Happy New Year, everyone!

There is currently a lot of small tweaking, fudging, updating and overhauling going on in the Etsy shop. Most of it will go unnoticed, and that’s kind of the idea. I am hard at work getting everything a little bit simpler and a little bit better. Soon I hope to go through a re-photograph a lot of my older stock to get things looking a little more polished and uniform.

I am also now going to be offering a number of my already-sold, but very-loved, items on a made-to-order basis. They will be sold at the same rate as my in-stock items. I believe this will make it easier for me to get my customers the pieces they want. All made-to-order pieces have a turnaround of a few weeks.

One of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is the direction of my work. I feel like 2010, in many ways, was a time of stasis for my ceramic pieces. It was a momentous year for other parts of my life: I got married, spent a month traveling in Europe, lost two beloved family members, made many new friends and had many wonderful, unique experiences. But my volume of work decreased, and in a lot of ways, I wasn’t “feeling it.”

Now that I have my new, big studio space to work in, I am allowing my artistic self to come out of the doldrums. I want to really listen to my inner voice and encourage it to speak up. And the only thing that is holding me back, is me.

i compare my work to other people’s too much.
I forget what I want from myself.
I get distracted easily.
I worry things won’t sell.
I worry that I’m not good enough.
I am afraid to push my limits.

For me, I hope 2011 will be a year of confidence and growing. I want to make beautiful things. And I want to share them.

artist's struggles, ceramics, changes, Etsy, new year's This entry was posted on Sunday, January 2nd, 2011 at 7:24 pm and is filed under Pano-pol-blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.