Well this will be a photo-less post, I loaded my bisque kiln early this morning and have over one hundred ornaments out baking in my shed. I'll have some posts of some of the finished ornaments later this week.
Meanwhile I've been thinking a lot about how to market and where to sell my ornaments. This will be the topic of a post in the near future, but it occurred to me that getting local art and craft into big box stores might be a good thing, and could be done in a way to benefit artists while also drawing more traffic to independently run venues. (so please don't be alarmed, locally run venues, if you see me tweeting about how I'd love to sell my Kevin O'Leary Christmas Tree Heads at Canadian Tire). But more about all this when I write the post which I think will be called "How to put the Canadian back into Canadian Tire" or something similar.
Step one in forming that plan was to come up with a label for artists trying to get their work seen by as many people as possible, while giving all stores an opportunity to replace stuff from foreign factories with locally made items. So I came up with a word. First I thought of "Localista" but that's already been thought up and is used mostly by people promoting local food. So that led me to my new word:
"Localartista" which I'll define as artists and craftspeople who make and promote local art and craft. Take that, China, we're gunning for you!
I googled it and checked for hashtags on twitter, I think I can claim "Localartista" as my new made up word. I'll possibly come up with a better word for this revolution I'd like help start, but for now it'll do.
Now on to more reasons for buying local art and craft, I had come up with 7 reasons so far.
Here are 3 more:
#8 - Child Care. Now I don't have kids which is for the best seeing as I can barely look after myself. But one thing I've noticed is a lot of artists and crafters do, and by selling their work it allows them to work from home. This means their kids also stay home with them and aren't shuttled around to daycares. I don't know how the daycare system works but I imagine this also frees up space in daycares, while saving artist-parents money on child care costs. In some cases I suppose there are artists who can also care for elders while working at home. In the case of artists raising kids, the ones I've met get their kids right involved in their business. This means parent/child quality time, and the kids learn art and business skills, while having their own imaginations and creative spirits nurtured. I think that's nice!
#9 - Environmental health. With the exception of the times I occasionally dump out small amounts of dirty glaze water on my lawn I would say my ornament factory is pretty environmentally friendly. Not sure if the same can be said about foreign factories. Unlike work from foreign factories, my work doesn't need to be shipped for thousands of kilometers on a giant tanker and packed up in various packing supplies. Rather, my work gets driven a relatively short distance, and I'm cheap so I do errands on the same trip. Instead of styrofoam my packing materials of choice is newspapers which I've read, or for larger objects I'll wrap them in towels and just lay them in the car. By staying home working all the time I'm also using my car less as now the only commuting I need to do is to drop off stock or pick up supplies. This means less time on the road, and I'm reducing my carbon footprint. It also leads me to:
#10 - Savings in Health Care. By staying home more, and traveling less there's less chance of me ending up in a traffic accident. By spending my working life doing something that I love and is stress-relieving, I'm also hopefully preventing disease in my body which will save Canadian taxpayers oodles of money.
That's all for today, as usual finishing off underglazing and loading my kiln took way longer than I thought so I'm a bit tired! Looking forward to seeing how my low fire ornaments turn out!
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