What to write about here on All Things Metal Clay? While my stated goals are to talk about making and selling jewelry, sometimes I’ve gone rather far afield from that, following my guideline that anything about creativity is okay.

While I love to research and write about business topics, I think my readers may be more interested in the making side of things.

Here’s what I’ll be writing about, on a weekly basis:

Techniques – at least one post a week highlighting a technique for metal clay or jewelry making.

Blog of the Week Award – I haven’t given out enough of the blog (or website) of the week awards. Starting with next week, I’ll aim to give out the award once a week. Have someone to suggest? Please do! Post in a comment or email me at Suggestalink…gmail.

Reviews and Sources At least one post a week that’s a review of a book or tool, or information about a source for something cool.

Sound good? What would you like to read more or less about here? I would love to hear from you!

I used to publish recipes, or links to recipes, on holidays, as sort of a holiday-break thing. I stopped doing that, but there are some good ones here! I discovered the recipes while doing some blog housekeeping and going through every post, in every category for the entire 6+ years of the blog!

So I thought I’d publish a round up post of all the recipes, in reverse order. If it’s my recipe, I’ll link to the post below. If it’s an outside link, I’ll link directly to the other website.

Here they are, in order from most recent to oldest:

Lazy, Degenerate Brownies

I made this for Christmas:
Figgy Pudding

Here’s a terrific cake recipe if you love chocolate and peanut butter:  Heaven and Hell Cake.  I made it as written, except I used semi-sweet chocolate for the ganache instead of the milk chocolate that the recipe calls for.

Merry Christmas Eve, and visit Healthy-family.org for the tale of the battle of the egg nogs!

Cake related:
How to Hide a T-shirt in a Cake

Frozen Yogurt:
It’s hot here in Chicagoland. To stay cool, we just made Elaine’s Coconut Milk Frozen Yogurt. You can read the recipe at healthy-family.org.

Kettle Corn:
We made it on the stove, using our heavy steel wok:

1/4 cup of vegetable oil (canola, corn, whatever)
1/2 cup popcorn
1/4 cup sugar
salt

Heat the oil in the wok, toss in a couple of kernels to see if the oil is hot enough. If it is, pour in the rest of the popcorn and the sugar. Stir a few times, then put the lid on and shake the pan until all the popcorn is popped.

Immediately pour the popcorn into a large bowl, add salt to taste and stir to mix. If you don’t have a large bowl, you could use a paper grocery bag.

To see what happens to popcorn when you squish it in the hydraulic press, see this post.

Passover Recipes:
Here’s a link to Gluten Free Bay, where she has a terrific round up of Passover Recipes. She’s got it all covered: her own recipes, links to more, where to buy and cookbooks! Click here.

An assortment:
Angel Food Cake
Brownies
Pancake Mix Review
Best Coconut Milks for Desserts

Jennifer Yu has posted a recipe for sugar plums on her blog! Your visions can come true.

Read the recipe and see more pictures here.

Here’s a recipe for chocolate dipped apricots for Hanukah Gelt.

Read the whole recipe here on this gluten free blog with lots more Hanukah recipes and mouth watering pictures.

I did a follow up post over at the Berwyn Makers blog with the sources I turn to when I have a question about social media.

You can read that post here:
http://berwynmakers.wordpress.com

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The blog is usually at least partly a reflection of what I’m doing artistically, and 2013 was no exception. I had an exciting year in 2013, giving a speech at Creative Chicago Expo, teaching with 20 Neighborhoods, and publishing my first book for Kindle.

Part of getting there involved making choices,cutting away the unnecessary and saying no. There are lots of posts on that theme! (That’s one of the great things about blogging, you can look back and see these patterns.)

While I usually do these blog year in reviews in chronological order, this year I’ll go by theme.

Let’s start with that series of posts about focusing, pruning, saying no, whoa, and yes to the right things!

