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I've got a piece laid flat on the floor, maybe a third of the way done, and both cats have decided the empty corner of it is prime sleeping real estate. Not the concrete, not the old rug. The corner where I haven't set tesserae yet. Every morning I come in and push a warm pile of fur off the andamento and get back to work. By noon they're back. I used to fight it. Shoo them off, shut the door, the whole thing. Then I realized one of them sleeps exactly where I hesitate the next day, and I sort of trust the judgment now. It's like a tiny furry second opinion on the composition. Anyway if you ever wonder why your mosaic has a slightly warmer, fuzzier corner, that's it. My insurance against the piece looking too perfect, I call it cat-approval quality control.

Eight years doing this and the single thing that got me work was a video of a smalti tile popping out of place and rolling across my studio floor, cat chasing it. My serious process videos, the polished finished shots, the "here's the story behind this piece" posts, nothing. The cat chasing a gold tile got me two commissions and a conservation inquiry from a museum in Vienna. I've stopped trying to figure out the algorithm. It's not a craft, there's no skill to learn, it's just weather. Some days the light hits your post, most days it doesn't. So I make the work, post what I feel like posting, and treat social media the way I treat the weather in Thessaloniki. I don't argue with it, I just dress for it. The people who do well on here spend their whole day on here. I don't have that in me and neither does my back. I'd rather spend four hours on my knees in marble dust than four hours curating my feed. Some weeks that feels like stubbornness and some weeks it feels like the right trade. Mostly it's a wash. But the cat video still got me the Vienna thing, so I'll keep one outtake in every ten posts and call it strategy.

ok so i spent three days on this little sculptural vase, handbuilt, textured surface, this glaze combo i've been testing for weeks. really proud of it. posted a reel of the process, lighting nice, good music, the whole thing. got maybe 300 views. then yesterday i posted a story of my cat sitting in a bisqueware bowl i forgot to trim down. phone footage, bad lighting, my thumb in the corner for half of it. 4.2k views. 14 dms asking if the bowl is for sale. i don't know what the game is anymore. i'm not even mad, just... confused. like the algorithm has decided my cat is the artist now and i'm just the assistant who cleans the kiln.

So I painted these two pet portraits, same size, same level of detail, both head-and-shoulders of someone's dog. A stranger commissioned me and I charged $150 and felt nervous about it. Then a friend from college asked me to do her cat and I immediately went "oh for you, $50" and then I painted the cat and it actually came out better than the stranger one. So my friend got the better painting for a third of the price and I keep thinking about that. Like I know we all do the friends and family discount thing and it's fine but it bothers me that my work isn't the same price regardless of who's asking. Or maybe it should be different because the relationship is different? My mom says I'm overthinking it because the friend will tell people and send me more work but also my mom thinks I should charge more for everything so I don't even know anymore. I guess I'm wondering where the line is between being generous with people you love and just devaluing your own time because you feel awkward asking for money from someone you actually know.

Like, I'll get a video of me just doing a really simple wash technique, something I thought was pretty straightforward and maybe helpful, and it'll get like, 100 views total. Then I'll post a sped-up video of me painting my cat, Bartholomew, looking super derpy, and it blows up to 10k. Bartholomew, of all things! haha. I'm not saying cats aren't great, but it's so hard to tell what the platforms actually want or if they're just messing with us. It makes me wonder if all the effort I put into explaining the pigment mixing or the paper buckling is just… wasted on them? It’s frustrating because I want to share the skill of it, you know? Omg, anyone else feel like they're just throwing paint at a wall and hoping something sticks with the algorithm gods lately?

Three years. Three years this thing sat under my workbench wrapped in old sheets, half-cut, wrong, not working. It's a portrait of my yiayia's hands, she was a seamstress, those hands knew things, and I could not get the light right in the smalti. The gold kept coming out flat, like a coin, not like afternoon sun on old skin. Took it back out two months ago and finally saw what was wrong. Wrong andamento, wrong direction of the cuts. I'd been setting the tesserae like fabric folds instead of like hands. Had to pull half of it out and start again. Sent photos to the client this afternoon. She cried. So did I, a bit, alone in the studio with the cats looking at me like I'd lost it. Anyway. Sometimes the work needs to wait until you're ready for it. That's the thing nobody tells you.

