Saturday, November 28, 2009

Thank you for this Experience



Greetings! Time moves
so fast. Seems like the more I work, the more intensely I try
to focus, the faster it all whizzes by. Once again I find myself
wishing I had gotten this news letter finished weeks ago. Seems
like I always eventually get to where I am trying to go. I find
it hard to believe that Christmas, and winter, are so near already.
I have been working hard keeping up with a few Christmas orders,
maintaining my wholesale customers, and making a good number of
marbles. This is all on top of continuing with my work with in
Blacksburg at the Orthotics / Prosthetics office, making progress
on my home addition project, and gathering fire wood for the coming
winter





I have been taking videos
of available marbles and hosting them on youtube.com for the last
few weeks. Video has provided a really great way for others to
get a better sense of what my marbles look like in person. Check
them out! Tiemeyerglass
- Youtube.com








A lot of has happened since my last news letter.
This time I have decided to share with images more than words.
I took a quick walk in a general circle of a portion of our property.
I took about 60 quick photos. I ended up with 14 photos that I
thought were nice and gave a decent perspective of our surroundings
as well as having a little fun. We really love living here and
put a lot of time end energy into our life here. I used to take
a lot of photos years ago and really enjoyed work with film. It
has been a long time, and even those these photos were taken digitally,
I had fun. Messing around with perspective, framing, and macro
is always enjoyable.


Click on the photos for the larger image:
Looking down the road from my house

















A tiered hill with garden
beds. We still have broccoli under the plastics tents and the
swiss chard is hanging there.
















A few shots of my home
and the remodeling / addition work going on.






























Random fungis on the rotting oak that I cut.



















The stump of the tree that will keep us warm much of the winter
















The very most recent addition to our flock of chickens. It is so nice when they end up being hens and not roosters













I do have a number of new works available on my website just
in time for Christmas I anticipate having a few more marbles and
some pendants available in the coming weeks.
Click on the images to check these ones out and more.










I am also looking
forward to making small display dishes for my marbles. I have
made larger "candy dish" style displays in the past.
They always looked great!



Please take the time to check out a
little video of me making
a bead. I think it will provide a fun
perspective on what I do every day and what it takes to make a
"quick" bead. It takes about 20 min to make the beads and can be seen in 3 parts. The video is the very 1st time I have tried to do this sort of thing. Right now my shop is not set up very well at all for taking videos. So, please bear with me and as I try new videos it will improve.
(It is taking some time to upload so please check back if the links are not working yet.)

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

For the past few years when I got to bed
at night I have liked to "Give thanks for the experience"
and that's enough. I have spent a good amount of time thinking
about "this experience" the past few months. As challenging
as life can get at times I try to always be thankful for every
bit of the experience, good, seemingly bad, etc........ Thank
you for allowing me to share a little bit of this (my) experience
with you. Cheers! - Kenan


Wednesday, September 9, 2009

1st News letter!




My name is Kenan Tiemeyer. I was born in Chicago, Illinois almost 34 years ago. I am the oldest child of my parents Brian and Arlene. I have 6 brothers and 6 sisters. From the time I was 2 until I was 24 I lived in Grand Haven, Michigan. This is right on Lake Michigan about 2.5 hours from Chicago. Great place to grow up!

I remember being fresh out of high school and looking forward towards the unknown. I remember thinking to myself that no matter which way life took me that I would never stop learning. I would always look for new positive experiences and constantly learn no matter what the subject matter. As it turned out I ended up getting a few scholarships and grants to attend college and decided that I could not turn down a free year or 2 of college. I chose Film and Video production because on the list of possible majors it was the only thing that looked remotely interesting. I was simply going to "wing it" for awhile until I could figure out what I really wanted to do. At least I could continue learning.

2 years after graduating from college (01-01-2000) I decided that it was time to venture out of Michigan and fortunately found a wonderful home on 12 acres in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. It is the only piece of property that I looked at and it just felt SO right. 6 months after moving to Virginia, Tree and I, got married at the creek that runs on the border of our property. That same year I came across the opportunity to learn how to work with borosilicate glass. Again, this new opportunity felt SO right. I jumped at it and never looked back.

During the last 9 years of working with glass, improving our home / property we were blessed with 2 beautiful children (Sequoia and Sage). We also had a lot of time to enjoy "country living" while creating and trying to figure out what we really wanted out of life. It has been an exciting 9 years as we have gotten used to our chosen lifestyle (only having 3 tv channels, heating our home with a wood stove, growing as much of our own food as possible, eating vegetarian) but nothing is static. As great as the last 10 years have been, things do change. What was once new and exciting gets old in as what was once fresh gets stale and stagnant.

The last year has been extremely busy as we started a large addition to our home, expanded our gardens, built facilities for our chickens while looking forward to getting goats and who knows what other sort of critters in the future. Even though there has been a lot of progress and change in our home life there has been a lingering feeling of stagnancy in my glass work. The truth is that I have made some of my very best glass work over the last few years but the best way to describe my feelings towards my work is that it had gotten "easy" and predictable. When I first started working with glass it was an immense challenge to not only make nice work but to make fresh original work with stimulating content to back it up. 9 years into glass work I have definitely not perfected the medium but the challenges that once stimulated me had diminished. Over the last year or the idea of "what's next" was creeping into my mind. I had been unsure of where it was coming from while subtly keeping my eye out for new and unexpected opportunities.

Finally the new opportunity has presented itself. For the last few weeks I have been working part-time in a new studio in Blacksburg, Virginia. It is a fledgling studio that needs to be nurtured but I hope to be hosting classes, selling a lot more of my glass there, and generally interacting more with the local public. The new studio is in the same building as New River Prosthetics and Orthotics. That business is run by Phil Johnson CPO who also happens to be a glass enthusiast who has been putting a ton of energy into the new glass studio. He has offered me the opportunity to learn the craft of making Prosthetics and Orthotics. How could I turn this down? So, I am very happy to say that I will be dividing my time between the 2 businesses and am very excited by this new opportunity as well as the many others that the future potentially holds.

I am hoping to get away from the wholesale end of my glass work (that has provided so much for me over the years :) and start selling primarily through the glass studio / gallery and my website. Really, this is what has finally prompted me to put together the long anticipated "1st news letter". New energy, fresh perspective, return of a passionate spirit. There should be some significant changes coming to my website very soon, fresh progressive glass work, as well as newsletter every month or so.

For right now I want to thank everyone that has purchased my glass art in the past. I feel very blessed to have been able to support my family with my art for the past 9 years while living in the country. I have truly been enriched by these experience and give many thanks.

NEW GLASS WORK AVAILABLE:

I put up 7 new marbles and a new paperweight for sale 2 days ago with the intention of getting this news letter together but 2 have already sold. Check out the 6 that are still available: MARBLES








I have 1 new bead and 1 new pendant available in my Etsy.com store: ETSY







Thanks for taking the time to check out this 1st new-letter. I look forward to creating more in the future. Hopefully the will improve with time. Cheers! - Kenan Tiemeyer





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