Teamwork and the non-making work of art

 Some days you do the work that helps you make; rather than spend the time making.

The week was pretty much like that - following on from the big clean up; there were one or two jobs left on the list which got done today (filing and sorting bookshelves).

If you follow Barry's blog, you will know he has been busy making what he terms 'product' - some fabulous ladles are done; as are some butter/pate spreaders, and I know leaf tea caddy spoons and leaf teaspoons are on the way.  What that means for me is where the teamwork bit comes in - I write the swing tags for his work.  

Today I set about writing 50 swing tags. I cut the paper to size; punched the holes and then wrote. 

Here's the first part done.

Then the second part.

This is halfway through the third part which happens on the back.

And to finish where I got to today, I cut 50 lengths of thread to be tied onto each tag. Then the price is written on each one and the tag attached to the item. Barry pretty much takes it from here now (altho I often write the price).

We have emerged safely from our 3 day lockdown.  Brisbane had to stay another day, but they are out now too.  In terms of work you do for art that isn't really art... I organised for the studio to get its own QR code.

I am not sure how many other places are doing this; but here we do it a lot.  You scan the code into your phone to check in, and this allows contact tracers to firm up where you have been and if indeed people who were at the same place are at risk. Hence our short and sharp lockdowns - rather than really long ones.

In other news, I have been updating our websites. A long way to go still, but if you head to DEP you can see that I have put my 6 feminist posters online for sale.

This was prompted in part, because a while ago I sent a number of our female journalists posters to say thank you for the amazing work they are doing holding this country to account.  As best they can. Seriously we are in bad shape in so many ways, but I digress. 

Included in these was a "nevertheless, she persisted" poster to Annabel Crabb.  Who, during the week popped this little thank you on her instagram page.

Which got almost 3,500 likes and then I got quite a few enquiries!  I never expected her or any of the others to promote the work; so of course, was behind the 8 ball when she did...

Sadly, we had to postpone our Celebrating Books Maleny event "Sunday Morning Talking Crime" which was due to happen this morning.  Given the uncertainties about travel, lockdowns and numbers of people allowed to gather in one spot it was the only option.

Our organising group decided early in the year that rather than have our full festival on one weekend and risk losing it all if we locked down; we would split events over several weekends.  We have had some great successes so far this year and it has been exciting to gather again and share our love of books.  Had we gone with the one-weekend-only it would have been this weekend; so we feel very fortunate that we made that strategic decision to help manage our risks - and we did!  Hopefully we will be back with another Sunday Morning Talking Crime event before the year is out.