56 Hours a Week?

I am, apparently, no good at relaxing. Case in point; here I am typing up my blog rather than the soak in the bath I'd planned for this evening!

Gold and Silver Fumed Dip Pen

Here at HQ, and with some of the other traders at Greenwich, I've some interesting conversations about how many hours a week that I work. For me, I don't feel that I do enough hours, and if I stop to watch something on TV my brain niggles at me reminding me of jobs that need to be done, even when I've done all that I can that day. This all started with a random OH comment when I complained how tired I was, 'but you only work two days a week!'

That had me counting up how many hours I might be working, the Greenwich days are certainly some of the longest, mostly I'll be there at 8am to set up and won't finish packing up till about 6.30pm, so a long 10 1/2hour day of which I'd do two or three a week depending on if I add in an extra Friday. (I am currently shuffling around my days, missing the odd Sunday and doing Fridays instead.) This also doesn't include the two or three hour traveling to and from there each day.

Now of course the rest of the time is back at HQ making things to sell, of which can be a more interesting and relaxed schedule. There are a few long breaks in the day, so I can understand why she thinks I'm a slacker! I might work from 9.30 till 12 and take a break for lunch, then a short burst till about 2 for a tea break; OH works nights so this is often when she's up and a chance for a quick catch up then back to the torch until 4.30-5ish. Then after 6 when OH goes off to work it's back to the torch for another two or three hours, followed by some admin, putting things together etc which can take up up to anywhere between 9.30 and 11.30. Admittedly there are a few stops to make tea, and Monday tends to be a late start if I've done a three day weekend, but it wasn't till I stopped to total up my hours that I realised how much I was doing. Even on my more 'slacking days' I might do 4 1/2 hour on a weekday, but more likely up to 7 or 9! Estimating it conservatively at 7 hours a weekday makes 35hours, plus a 21 on top from the weekend and it's up to 56 hours. This puts my guesstimate of 54-60 hours a week not too far wrong.

Now I did originally make Monday mornings an easier day, and I used to have Wednesday nights from 9 as my night off, but post Olympics that schedule seemed to evaporate. This probably explains why I woke up this morning feeling so rubbish, and spent a larger part of the morning slumped on the sofa. So, I've decided I need to re-institute my Wednesday nights off, so I can at least time my downtime rather than having my body decide when to stop.

Green swirl dip pen

So, it's time for a long soak.... although I still have some Etsy photos I really must do....... and I did want to get some more torch work done......  I can see this taking break thing being really hard to schedule in! But then if I didn't enjoy it, I wouldn't do it. Maybe there's a lesson here for company bosses; if more 'real' jobs were done by people that enjoyed doing them (or made more enjoyable and less 'arghh!') then no one would mind putting the extra work in.

Tiny Marbles, Big Horizons

In the midst of getting my Etsy shop back and alive with new glass in it, I've had a lot of interest in very small galaxy marbles. These days I try to avoid making really big or really little marbles; it doesn't matter how big I make a marble I always get people asking if I can make them even bigger. I not sure if they even want to buy them, I think people just want to see football sized marbles! I used to try and pump them up as much as I could, often loosing some of the nice optical illusions and depth because I pushed them too far. Not to mention the hours twirling a hot heavy marble trying to get it into shape!

I've also try to avoid doing small ones, unless it's a quick test of a new colour or technique, when they start getting under about 20mm they become really tricky to hold and shape well. And to be blunt, despite the work involved, because of the small size people expect them to be sold for pennies. So these days I try to go for a comfortable balance between sizes, going often for the size the marble wants to be.

Then about a month ago I had an interesting enquiry from a chap who was re-creating the 'Men In Black' Orion's Belt prop. For those few people who haven't seen the movie, it's a little metal pendant that hangs from a cat's (a cat called Orion) collar, inside which is a little marble which contains an entire miniature galaxy. Well, it is a sci-fi/fantasy film!

