KKaZZ Designs

New News in a New Year

2010-01-24T11:20:00.007-05:00

Not much news on the KKaZZ designs front these days; my full-time web design business has been demanding so much attention that beading has gone by the wayside for a while now.

A couple weeks ago I managed to steal a little time to inventory and photograph all the new stuff I'd done since August(!), optimize the pics, stick em on Facebook and Flickr and post them all on Etsy.

After an epic two-day battle with the KKaZZ workflow, I've now got more than 70 items in the shop and am thinking about signing up for a few more local craft shows.

The Can-Change environmental festival was a great day on the lake last September, and made me realize how much I enjoy sitting outside by the lake talking to community members about art. And I sold a lot of stuff, which I must say is motivational.

Building the displays was fun. I'd rescued some big pieces of driftwood from the cottage where I used to live and found that they lent themselves well to hanging things from. I built the other pieces out of scrap wood, recycled styrofoam and some black cloth - techniques learned from my time building set pieces in high school.

KKaZZ is now good and prepared for more shows and anticipating an interesting year.

Some new work, and a new retail location!

2009-08-21T12:05:00.005-04:00

It's been a great week. There was some day-tripping to Marten River Provincial Park with friends, a couple unexpected visits from other friends, and yesterday Heart of Unity, a neat little shop on Main St. here in North Bay, took my whole line of prayer beads and some other stuff and put them on display. I'm thrilled, to say the least, especially now that I've got art in two galleries and one retail location in the area. I love making the stuff, and it's nice to know that other people appreciate it.

Here are a few of the newest pieces:

I've been getting into bead embroidery again as well; here are a couple beginner pieces. Working on a bigger, beaded Aleister Crowley portrait of sorts at the moment.

KKaZZ Designs' first official gallery show, and some other things.

2009-08-08T19:13:00.008-04:00

It's been a great summer so far...self-employment is great because it allows me to plan my working time around the weather and whatever interesting things are happening in the offline world. I love having work-life balance and the ability to make time to create stuff and to take off for road trips on short notice.

They've included two visits to Toronto so far this summer; one which involved general roaming around all over Yonge St./Chinatown/St.Lawrence market, much eating of sushi and Indian food, and the discovery of ArtOn, my new favourite bead shops which are side by side on Queen St.

The second trip was this past week, to see Tool live at the Molson Amphitheatre, an experience I'll never forget. I also scored this very excellent limited-edition print designed by the band's guitarist, Adam Jones.

I love freaky art like this.

This afternoon in Callander, which is just south of North Bay, the Alex Dufresne Gallery opened a show called Adornments to display jewelry made by local artists including Peter Sloan, Fluttering Designs, my friend Kathleen, and me.

Here are a few shots of the gallery and the pieces I've got on display. I feel very honoured to have been invited to participate. :-)

Some new designs

2009-07-04T12:31:00.005-04:00

I'm looking forward to doing some beading tonight while I watch my friend's kids. Am in the middle of uploading some new images to my Flickr Photostream. The next step is to add them to the KKaZZ Designs page on Facebook and blog about them. I'll put them up on Etsy at some point, if they're not already there.

I need to start working on an Operations Manual for KKaZZ Designs. I've been reading an excellent book called the E-Myth Revisited, which explains how entrepreneurs can turn their small business into a turnkey business (think about franchised companies like McDonald's) by refining the operations of the company into systems and distilling the systems into an Operations Manual so you can sell copies of the business to other people. That's my goal for AloeRoot Web Services, ultimately, but in the meantime I'd like to start the process with KKaZZ Designs as well, so I can eventually hire people to fill some of the positions I'm doing myself at the moment.

Anyway, enough business chatter. Here are some photos:

To see more, visit KKaZZ.com's catalog!

Moved!

2009-06-25T15:47:00.004-04:00

No new jewelry for a few days now; I've just spent the last week or so moving and settling into my new house. It's near downtown North Bay, and much more populated an area than I've been used to for the last three years. It's nice to be able to walk everywhere, and have city water pressure, and have my mail show up right outside the front door as opposed to 4kms down the road.

Finding work-life balance is great when the weather's nice; I love working from home because I can take a morning break and go outside to water the plants in my new yard.

The gardens need a little attention, but I love the fact that there's no grass to mow. I don't have a high opinion of lawnmowers - they're noisy, environmentally unfriendly, and I don't see the point in maintaining "lawn order" as Alan Watts used to call it. I plan to let this place go pretty wild, Taoist fashion, while taking subtle care of the plants and neatening things up a little. The nyjer feeder is already attracting little chickadees, and I found a perfect blue robin's egg in the yard last week. There are lots of trees, which was my main sticking point when house-hunting. The maple in the neighbour's yard is the biggest one I've ever seen, and it has lots of personality, casts a lot of shade, and hosts a large bird population. Last night I sat out on the porch and eavesdropped on bird conversations until the sun went down and the mosquitos found me.

