i'm your greatest fan

Another day in the oven.

The last two days were ok, I can deal with dry heat but today was just a little to humid and the studio has become a hot box. As soon as I moved away from the fan, the heat became unbearable.

I was hoping to get more done this week. Haha. There are new tea-cosies in store tomorrow and I was planning to get a few ric-rac tops finished...... well almost...... maybe I'll go into the studio and finish them off before being shop-girl tomorrow.....

On the subject of 'I'm your greatest fan', I've been struggling with a whole spate of being copied and ripped-off lately. There was the newspaper bag issue, the tea-cup candles, a swag of tea towel stuff and, sadly, the doily magnolia tree. Many things I work on have a 'zeitgeist' feel, that there are many people working on similar things or designs of a certain concept at the same time. This is inevitable, and often not a problem, but it's been getting a little sad and depressing lately as so much of it has been close to home and, worst of all, badly done. I, too, sometimes use other people's work as inspiration but I try as hard as possible to make my work individual and to make it to a very high standard. When the Magnolia Collective did the doily tree I was open about the inspiration coming from a piece of work by Janet Morton. Our work took on a life of its own and the tree is very different from Janet's excellent and monumental tree. Sadly the NZ artist who has doilied a magnolia (!) in Wellington has sadly copied some of the things I wrote about our tree in her artist's statement.

This is probably the thing I hate most about the internet and the blogging world, the world is smaller and faster in the dissemination of information. I sometimes feel that there are things that I can not share with the blogverse because I can not trust it to respect my copyright and integrity. Remember that if you have seen or read something on the internet you are not the only one, someone else will recognise the source. To me craft isn't all cupcakes and frilly aprons (let's not go back to the 50s!), it should be about skill and creativity, on-going development and, most of all, the fusing of tradition and innovation.

*And if you think this is snitchy then blame it on the heat.......... I've just eaten a container of ice cream and now feel thoroughly sick.............