Making Time for Art By Saying Whoa! to Everything Else

How to Tell When It’s Time to Stop Doing Something in Your Business

Related to that:

Self-Control: Software to Protect Your Time From Email, Facebook

and: “How Studio Night Saved My Marriage”/Making Time for Making Art

There are more on that theme, but maybe that’s enough for now!

In 2013, I became an even bigger fan of Alyson Stanfield, the ArtBiz Coach. Here are the posts that mention Alyson:

Alyson Stanfield Made Me Do It, or Why I Collage’d My Successes

Terrific Podcasts about Art & Art Marketing

And in the My Studio/My Jewelry category, some of my highlights of the year included:

Publishing my first book for Kindle! It was much easier than I thought it would be.

I began to share on a deeper level on the blog — while I’ll never be Luann Udell, it’s a good start:

Reflections on art making and support, “I need a wife”

Here’s a post to help you think about the story you tell with your jewelry, and the story that your customers can tell about it: What’s the Story with Your Jewelry?

My favorite blog posts aren’t always everyone else’s posts, but one the posts of the year that I am most proud of is the epic, 1000-word, meme filled post, What Are We Afraid of? (The Future of Craft), that I wrote after attending the Zoom Symposium.

(I just re-read it, wow, that’s a great post. I hope you’ll read it.)

I wrote about jewelry techniques this year too! Here are my top how-to posts of the year, about jewelry making and more.

How to Make:

Awesome Things You Can Do with the Silhouette Cameo Cutter

Why and How to Use Casting in Your Jewelry Making That will take you to a series of posts by Vickie Hallmark. I didn’t write it, but I am a big advocate of using casting for profitability.)

Susan Zeiss Publishes the Zeiss Formula for Mitsuro-hikime Wax for Lost Wax Casting I was thrilled to assist Susan in publishing her formula online.

How to Make a Color Study to Take an Inspiration from a Place and Put it in your Art
As a result of my trip to Ox-Bow.

There are links to so many more in the Free Tutorials and Videos Category.

How to Sell:

How to Get Started Selling Jewelry and What to Do

Grants

Some terrific resources on grant writing

Legal help:

Protecting Your Art Images Online

Blogging:

Artists Who Are Great at Blogging Their Artistic Process (and how you can be too)

I also blogged quite a bit this year about my growing interest in tech jewelry: laser cutting, 3D printing, soft circuits. I won’t link to those here, as I don’t think that’s a huge area of interest to my readers. If it is, let me know!

In another post, I’ll share the Most Influential Things I Read This Year. And as I reflect back on the year, I am super grateful for support and everything I’ve learned from being in a local support group of Makers.

That’s it!  That’s the blog year in review for 2013!  There were even more posts in the past year, but that’s a roundup of some highlights for you, I hope you enjoyed it!

Did you do a blog year in review,or craft year in review?  Share the link in the comments,thanks!

P.S.  Coming in early 2014:  the long overdue make over for this blog, including that it will be mobile-ready.

A review copy of a book on wedding crafts is on it’s way to me — do you make bridal jewelry? Wedding or engagement rings? Something else? I’m looking for makers to profile on the blog during Wedding Week!

Please post a comment or send me an email pitch with links to your work,if you’d like to be considered, thanks!

Photo via the stockxchng, with a beach photo for all of us to look longingly at, after the recent polar vortex.
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And while we’re thinking about legal issues,this post, Protecting Your Art Images Online, covers some excellent territory:http://www.creativetexturetools.com/news/2013/06/21/protecting-your-art-images-online

I hope that’s helpful!

P.S.  I’m personally still not on facebook.  In order to write and make art, I’ve had to make the decision to limit my social media use.  If you’d like to connect personally, find me on twitter at @ElaineLuther.

At meetings of local craftspeople and artists, the questions always come up about managing social media. How do you use it? Which ones should you use?