More new stuff!

2009-06-08T13:17:00.004-04:00

I've been beading like mad these last few days, mainly because my house is all packed up in preparation for the move and there's nothing much else to do, other than try to keep my hands busy!

This one is a custom work for my neighbour - it's turquoise with silver beads and I'm really pleased with the way it turned out.

While I was finishing the first necklace above, my neighbour started digging in my toolbox to see what else I had - she found this pendant and these beads and asked me to make her a second necklace. But of course!

This is the original Ouija Board necklace that inspired the one in my last post - also for the same neighbour. Which just goes to show you that it's not always terribly important to have retail space or even an online store to promote your work; word of mouth and existing happy customers are just as important, if not more.

In fact, I've sold more pieces during random conversations in my living room than I have anywhere else.

Not that sales are the ultimate goal, either - my plan was always to earn enough to support my beading habit :-)

Custom Necklace for Helene

2009-06-01T17:28:00.003-04:00

I made a necklace very much like this one for my neighbour. Her friend liked it so much that I was asked to create this piece. Yes, that is a tiny Ouija board and an eeny weeny Tarot deck.

Some of the beads are vintage - found at Rebuilt Resources here in North Bay. The rest are Etsy finds, or from BeadFX.com

Here's a closeup:

Some new creations

2009-05-30T21:32:00.005-04:00

Just a few new things; I spent the afternoon on my neighbour's back porch, nursing a beer and stringing some bracelets as we watched a large storm brewing over Lake Nipissing.

Took this photo just before the clouds rolled by; they didn't stop to rain on us, thankfully.

Here are the new items:

This one is made up mostly of beads created by the awesome couple at Algonquin Motel in South River, Ontario.

It's up for sale at my Etsy shop, along with the other pieces

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Working on a new design for KKaZZ.com

2009-05-22T21:39:00.003-04:00

I blame the fact that I'm a website developer who sells domain name registration services for the fact that I've compulsively collected a lot of domain names over the years. Meatmissile.com, vandoleweerd.com, inadequatehelpingofrubberymushrooms.com and kkazz.com are some of the ones I'm holding onto at present. Some of them have websites attached, but the rest are just hanging around waiting for inspiration and a little free time. Lately I'm working on KKaZZ.com again.

My late business partner thought that KKaZZ Designs was a great name for a jewelry business, so we whipped up a logo and registered kkazz.com. He was also of the opinion that any 5-letter domain name would eventually be saleable for a lot of money, so even though we didn't really do much with the site at first (our jewelry being mainly at our Etsy shop), we kept the domain around. Making personal sites for fun is a great way to try out new techniques that eventually end up in my professional toolbox. Once the bugs are worked out, of course.

Right now, I'm excited by all the ways in which developers can integrate and import website content from various sources into one custom-designed webpage. If a client of mine already uses Blogger, Facebook and eBay (to name just a few), I can use RSS and web widgets to import much of the content they're already generating into a personal or business website that updates itself with almost no developer intervention once the initial design work is done. This saves my customers time and money because they don't have to learn how to use yet another web application in order to promote themselves. I don't have to spend as much time writing code to build the website, and I can concentrate more on the interface and layout - designing a positive experience for the site's visitors, which is entirely the point of good website development.

KKaZZ.com, when it's done, is going to contain widgets and feeds from Etsy.com, Facebook.com, Flickr, Blogger, and multiple other sites from around the Net. It'll pull all this content into one big happy website, and it'll update itself so I don't have to worry about ongoing maintenance. I think that's KKaZZ.

KKaZZ Designs Inaugural Post

2009-01-15T15:32:00.004-05:00

Welcome to my brand-new artist's blog. KKaZZ Designs is the creative branch of my website services company, AloeRoot.

KKaZZ Designs is the umbrella under which I sell handmade jewelry, sculpture and other small manifestations of restless creative energy.

KKaZZ has a small online storefront at kkazz.etsy.com, although it's presently offline while my jewelry is on display at the WKP Kennedy Gallery in North Bay, Ontario

My portfolio of website designs is located at AloeRoot.com. If you're looking for a website, an ecommerce shop, a series of storyboards, or a one-of-a-kind piece of jewelry, please feel free to drop me a line.