I've had a few requests like this in the past, but what has made this different is that he's been using 3D printing techniques to produce it. As yet I've not seen the kit or bits, but I've had several enquires asking for marbles 18mm or smaller!

Setting to work to make some I soon realised why I try not to work at this scale, to start with I couldn't make anything smaller than 20mm, but a few more fails and I was starting to get the hang of the smaller ones. The next problem has been trying to get the detail into them. Many of the colours I use don't work when thinned down this small. Some of the colours just vanished, others just refused to play. I had this problem before with opaque reds in flower marbles which go from vibrant colour to a mud red when they thin out. Even the dichoric glass became a problem as it's really a very thin metal coating on sheets of 3-5mm glass. This needs to have another layer of glass locked over it, sometimes 2 or 3 layers in a sandwich, so suddenly there is 6-10mm of glass. It doesn't sound much, but throw in backing colours that add up to 3mm of glass at the base, and that it's only at the extreme equator of the marble that's the thickest part and suddenly every mm counts!

They are getting better, and more detailed, as I find tricks and colours that let me get around these problems. I don't think I am ever going to ever exactly copy the CGI created original, which I know it what the people making these props really want! In the meantime it's been quite interesting to make them at such extremes, and they've seemed to go down well with marble and glass collectors too.

 While all this has been going on I've had to drastically increase my shipping charges to USA & Canada, so that I can send parcels tracked and signed for, as I've had an awful run of packages not turning up. One of these was a commission for tiny marbles as well, which were even smaller and a nightmare to make. A compensation claim from Royal Mail can take months, (and I've had them wanting to prove how much it costs in materials to make) but it's letting down customers I hate most. I'm not using small envelopes anymore either, larger ones stops them being slipped into pockets, and gives more room for all the Post Office stickers! I once had a parcel from the USA with 14 USPS and PO stickers on it, so I've no idea how many end up on the ones I send to USA!

I'm going to try and add a few more, but I will have to stop adding to my Etsy shop for a while. Along with the run up to Xmas I have the MCM Expo at the end of October which I am frantically getting ready for, plus being at Greenwich! I may not be at Greenwich on some Sundays to give me chance to get ready, but I will try and make Saturdays (and possibly some Fridays too so I can avoid travelling to London during rail engineering works!)

Is Groundhog day over?

The workbench is more of a disaster area than usual! There's no time for tidying!

Yesterday was the end of a very long week for me. During the Olympic and Paralympic periods Greenwich market has been opening for longer hours, to help people stay longer in Greenwich to relieve congestion on the tubes and trains at the end of the events (more on that in my earlier posts.)

After a very quiet period between the end of the Olympics and start of the Paralympics I decided it would be good to try and do a few more days. Originally I'd intended on doing Friday to Sunday, or skip Sunday and come back on Monday for the day (an extra day added during the events,) but I ended up doing five days in a row! No sooner that I was up I was on my way to Greenwich (luckily I can stay over nearby to save such long train travel) to be there between 8-8.30, grabbing breakfast along the way. The hours were trimmed back during the Paralympics, to a 7pm finish, but even then it doesn't mean finishing packing away to gone 8-8.30pm, in time to grab a bite to eat if I hadn't managed to eat at the stall, before heading off for an early night! A few hours later and the alarm was off again; what day is it? Sunday, Friday? It started blurring by the time it got to Tuesday, the last day of the Paralympics in Greenwich.

I have been really surprised on how inconsistent the days have been, it's been really hard to plan for, days I expect it to be quiet have been busy, and vice versa, days when there have been lots of people I've hardly sold anything; it's been impossible to know what days to turn up and which ones to stay in the workshop! A lot of new stuff has had to be put on hold that I'd really like to work on.

The only thing I am sure of is that my feet still ache 24hrs later!

I really must sort out the debris, and empty those dump jars of grot glass!

Now that's over it's time to start again! It's only a few weeks to the end of October and the next big MCM Expo, I have lots of ideas for new alien specimens, a backlog of marbles I've been asked for, plus it's now barely two days before I need to be back for the next weekend in Greenwich. I'm also hoping to sneak an odd day off too, maybe a Sunday, which I am sure my feet will be very grateful for!