This morning I’m thinking about folks at the meeting, what would help them. We don’t have to be experts in everything, but we should know who to turn to for answers. Here are my top resources, the sites and experts that I check in with when I have questions:

Twitter Guide
HubSpot is a marketing company that markets itself with terrific guides for businesses. They explain how to use various social media outlets in clear terms. They write tons of concise reports on specific topics. Here’s their page on twitter.

http://www.hubspot.com/twitter-marketing-hub

Social Media in General

http://wiredprworks.com

Blogging

Copyblogger is the big one. Could be overwhelming, but good stuff there.
http://www.copyblogger.com

Lorelle on WordPress is terrific.
http://lorelle.wordpress.com

Facebook help

For facebook questions, I turn to allfacebook.
http://allfacebook.com

What did I miss? Who’s your go-to person?

Graphic by Sparky Firepants.

P.S. You can find me on twitter at @ElaineLuther
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affiliate partner:

Lorelle, of Lorelle on WordPress, has a series of posts up that are blog exercises for you.

This post: http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2013/07/15/blog-exercises-blog-your-mistakes is about blogging your mistakes and why you might want to.

That’s a bit of a theme that’s been coming up lately in what I’ve been reading. In the book, Homeward Bound: Why Women Are Embracing the New Domesticity by Emily Matcher, the author talks about all those home design and cooking blogs where the children and always perfect and well dressed, the projects elaborate, the meals gorgeous and healthy too.

And how of course, no one’s life is really like that.

Those of us who blog about our creative process, of course we want to show our best work too, which can lead to the appearance that we’re like those perfect home chefs who never ruin a meal.

Ebony Love recently responded to that perception in this most, Sometimes I Just Don’t Want to: http://www.lovebugstudios.com/2013/07/12/crapology-101-and-sometimes-i-just-dont-want-to.

And I just blogged about a mistake last week, here: http://www.creativetexturetools.com/news/2013/07/18/these-things-come-in-cycles-and-reflections-on-working-alone

What about you? Do you blog about your jewelry? Would you ever blog about a mistake?

An artist friend commented that it seems to work this way: you spend some time immersed in making the art, then you come up for air and work on getting it out there.

This week, as I follow Helga’s at home residency, I’m loving seeing how she creates her own experience. I love the structure and challenges she’s created for herself.

I also noticed that she’s doing a terrific job of working alone. (See what she did on Day Four.)

This month I attempted a project working alone — I have a new blog at ElaineLutherArt.com but haven’t yet found my blogging voice over there. I’ve been blogging here since 2007 and it’s easy to write here because I’m writing for you — I post things that will hopefully interest, inspire and be helpful.

The other blog aspires to have an audience of potential collectors, as opposed to fellow artists, and I haven’t figured out what to write about yet.

Partly to have something to blog about, I challenged myself to a 30 day challenge of making one small (8″ x 8″) collage painting a day. I’d done the Ring-a-Week challenge and this didn’t seem like such a big deal. Just 30 days.

In just 10 days, I discovered that 8″ x 8″ is really small. Having finally worked out painting large — 24″ x 36″ — I found it really difficult to go back down.

Another problem was that when I did Ring-a-Week, there was community on flickr. I have fellow travelers along the path and encouragement. On this one, I was completely alone — no blog comments, because it’s a new blog, no flickr group.

So that was a mistake. I realized challenges are more fun with a group.

While I’m not a quitter, after 10 days I pulled the plug on the challenge. I realized that I’m not a quick worker (at least with paint) and I do better work when I have time to reflect and ponder.

And, I had some real deadlines to meet that the challenge was interfering with.

I knew it was the right decision when I felt so relieved that I’d called it off.

While I haven’t been talking much about making jewelry lately, I am still working with metal. After some time completely away from jewelry, I’ve circled around and come back to it. I’m finalizing a line to wholesale to stores.

And I’m making my series of “Medals you wouldn’t want to earn,” with BronzClay. (Every time I think the series is done, I make another one.)

This meandering post is to let you know that I’ve noticed that a number of the posts lately have been about software (one more coming up, you’re going to love it!) and other seemingly off-topic things, and it’s a phase, I promise.

I’m in that phase of applying for things, doing the business side, slightly less in the making things phase, and the blog posts are reflecting that.

Photo credit: Joanna Vidad