.5"x11" cover pieces. It was crazy. I have a stack of covers about a foot high. Yeah it’s a lot of covers. So last night I collated a full ream of paper to a few of the covers, and then clipped them into place. Tonight I hope I’ll have the energy to stitch up a few books.

My boss gave me quite a few really cool posters so I’m hoping to have a few really awesome covers, so far from what I’ve seen they will be very cool. There were a lot of very cool color combinations- pinks and browns, tans and greens, etc… This crop of advertising is lighter and airier than some of the darker and more sedate posters I’ve had in the past.

Last night I trimmed a few I had stitched a couple of weekends ago and I had screwed up on about half of them, not in the trimming aspect but the stitching. I’d had a few issues with my sewing machine. It’s amazing to me how much I abuse the thing but how the relatively simple technology can be fixed easily.

This is a sweet little time lapse video of the creation of a journal page from donnadowney on YouTube.

After finishing my old journal I decided I wanted to shift gears and try something new with my journal, so I made a folio and tore sheets of stonehenge to 5.5×7 inch sheets. I’m going to journal on loose sheets to see how i like it. It’s not as portable as say a journal, but it does have the folio so it is contained. So far I like that I don’t have to deal with or work around the crease in the page, I’m treating the pages as if they were spreads though, which is weird i have this option to work as if the journal is just sheets of paper but I’m choosing to work the sheets as if they were spreads instead of single sheets. I think for me it’s a design option as well as simply how I’ve worked over the last few months with a journal.

I really do like  stonehenge paper for just about everything, it’s thick, it’s mostly smooth with just enough tooth, I can use colored pencils on it, acrylic, and gouache and it responds well to all of it. Not to mention that it comes in a nice array of colors. It also doesn’t buckle or warp much when it’s wet down with a ton of paint.

I did this pic as a redo of an image I did in my last journal. It was still pertinent to my life so A little reworking and a difference in colors a change in text, and a big difference in the "blood" the good thing about working loose is that I can do things on these "spreads" that I wasn’t able to do in the journal, in that there is no way I could have made this image work well across a spread so when I did the other one in the book I made the knife up and down on the page, I think it works better at an angle.

You can see a hint of the text under the target. I was testing out how different inks work under the paint. I’ll write about my tests in a later post. It’s pretty specific though, about how the inks work under gesso.

Self explanatory, sometimes I do stupid shit. Sometimes I just forget about things and do stuff without thinking. Especially when things are going well I tend to foul the whole works up. There is text under the lines of blue and purple. Its also a bad self portrait, it doesn’t look quite like me but I got the essence. Also a dunce cap- after I was just making fun of pointy hats in other peoples art. Here though, I’m using to point out I’m a dunce sometimes and I do stupid shit.

Not at all book or journal related but I spent last night painting the breakroom at my workplace. My coworker and I picked the colors (aa combination of custom mixes and company branded colors) and combinations for the room, and I’ll bedamned if it doesn’t look darn good. A combination of soothing browns and terracotta walls with latte and terracotta colored cabinetry, looks awesome. I was pretty happy when it was all over with and we stood back and looked at our work and saw how terrific it looked. The reactions of my coworkers was pretty darn great too. Considering the breakroom looked, well to be blunt, like a shit hole before hand so anything would have been nice.

As a result of all that painting and cleaining I’m tired and sore today. It’s a lot of work to paint a room while moving the stuff in it around. But it makes all the difference in feelings. COlor and cleanliness can affect mood.

XXX thoughts
Originally uploaded by lessherger

I really enjoyed making this spread in my journal. I had bought some new materials and wanted to try them out. I used making memories paints for the blue and red. I’m not overly fond of the paint. It’s a little too thin and doesn’t cover that well. It is the consistency of craft acrylic but much more expensive. The colors don’t play well together either, making mud, and the colors ae specific rather than letting me mix the color I need/want. Ilike a lot of their other supplies and tools, just not their paint.

The other thing that I tried out on this page was the fiskars texture plates. The grid is one of those. You put paper onto a plate with a recessed design, rub it with a tool and end up with a fancy design. It works well enough, and I like the outcome. Some of the designs in the package I bought were… boring and stale but some like the grid and scales were right on.

The final new item I bought were Making Memories foam letters. Not a new to me item but new to my journaling arsenal. These were pretty awesome, and not a boring font either.

I finished an art journal, yay. Usually my journals sit about 3/4’s of the way full and I don’t fill the last few pages. But I’m pretty proud of myself and feeling somewhat accomplished that I finished 2 in a row, cover to cover.

My goal with this most recent journal was to chronical my life in words and images. I think this journal does that. In most cases I have obliterated the words to make room for the imagery, but allowed some of the words to peeks through. I aimed to distill each days events down to a single spread in the journal. Every spread is a single days entry. Though I might say that I didn’t limit my activities on a spread to a single day, many of them I worked on for several days, and on weekends. Though the image may be about one single day or event I may have spent several days working on it.

Working 3×5 inches has challenges. I like to work small but some of my ideas I felt needed larger pages, alas I had a given size and I worked in it. I think it adds to some of the work that it’s forced to fit onto a small page, though on some pages I did allow myself to extend past the page borders.

The journal itself was a screw up, on I intended to sell on etsy but I fouled up the cover and made it about 1/8th inch too short, it made the journal disposable for me.It was in essence trash, so when I started to fill it’s pages I wasn’t nervous about screwing anything up. If anything now the short fore edge of the books adds to it’s charm, the fore edge of each page is exposed and make s the book look like it’s in a sweater that shrank. It looks far more abused than it ever was. I did take the book with me a few times but for the most part I left it at home on my easel, waiting for me to have a grand idea.

I worked in it heavily, thick impasto acrylics, layers of gesso and ink, sheets of paper glued in, pages from books, fold out pages, pockets and stuff glued to the pages, with acrylic and watersoluble crayons over the top of that. Each page was sealed with a 50/50 mix of bee’s wax and parafin. IT adds a nice glow tot eh pages and seals the acrylic from sticking to the other page. With out the wax, my journal would be one group of glued together pages.

Some photos:

In other excellent news. I talked to my Father about the whole sewing cradle thing. My brother really dropped the ball on it. I love the kid and while he’s a bit of a genius in some areas he’s really not in other areas, one of them being customer satisfaction and service. I was told by a fellow bookbinder and BEST member that my brother never got back to her about a sewing cradle, while I was mortified and embarrassed my brother claimed he had gotten back to her. Though somehow I doubt it. So I chatted with my dad, told him about the issue and he said he’d set up shop and make 50 or so of them. The other deal will be that he’ll bring them to me when he comes to visit next, which should be in a month or so. After which I’ll have all the cradles here and I’ll be shipping them.

So starting now, sewing cradles are available again. He’s piecing the 50 together slowly but surely and I’ll have them in my grubby little hands next month. However my Father is much more reliable than my brother and can be trusted to ship them from his farm in Maine. So as of now he has one completely finished and ready to go, I’ll be listing it on etsy in the next few days and then as he makes more I’ll list them too. He’d like to have a few go up on eBay but I’m reluctant to do that. But we’ll see.

So yay for new well built solid pine cradles. I will post about this again as more become available!!!

Price will be $32.99+ $10 shipping (in the US