It begins!

Making a new piece of jewellery every day for a whole year is an ambitious project.

Documenting it and blogging my results with photographic evidence is an even bigger task to undertake. A year is a very long time to stick to a demanding routine and a very short time in terms of trying to get a lot of work done and bring a crazy dream to fruition. You may be wondering how I came to dare myself into this.

I graduated my Advanced Diploma in Jewellery & Object Design in 2010.

2011 started well, with exhibitions and recognition, full of promise.

Then life, as it often does, interrupted my plans. I couldn't spend as much time as I wanted in the studio, I lost the impetus and didn't achieve all I had set out to do. Clearly, I needed to do something to reawaken my creative spark.

The turn of the year seemed the ideal time to turn things around - and what a year! 2012 is a leap year. It is also the year in which I will turn 50. Surely an auspicious time to undertake something daring?

I decided to set myself an audacious goal. Not a nice, safe one I could comfortably reach, but a big, difficult, challenging one that I knew would be hard to achieve, but would bring me so much satisfaction if I could do it.

When I first thought of attempting to make a piece of jewellery every day for an entire year, I KNEW it was crazy, but I couldn't stop thinking about it.

If I couldn’t find time to get myself into the studio for most of 2011, why would 2012 be any different? The answer to that is simply this: because I want it to be.

I’m not unrealistic. I know there will be days when it’s hard to get anything done – probably even days when it’s pretty much impossible – because I’m unwell, or somebody else is, because I’ve run out of gas for my torch, or there’s a power outage, or for any one of a hundred reasons. So, there have to be some rules in place to make this work.

1. The ideal is 1 piece per day and that’s what I will aim to do.

 Note: I’m not talking about complex, intricate showpieces here. If it’s insane to try to do one of those in a day (and it is!), 366 in a row is not going to happen. The pieces will mostly be simple things – exercises if you like. They might be (and ideally will be) finished, wearable items, but there may be days when what I produce is a test piece or series of experiments, and that would be acceptable output, provided it’s properly documented.

2. If there is a day, or a number of days on which I can’t finish something, then I must make two or more pieces a day until the backlog is gone. Again, the ideal is 1 piece every day for a whole year. If the reality is 1 piece for every day of the year, so be it.

One way or another, my intention is to finish up with 366 finished pieces.

3. I sometimes like to work in series or batches. If that means I make seven pieces in seven days, and they’re all finished on day seven, that is acceptable. Daily progress must be documented in the same way as if I were making an individual piece each day.

4. If I have time and inclination to do so, it will also be permissible for me to accumulate partly made items as an emergency supply to finish on other days. The item will count as the piece for the day on the day it is finished and documented. Again, the ideal would be to make something from scratch, and while I will attempt to do this as far as humanly possible, there are bound to be some days when I’ll need my emergency supply. I will also attempt to make and accumulate a supply of assorted findings – ear wires, catches, brooch fittings, etc, so that I have these items ready to go instead of having to make the parts from scratch for every new piece. Sensible studio practice, really, and something I should already be doing anyway.

5. On really desperate days, or for pieces where it seems appropriate, I may use some commercial parts. I will endeavour to keep this option to a minimum. The emphasis is on the handmade.

6. Some of the pieces may be experimental, unusual and make use of found or donated materials. I will be looking to accumulate an interesting selection as the year progresses. If you’d like to see me use a certain material or item, feel free to suggest and/or donate or attempt to sell it to me. I’ll consider these, though I can’t guarantee using everything that turns up.

7.  Lucky dips. This will be my strategy for the inevitable days when I get really stuck and just can’t decide what to make. I’ll have a little set of boxes or bags for categories including materials, item type, theme, etc. These will contain slips of paper with words on them like silver, titanium, pendant, earrings, ocean, jazz and so forth.

So, for example, I might go to my item box and draw ‘ring’. Materials might be one or two dips (maybe bags for metals and other materials) and I might draw ‘silver’ and ‘plastic’. If I still didn’t have an idea, I could turn to my themes dip, and I might get and image or emotion to work with, say ‘anger’. You get the idea. I’m open to suggestions as to what might be in the lucky dips.

8. As I go along, I’ll be keeping a visual diary pertaining to the project. I may occasionally scan and share snippets of that, or perhaps just include a few quotes from the days working notes in my blog posts. The commitment to blog is the other major component of this project. Not only will I make a piece every day, but I will also photograph the piece and post it here, with some comments about the work or how the project is going. Basically, this will be an active (and I hope, to some extent, interactive) journal of my year as a creative artist.

9. This project is intended to get me into the studio and get me working again. The pieces will have to be fairly basic if I’m to have any hope of staying on track. In order to keep moving forward as an artist, I will also have to keep making other, sometimes more involved work. I’m thinking the Dare 366 pieces will fill the role of daily warm up exercises, to get the creative juices flowing, or just plain force me to get some work done.  I still want to get some work out into the marketplace, via retail outlets, galleries and exhibitions. Some of this may relate in some way to 366 in 2012, and if so, I’ll include mention of it here. Otherwise, you can see what I’ve been up to on my other blog, Betty’s Shed, which I’ll attempt to update from time to time through the year.

10. Part of my blog will be to include a numerical tag, which will indicate where I’m at each day, so you’ll know whether I’m on track or carrying a deficit. (I hope not!).

So. Come January 5, if all has gone to plane, the post will bear the tag 5/5 (i.e., five pieces made and it’s day five. I want to see that. I don’t want to be looking at 37/41 or 243/359  (Horror!).

11. Somebody asked me whether the pieces would be for sale. At this stage, it is my intention to keep them all until the conclusion of the project, as I may wish to look into having some of the items professionally photographed, or to exhibit or catalogue my efforts in some way. This is, of course, negotiable if somebody desperately wants to buy one or some of the pieces. I’m a recent graduate and my tools and materials do not come cheap. Some income would be a splendid thing. It may be a matter of making a similar piece to order, or making a borrow-back arrangement if needs be. Otherwise, I’ll be accumulating them all as a 3 dimensional diary of my year, and once I’ve satisfied myself by cataloguing, exhibiting, or whatever I may decide to do to round off this crazy scheme, I will then price the items and make them available for sale. After all, if I want to keep making, I’ll need to be able to buy more materials!

12. If you’ve read this far, thank you. I will endeavour to reward your interest with posts containing less words and some actual pictures.

366 in 2012. The challenge begins!