What happens to rats in jail? (Well, mice anyway)

My mice are complicated.
They do good work for charity, but they also have a dark side.
Sprightly and Nosey went missing.
It turns out they had been sneaking off to the supermarket at night and eating holes in the cheese.
They got tried and sentenced in a kangaroo mouse court and ended up in jail, all without my knowledge.Here they are adjusting to their temporary new home...Nosey saw the movie 'Flushed away' and wonders what magical worlds may lie beyond...Sprightly is a bit more skeptical.
Here's Sprightly in the prison chapel.
Is he searching for meaning?
Or cracks in the glass?
Or maybe those big yellow squares look like cheese from heaven?
Do mice believe in a big cheese in the sky?Wandering the halls...
When I did finally track them down I had to pay a fine to get them out.
I hope they learned their lesson though...

My website.

The day Nosey mouse was born, and his current work for charity...

These pics were taken the day Nosey was born...


It was Dec 29, 2006 in Santa Fe.
This was taken in town the day after...
I suppose Nosey should have two birthdays, like the Queen.

One for the day he was born in clay, and one for first day he emerged from his cocoon of investment material as a fully fledged bronze.

I decided, starting June 1st to donate one mouse to auctions benefitting animal shelters for every five mice sold. No matter who sold them (me, my Etsy store or galleries), and of course if each person buying only buys one, no matter, each gets added to the tally and every time I pass another 5, one goes to a charity auction to benefit animal shelters.

And of course it's not just Nosey mouse, it's any of my family of six mice.

I started by donating 2 mice to cover my first 10 sales from my starting date. They were auctioned at a cocktail party in a very fancy home and the proceeds are now benefitting cats and dogs at Felines and Friends in Santa Fe.
They assist other shelters in finding homes for unwanted pets and strays. They also take in some that need veterinary help.

I'm always a bit leery of websites that proclaim 'a portion of sales are donated to...' or 'a percentage of sales are donated to...'
Always seems a bit vague to me. I always want to know 'what portion?' or 'what percentage?'.
After all, you could drop a dollar in a charity bucket once in your life, rationalize it came from your sales, and therefore counts as a portion or percentage.

0.00000001% can be called a percentage of sales, as much as 50% can be called a percentage of sales.
If you stop donating after a dollar, but keep selling forever, the percentage or portion you gave just keeps getting smaller, that's all.
So to all those out there who want to know how my mice are helping homeless cats and dogs, I went with one mouse donated for every five mice sold.

So if donated mice sell at auction for their retail value, each mouse you buy from me, my Etsy store or a gallery amounts to about $50 of help for an animal shelter.

When we lived in Venice, California there was a female cat in the neighborhood who was bent on populating the whole area with her kittens.
We managed to catch one and adopted her as our pet. She had 2 kittens before we got her spayed (one of which we found a home for, the other we kept).
Later Meridee's doctor told us keeping them would kill her (Meridee's allergies were getting severely worse).
Luckily we found a great home for them both before moving to Santa Fe.
Here they all are in a pretend Friskies commercial I made for fun...

Other than that, I just got a tree frog (so I'll be making tree frogs - stay tuned for that!)
My website.

Southwest Art magazine features Sprightly and Nosey mouse!

I'm delighted to announce the debut of Sprightly and Nosey mouse in Southwest Art magazine's July edition!
In fact it's the first time any of my sculpture has been featured in a nationwide publication besides exhibition catalogs.
Here's a sneak preview (I believe the magazine will be on the shelves next week).
As it mentions, I'm donating mice to animal shelter art auctions (one donated for every 5 that sell).
I'll no doubt post all the details here from my website (probably next week's post) since it's a worthwhile cause.
And thanks, Southwest Art!

FREE eCards starring your favorite stand up mouse - Sprightly!

I just got done setting up a page full of FREE eCards you can send from my website.
They're FREE to send (of course!).

When I say 'I just got done', what I really mean is Peter Sundstrom just got done.
He has this cool program called 'postcard direct' which he set up on my site. He's super friendly, and eager to get it up and running in no time.

There were a few glitches, and I had him on Skype while I called GoDaddy support on speaker phone so they could talk to each other.
Via Skype because Peter is in New Zealand, GoDaddy guy is in Arizona, and I'm in Santa Fe.

After a few introductions they continued their conversation in Klingon I believe it was, before it all got sorted out.
All completely above my head.

The upshot?
Now you can send supercool eCards to your chums starring your favorite mouse and mine, the ever cheerful Sprightly, and one or two other characters from my repertoire of bronze critters.

Fun, easy, and best of all, FREE.

So what are you waiting for, pop on over and have a go!

Tiny turtle dilemma – the problems involved when producing miniature bronze turtle sculptures

There’s a great Seinfeld 2 part story called ‘the bottle deposit’ where Kramer and Newman are racking their brains to figure something out: Newman wants to take empty beer bottles to Michigan and deposit them for the extra five cents you get in that state.

Kramer tells him it’s impossible.
If they drive them there, the gas, toll booth and truck rental prices will kill them.
Newman’s determined to crunch the numbers every possible way to make it add up.

I have a similar dilemma with my tiny turtles.
Plenty of people have told me it’s not worth the hassle making tiny pieces. The work involved means you have to charge a lot, or you just don’t make any money on them.
Things with my tiny turtles seemed to be going well. But my supplier got fed up fiddling with them since his casting results were inconsistent. Sometimes they’d come out just fine, so he could give them to me after minimal metal finishing. If that happened every time things would still be great.

But the metal finishing is where he loses money since he gave me a per piece fixed price based on the assumption of consistently good casting results. But sometimes there’d be problems that would need extra time to fix (time is money), or he’d just ditch the problem ones and cast more. Again, wasted time and effort on his part. His prices were great for me, which is what I based my retail price on. But he’s had enough of making them.

So now I’m getting them made somewhere else, but it’s costing me more. They’re casting great, but the sprues the foundry puts on the bottom are bigger than my previous supplier’s, and they obliterate more of the under surface, including my initials.
So they need more work done after casting (after cutting off the bigger sprue, the bottom of the turtle needs to be metal worked, essentially re-sculpting that portion where the sprue was attached on each one), and that extra time adds to the bill.
I don’t want to raise the price on them, they’re 2 of my most affordable pieces.
I like that just about anyone who wants one can get one.



Here’s my options. Do I :-

Stop making them, it’s just too much trouble.
Drop the quality (just flatten off the bottom rather than have metal workers re-sculpt it) so I can still make a bit of money on them (they’d look fine except from underneath)?
Maintain the original quality but raise the price so I can still make a bit of money on them?
Maintain quality but keep the original price so I make next to nothing but you can still have one to enjoy at the same price as before, while I continue to explore other options?

I have decided to go with the last option:
Keep the same price, while trying to figure out a way to make it work.
At least for now.

Like Newman I’m hoping to find a successful ‘other option’ before too long and prove the nay sayers wrong!

They are available from me directly, from my Etsy store, and from some of the galleries I show in.