Handmade Button and Vacation Plans

I am quite excited because I have the week off from my day job. Usually when I'm on vacation I go away but this time I'm home by myself since my husband doesn't have as many vacation days as I do. This means I have the week to stay home and work on my buttons. I know that a lot of people dream of quitting their day jobs and doing their art as their job. For this week I want to explore that a bit. I'm going to pretend that this is my day job and approach is not as a vacation but as a real job. I know right now that I'd never be able to make enough buttons to replace the income from my day job even if I made buttons 8 hours a day every day. They're just too labour/labor intensive to actually be able to make them in quantity by myself. Never-the-less I'm going to explore my options and use this as a mini experiment to see what I can do. It also happens that today is the first of the month so it's a good day for some new beginning and exploration. So far today I've fired a load of ceramic buttons in the kiln and am experimenting with some glazing and handmade decals combined in a technique which I thought I had discovered. It turns out that this isn't a new technique but something that has been explored by others. It's funny how I really hadn't seen this combination of techniques before and yet it's not new. I guess there really isn't anything new under the sun. Anyway I'm going to explore this technique, make it my own and see how far I can push it. I've also made some more resin buttons which are drying. They should be ready tomorrow. I've also listed a few resin buttons that I made yesterday (I took the pictures this morning and am in the process of listing them.) So for my first "pretend" day of the new job I've done a lot of work. So far no sales for today but Sunday (and weekends in general) tend to be quiet so I'm optimistic that the week will be successful. I'm going to continue to list the rather large pile of buttons I have ready to go and will then decide what I plan to do tomorrow. I do know I have some ceramic buttons ready to go in the third firing of this really labour/labor intensive creations. The problem with the ceramic buttons is that they take a lot of time so are quite a bit more expensive than my resin buttons. They should appeal to a different type of buyer though so I know it will take some time to get them going. I have so many ideas I just hope the week doesn't fly by too soon. I'll try to keep this blog updated throughout the week to let you all know how it is going. Here's to all of us dreamers who want to make a living with our art!