New year, new designs.

Happy 2010 to one and all. Hopefully this decade is better than the last.  Granted, that wouldn’t take much. But you know, small victories.

In any case,  now that the pleasantries are out of the way, I have a bunch of new designs that I’ve been working on.  Furniture designs, egg designs, even house and club designs.  So lots and lots of new stuff. I’ve set myself a pretty brutal design pace- I’m working off of about six different spreadsheets.  We’ll see how long I can keep the pace up, but for the moment I’m designing pretty regularly.  But since I don’t want to blow everything in one post, let’s take stuff one area at a time.

Eggs.

It’s my goal this year to create 52 of these suckers.  So far I’m doing well- two are already done, and I will be starting the next one in the next couple days.   Granted, they’re fundamentally useless little objects, fragile and strange, but they are pretty, and though I’ve gotten significantly better at making them, it’s still not exactly easy.  I’m hoping to stock up on blank eggs while the current winter cold lasts. Cold temperatures lead to thicker eggs (yep, true!) and thicker eggs are easier to work with. It sure would be good to be able to have a backstock of empty winter eggs come July, because in summer the shells get very thin and it’s difficult to get one carved up properly on the first try.

So, the first two eggs of the year:

This one was done as a commission won at a charity auction.  I try to donate my time/skills to various charities when I can.  I have another charity egg coming up soon, actually (it’s 3 eggs away on my list, such as it is.)  This one is going to be winging (ha) its way off to its new home in the Netherlands.

And the second one:

This one was the result of a happy accident. When dealing with eggs, few accidents are actually happy but this one worked out pretty well.  The egg had come out of the dye bath and wasn’t quite dry enough when I put a coat of  sealant on it.  That is, it was dry to the touch but not really dry.  Anyone who has had the experience of putting sealant down on a not quite dry surface can tell you what happened next- the finish crackled like a crackling thing, and the dye layer began to flake off like little blue snowflakes.

However the resulting effect was really interesting, so when it fully dried I sealed it in with another layer of sealant and went to work with my paints.

Overall, I was pretty happy with the result, since it had a bunch of visual/textural qualities that really worked well together.  It’s becoming clear though I need to order some new diamond cone files- this one is wearing in an uneven pattern, and surely by summer I’ll need to restock on microbits.  But I think I can hang on for a little while yet. I’m hoping to get another dozen eggs out of the way before I have to do that. We’ll see.

The blue egg is going to be headed to its new home in New Jersey (a substantially shorter commute than the other one) this weekend.  My post office still sucks, btw. This year is the year I buy a postal scale and make them pick things up at my house so I never have to go down there again. Seriously, I mean it.

Interestingly, I still haven’t designed the furniture that inspired the eggs in the first place. It’s still in my head though, so I’ll get to it.  I HAVE designed a bunch of other furniture so far this year, so I’ll start talking about that in my next post.