My (Cockney) Zombie Girlfriend

Other peoples ambitions and obsessions often seem strange. Climbing very cold, dangerous mountains, wanting to get a hole in one in golf, winning a chili-dog eating competition, or being a zombie extra in a film. I think you see where this is going!

Yes, my OH (Other Half) had an ambition to be in a zombie film, if not as a main character then as a walk-on (or should that be stumble along?) zombie. Last year she had the opportunity when along the zombie grapevine she heard they were asking for volunteers to shuffle along to docklands for a few days shooting the climax scene of 'Cockneys vs Zombies.'

So it was with great excitement she spent three days trying to eat some British veteran actors, whilst covered in a lot of fake blood, while they in turn shot at her! I met her in our local Essex pub, she'd stayed covered in fake blood and zombie makeup on the train home, and certianly looked like she'd been in a car accident! Yeh, strange what some people have an ambition to do. She certainly enjoyed it, and has been eagerly awaiting the release so we can go play 'spot the zombie,' and last Thursday managed to swipe some of the very last tickets left for the premier in Empire Leicester Square as part of their 'Frightfest' season.

I won't give too many spoilers away, but I must admit I wasn't expecting too much but was pleasantly surprised. Certainly not a film that took itself seriously, and it was great fun because of that, at the Q&A the director and writer said they'd made it for a 'Frightfest' audience, putting in as much gore, jokes and bad taste as they could get away with. Mixed in with that was an impressive cast; to be honest you have to see it just to see Richard Briers playing a geriatric peeping tom machine gunning down the undead. Richard Briers, zimmerframe, machine gun; not three things you'd ever expect to see put together. However it was Alan Ford who played the action hero, (most people will remember him from 'Snatch' where he played the nasty villain who fed people to his pigs) who despite being 75(ish) was racing around sorting out zombies in a way that would put Bruce Willis to shame!

Of course the highlight for us was the dockland scene, where I tried picking Ellie out of the crowd, and she'd even managed to get a frame all to herself, of which she was quite chuffed! Blink and you might miss the lone female zombie shuffling along the dockside, but that was definitely her! I'd recognise that bunches hairstyle anywhere!

At the end there was time for a quick Q&A, and in the distance queueing to ask questions of the directors and actors I recognised a familiar hairstyle again. A sensible question then I suddenly heard 'Would Mr Ford prefer to be eaten by Zombies or Pigs?' She's found loads of reviews that have used her question, quoting it as 'the perfect Frightfest question.' They'll be no living with her now!

Oh, and apparently Alan Ford would prefer to be eaten by pigs.

Neil Armstrong, the last pioneer?

I was going to post about a recent trip, but in light of Neil Armstrong passing away this weekend I thought I'd share some thoughts, and some things that I've read in the press that have made me wonder if we've reached the pinnacle of our civilisation and are now on the slide down the other side?

On the Moon, photo courtesy of NASA

I was checking up on Twitter news on Sunday morning with my first coffee of the day when I learned that Mr Armstrong had passed away. I also learnt way too much about half baked sloppy press at the same time. Ed Yong (Edyong209) had collected together some rather appalling instances, I thing they've been corrected but if you plough through his twitter feed he's recorded photo's of the various pages and web articles. NBC, who as an American website should have know better, listed him as Neil Young; a Dutch paper claimed he was the first man to walk on Earth; and even the UK slipped up saying he was the first US woman in space. I believe the correct Internet hash tag here is #palmface.

I can't say any of my reading got any better when I found out there were people asking who he was, someone who decades before had the entire world gathered around TV sets to see grainy pictures of him stepping down onto the dusty moon surface. But then, as others pointed out, nobody born since 1935 has walked on the moon. Very soon there will be nobody alive who has been there, and there doesn't seem any real will to go back. 'We have enough problems down here to deal with,' is what most people will say.