You know that moment when you're three rows into a section and you realize the particular batch of smalti you pulled has just slightly too much green in the blue, and now the whole thing reads like a bruise instead of sky, and nobody else would ever notice, but you notice, and it's going to burn a hole in your head for the next ten years if you leave it. So I unpicked the whole section. Recut the curve from a different batch. It took three days and the difference is barely there. But it's there. My conservator friends would say this is insane. My regular friends don't understand why I didn't just paint it. My cat sat on the loose pieces twice. Anyway the curve is right now. Worth it? I'll let you know when my knees forgive me. 🙃

Found a little screwdriver in my coat pocket today. The kind that folds open, cheap steel, worn wooden handle. I have owned it since I was maybe twenty three. It has been through two marriages, one divorce, the fall of a regime, and about four hundred pieces of work. I do not remember ever buying it. It just exists, like a cat that moved in and never left. I think the thing I keep is not the tool. It is the fact that I opened and closed it ten thousand times without once noticing. You want proof you were alive somewhere, it is not in the exhibitions. It is in the things your hand did automatically while your head was somewhere else. Tomorrow it will go back in the same pocket and I will lose it again for six months. Fine. That is our arrangement.

Been hearing a lot about "content strategy" and "funnels" in these threads. Meanwhile my best sale this year happened because a woman I'd never met spent twelve months quietly watching my story highlights, then one day just wrote me a message in broken English asking if I could do a small version of a piece she'd seen me post back in January. No ad, no post boost, no newsletter. Just a person who liked looking at my work long enough to trust me with her money. The part nobody talks about is that I almost didn't post that piece. It was a commission that got cancelled halfway through, I was annoyed about it, and I only photographed it because I'd already set the lights up. One of those throwaway posts. My Instagram is a mess. Irregular, half-finished work, cats knocking tiles off the table. And it's the regularity of the mess that does the work, not the polish. People watch you be real for long enough and they stop seeing a stranger. The thing that actually sells is time. Nobody can buy that for you. All the paid reach in the world won't do what a year of showing up did for that one message.

So I got a message from a woman in Oregon, says she saw a photo of a quilt I made for my grandson's wedding, posted it on Instagram two years ago, just a picture I snapped on the porch, didn't even think about it, and she tracked me down to ask if I'd sell it. I told her honey that quilt's been slept under and washed and loved on, it's got a wine stain from the reception and a cat hair woven right in there somewhere. She said she wanted it more for that reason. So I called my grandson, he said he'd make me a new one if I wanted to let this one go. So I did. She paid me more than I ever charged for a quilt in my life and sent me pictures of it hanging on her wall like it was a painting. And I'm sitting here thinking, I been sewing sixty years and the Lord let me live long enough to see folks call my grandmother's way of doing things "fine art" and buy it off a telephone. I don't know what to do with that. But I know if you had told Grandma Viola her granddaughter would sell a quilt to a stranger in Oregon who saw it on a picture box, she'd have laughed and said you were touched in the head. Anyway. Anybody else got a sale that felt like it came from another planet?

I finally sent the email I'd been drafting for like three weeks. The one to a gallery that actually shows work I respect, asking if they'd look at my portfolio. I rewrote it nine times and then sent it at 11pm in my pajamas with wet hair because if I waited until morning I'd chicken out again. And then I sat there staring at the sent folder like... okay so now what. Cried a little bit. Called my mom. She said "what's the worst they can say, no?" and I was like mom you don't understand, a no from THEM feels different lmao. I know it's such a tiny step, they probably won't even reply. But I've spent eight months telling myself I'm "not ready yet" and I'm honestly so tired of being the person who waits to feel ready. The watercolors are good. I know they're good. I just needed to let someone else have the chance to say so. Also my cat sat on my keyboard mid-send and nearly deleted the whole thing, so that's probably a sign of something. Anyway. If you're also sitting on an email you're terrified to send, send it. Worst case you're exactly where you are now, just one braver step ahead.

I'm working on this piece, pietra dura sort of thing but with smalti, very fine cutting, very controlled. And yesterday I'm setting pieces and I notice there's a cicada shell stuck in the thinset near the edge. Must have fallen from the ceiling while I was spreading it, died there, dried out, became part of the substrate. My first thought was to pick it out. But I looked at it for a while and I don't know. It's been there the whole time I've been working on this thing. It's not hurting anything. It's almost invisible unless you're right up close. So I'm going to tesserae right over it and leave it in there. A little fossil. A tiny uninvited collaborator from the studio ceiling. This is what happens when you work on the floor. You make deals with the dust and the insects and the cats. 🙂

