Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

In today’s entry I want to share with you a guy that I made a couple weeks ago but have only gotten around to photographing now. I got a cheap grab-bag full of low grade geodes (twenty halved and polished geodes, roughly 1.5″ across on average, for about $20) and have been thinking of fun things to do with them, and the first thing I came up with was using the geode as a mouth for a funny character. I made this fellow using an Oco geode from Brazil that had a nice big quartz snaggle tooth. I sculpted the face in “Aves FixIt” (a two-part epoxy clay) and the hair is a section of a sheep hide that I got at Ikea. I glued the leather to the clay, and then sculpted a small lip over top of the edge of the leather in order to hide it. This was quite successful, and the original hair was totally crazy looking and very long, but in the end I cut it to a third its initial length and added a hat, mostly to keep the hair from being the focal point.

But why, you ask, does Etsy scare Mr. Geode Mouth? Well, do a search for “Geode” on Etsy and the results are quite remarkable. Sure, there’s a lot of junk on Etsy, but there’s also an incredible variety of beautiful handcrafted jewelry. The part that I have a problem with most of the time though is the cost. Not that it’s too high — but that it’s too cheap. It really upsets me when I look at these artisans creating stunning jewelry that shows both technical expertise and a wisdom about art that comes from a master at work. I look at them and I do the math in my head, adding up the cost of the supplies I see them using, about how many hours it would take to create, and it’s obvious that they’re often lucky to be making minimum wage. Nothing even close to approaching a living wage. And if they’re handmaking the stuff, it’s not like they can offset a low profit per piece by selling a thousand a day. It’s not humanly possible (don’t get me started on people scamming Etsy with Chinese mass-crap masquerading as homemade — those stores make me sick, and the fact that Etsy won’t deal with that disease makes me even sicker).

It makes me sad to see people with such talent and creativity selling their creations for so little. I can’t help but conclude that Etsy shares some of the blame there, because of the role it has played in forcing absolutely cutthroat pricing on handcrafted items. It’s unfortunate that the market has not been able to accept that one should be willing to pay a premium for handmade items, and instead has created a status quo where people expect them to come in at lower pricing than mass-manufactured items. Fine jewelry should be a fair exchange for a valuable commodity, not “a steal of a deal”. That said, if you follow the first link I posted above, you will find plenty of jewelers well worth supporting at said steal of a deal. From time to time I consider running a store because I make so many things that I’d love to find homes for, but I really don’t know if I feel like taking place in such a market. Plus I don’t need hate-mail from ignorant shoppers begrudging the fact that I’d only be willing to price things without devaluing my time and abilities. But anyway, back to my silly geode dentistry.

Oh and while I remember, I had a nice day today, spending the whole thing (about six hours anyway) at the park working on a fun but top-secret project. When we got home I started making the molds for an awsome chess set project that Nefarious created. I was cutting the plaster mold backings off with a hobby razor knife, and when I was done I noticed that my right pantleg was drenched and dripping with blood. At some point my hand must have slipped and self-stabbed but I didn’t consciously sense the injury. It wasn’t deep enough to be dangerous, but it was deep enough that you could see fat cells in the open wound. I called Nefarious down for an anatomy lesson (“you are so gross daddy!”) and showed her how to close the wound with superglue. If I’d gone to the hospital I know I would have walked out with four or five stitches and far too much boredom from the wait. I’ve got enough scheduled hospital time this week without adding more for stuff that I can just deal with myself! Once I started working with the wound I became aware of it, but the “amusing” thing is that I didn’t notice it otherwise — the pain of getting a nasty stab wound is so much less than the constant ache in my legs that it’s below my threshhold and doesn’t score high enough to get my attention.

To finish up, I’ve got some other geode projects on the go that I’ll post another time, including more in the theme of this post, experiments in adding glow-in-the-dark elements to create self-illiminating “radioactive” geodes, as well as active lighting by drilling the geodes and mounting internal LED lights. If you’d like to see a few more pictures of this character, there are a whack more after the break. Nefarious is out of school for the summer so I am going to try and spend some more full days at the park like we did today — I’m sure it’s healthier for me to bring my reading or sculpting or writing or whatever (or even napping!) to the park instead of staying here at home on the couch. The fresh air can’t possibly be a bad thing, right?