I don't know if that's right or wrong, but these large scale projects do bring benefits that are unexpected, in this case Velcro, and seeing how small an isolated how vulnerable home really is. Today people wonder what's the point of the CERN collider, but I only recently learnt that off-shoots of this technology resulted in MIR scanners. The Earth is not flat, and neither is science; A sometimes takes mankind to K while on the way to B. Right now I'm reading Iain M. Banks sci-fi novels, who have civilisations which have 'Sublimed,' and have gone from technological zeniths and have withdrawn back into their own society and given up. Some days I do wonder if we're doing the same.



Despite the inventions, the real outcome of the space race was to prove what amazing things man can do if he really tries, if real will is put behind in. What is also impressive is the man who got to make that boot print was refreshingly dignified and down-to-earth, and not big headed about it. Maybe if he boasted and hyped himself as much as people-who-kick-a-football for a living people under 18 may well know his name, but despite the odd reprint I'd hope his name is being learnt in 200 years time.

You are now leaving Essex....but probably not Suffolk

 Normally I'd not dare to take a day off when I need to get glass made for the weekend, but after the disastrous weekend due to the 'barrier fiasco' a few weeks ago, I had lots of glass unsold, and had made more than I needed, so we decided on a day out to clear our heads.

The original aim was the seaside, and we weren't planning to go far, but then I remembered we'd talked about going up to Southwold, via the little village of Blythburgh. It was a lovely sunny day, so we plugged in the postcode for the car park of the Whitehart Inn (because that's the only postcode I could find!) and hit the road.

The Angel Of the East

Now it occurs to me that I don't see that many people from Suffolk, certainly not when I'm on the stall in London. Originally I'd have said it's because it's not a very heavily populated area, but I now think it's more a case of why would they want to go anywhere else! Having no real itinerary it was no problem when a mis-hearing of the sat nav and we turned into Saxmundham. I'd been through it on the train, and not thought much of what I'd seen, but it's certainly a lovely place and stuffed full of artists! The book shop sold art supplies, a sculptor had a shop, I even nearly tripped over a young lady in an alcove sitting on the floor sketching the street! I was quite pleasantly surprised how vibrant and busy the high street there is, having a much greater range of shops than ours for what appeared a quieter area. Ok, it might have been a bit tatty at the edges, but I'd rather see open shops selling local goods than just estate agents and charity shops such as our commuter belt one has become.

We'd originally thought to stop there for lunch, but pressed on to Blythburgh and the pubs postcode, which turned out to be another piece of inspired good fortune. Now I must confess not to be very keen on Adnams beers, and lately my experiences of eating out has been rather 'unimpressive.' I decided to go for a snack, a fish finger sandwich! Expecting no more than a certain frozen food Captain's fare, I figured I'd get some chips too!

How over impressed was I! First to be sat in a beer garden with some dayglo budgies in an aviary one side, and at the other a HUGE expanse of reeds, marsh, estuary, wild birds, and achingly lovely scenery.  I'd have taken a picture, but not only would it not have done it justice, but my grub had turned up, and I'd have taken a picture of that too if I hadn't been enjoying eating it so much! I certianly didn't need the chips! The fingers were very much home made, and the last time I'd had fish that fresh and well cooked it had been in Whitby in a shop 50 yards from the fish dock. And it was no bread crumbs either, but a very light tempura style batter. I am assured OH's ploughmans was of an equal standard, but I was rather too taken with my increadiable sandwich to note more than the enormous hunk of cheese that had come with it.

From there it was time for a walk around the lovely little village, which has the 'Angel Of The East' village sign which is worth visiting just for itself! Sadly the church was shut, so from then we had a long drive around a few surrouding villages to scout the area for other places to return for a closer visit. We'd almost forgot the seaside until we saw signs for Aldeburgh so headed for the seaside.

Yes, a real red telephone box in Bythburgh! We checked, inside it was clean and fully working!

Again this is another town full of art, lots of galleries this time, and even the Suffolk crafts guild had their own exhibition space. The shingle beach wasn't so great for walking on, but I certainly noted a huge lack of litter compared to many that I'd been on. In fact the only clutter on the beach was so picturesque it was worthy of a few snaps! There were even little huts selling fresh fish, and even dressed crabs and lobsters direct from the fishermen.

Eventually we ended up at Woodbridge, which has a lovely harbour and estuary location. A lot of shops had closed by the time we reached here, so we had a quick look around the town (certainly one worth coming back too, and soon!) and then hesitated on spending out more on dinner. I'm glad we did, it seems Suffolk folk really know how to cook, and we had pizzas that knock socks off anything I've had for... well, since I don't know when!

Working fishing beach at Aldeburgh

The coast here really is clear - of people and litter!

So from there, rather tired but refreshed, we headed home, already planning in our minds to go back. I can see why you never meet many Suffolk folk now, they already have enough wonderful views, villages, walks, food and art, not to want, or even need, to leave.

Giant Meercats, Chameleons - all in an average Greenwich day

I seemed to have been living in Greenwich last week, no sooner than I'd left on Monday night than I was back Thursday morning for another mammoth day. It was really busy, as it was the last day of the Equestrian events, and everyone seemed in great spirits that day. Instead to trekking home I decided to stay on for Friday, a much quieter day as there were no events that day, and then back yet again for a very long Saturday.

There has been a great buzz this week, the atmosphere has been terrific. I only regret not skipping the Friday to be there on Sunday as well, as I didn't realise the pentathlon final was on that day in Greenwich.


Click to expand picture - Frank the Chameleon has a day out in Greenwich Market

Saturday turned out to be more entertaining than I'd expected! For most of the week a Hurdy-Gurdy player has been in and around the market. For those who don't know what that is, it's a very odd Elizabethan musical instrument, which has a small keyboard as well as strings. The last time I'd head one being played it wasn't very good (think cats in a bad temper) but this guy was excellent, and I actually quite liked his playing. There's a photo over on Greenwich Market's Facebook Page if you want to see more.

 Having been to a few medieval banquets where the mead was flowing a little too freely I can see how this might have gone down well in 'ye ages gone by.' I've looked at old instruments like this a little more sideways ever since listening to Emilie Autumn's 'Face the wall' (which is an instrumental electric violin song, played by a violin virtuoso who dropped out of the classical world to do more alternative performing.) I never really 'got' violin solos till then, but hearing that I could see how in Bach's day this instrument and style of playing might have seemed revolutionary. It was the rock and roll of the day. Maybe it's my ear, or way I listened to it, but I couldn't fail to notice some of those Hurdy-Gurdy melodies weren't far away from rave & electronic dance music of today. Maybe it is just me, maybe it's because I've spent way too many hours working this week, but looks like I'm not alone in thinking this is an instrument that more could be done with. Elizabethan Star Wars anyone?

Darth Vader vs The Hurdy-Gurdy

So after that if I told you I saw two giant meercats wandering around the market, you'd probably not believe me? I was certainly surprised as I looked up from popping a pendant in a bag for a customer to find a meercat had crept behind my stall and was staring at me!

I've seen them in the market before, they create such a buzz when they come along, and have got the movements down so well too! They are always a pleasure to see, and often have lots of children and adults with cameras stalking behind them!

Then late afternoon there seemed a large crowd gathering besides Ng Jewellery's stall a few stalls away. I looked over and wondered why someone was carrying a model chameleon on her arm. Of course, it wasn't a model, but the real thing! Because the weather was so nice, the lady owner of 'Frank' had taken him out for a walk. She explained chameleons don't really walk much, there like standing still waiting for food to walk past them, but the sunshine and fresh air was good for him. As long as he stayed green, which meant he was happy, and didn't turn grey which meant he was unhappy, he seemed unbothered about lots of oooing strangers stroking him and taking photos. Now I lived very close to Camden Market for many years, and I saw some strange and interesting sights, but certainly never quite so much as you get to see on an average sunny day in Greenwich!