Took me forty-five years and a divorce to say it out loud but here we are: if someone hands me a theme and a deadline, my brain turns off like a switch. I stare at the wall. I cut and reset the same piece of stone six times. I produce something technically fine that I don't care about. Meanwhile the thing I do for myself, last month it was a portrait of my neighbor's cat made entirely from broken roofing tile I found in a skip, I finished it in a week and a half and it's probably the best thing I've made all year. I keep saying yes to calls and group shows because that's what you're supposed to do, right? Get your work out there. Network. But I think I'm done pretending I function that way. I'll take the solo slow route even if nobody sees it for a while.

ok so I'm working on this piece right now, it's a really soft grey-blue morning scene of my neighbor's cat on the fire escape, and I've been staring at the blank paper for like twenty minutes because I know the second I lay down that first wash, that's IT. there's no undoing it. you can lift a little but you can't un-wet the paper. and I think that's what people who don't work in watercolor don't get, the courage it takes to just COMMIT. every other medium you can paint over, scrape back, repaint. watercolor holds the record of every choice you made. I messed up the first attempt and it's sitting crumpled in my recycling bin right now. the second one is going better because I finally just breathed and went for it, but wow. my heart was actually pounding. anyone else have that moment where you just have to close your eyes and put the brush down and trust it??

I spent yesterday cutting back old grout on a piece I'm reworking and I swear I'm still finding dust in places I didn't know I had. Inside my watch. In the crease of my notebook. My cats are sneezing. I washed my hair twice and there's still a gritty feeling when I run my fingers through it. It's the fine stuff too, not the chunks, that almost-powder that floats for hours and settles on everything three rooms away. I gave up and ate dinner over the sink because the whole kitchen felt like a construction site anyway. Does anyone else just surrender to it? Or do you have some system I haven't figured out in fifteen years of doing this?

Did a linocut for a mate's mother two years back. She wanted a heron for the sitting room, lovely woman, made us dinner while the ink dried. Charged her €80 because sure, she's family-adjacent, and it was only one colour, how long could it take. Twelve hours it took. Twelve. And between the lino, the paper, the good ink, the proofing runs where the bugger wouldn't sit flat... I made about €4.50 an hour and told myself it was the gesture that mattered. Now every second cousin and neighbour's dog is looking for the "€80 heron." Two women this month alone, and one of them was genuinely offended when I said €180 for a bigger one. "But you did Joan's for eighty." Joan knows the price of bread, so she does, and she's mortified, but the cat's out of the bag. Worst part is I can't even be mad at them. I set the damn rate. If you undervalue your own work once, that's the price that follows you around for the next five years. I've had to have the awkward chat three times now and I still hate it every go. Lesson's learned anyway. Friend rate is a bottle of whiskey and a proper thank you, not a discount that pads itself into every conversation after. Sure I'm still not sure how to undo it, but I'm not doing another one at eighty. That ship has sailed.

Okay so I'm still pretty new to pricing my own work without a professor or a gallery telling me what to do and I think I massively undershot this one. A friend-of-a-friend reached out wanting a custom piece, her cat, sitting in a sunny windowsill, very specific reference photo she sent, gorgeous light honestly I was excited about it. I quoted $150 for a 16x20 watercolor which is like... insane when I actually stop and think about it. That's easily 15-20 hours of work when you factor in the back-and-forth and the sketching and the masking and the layering and fixing the thing I inevitably mess up. I did the math after I sent the message and it came out to like $8 an hour and I just sat there staring at my phone. I'm not mad at her she was thrilled with the price obviously lol. I'm mad at me. I keep doing this thing where I price based on what I think someone will pay instead of what the work is actually worth. And I KNOW better. I had a whole class on this. But when it's real and there's a real person on the other end asking nicely I just fold and throw out a number that feels "fair" to them and not to me. Anyway she's picking it up tomorrow and I'm gonna smile and take the cash and then I'm gonna spend the whole evening updating my rate sheet so I don't do this again. For the fifth time. 🫠 Anyone else have a number they immediately regretted the second it left their mouth?

Five hours on my knees today and my right foot went completely numb, the kind of numb where you stand up and it's just a block of meat attached to your leg for a full minute. I'm 45, I know this is my own doing. But I was in the middle of cutting smalti for a sky section and I couldn't stop, the color was exactly right and the light was going, you know how it is. Took the cats outside with me afterward and sat on the step with a beer and watched them sniff things. No profound lesson. Just sore knees and a cold can of Fix and a half-finished sky that's going to look good tomorrow.

Alright, let's hear the worst gallery pitch you ever got. The one that made you laugh or almost made you walk. Mine: A new space in a nearby city, wanted 50% commission, and when I hesitated the owner said "but we'll really push you on social media." I told her my cats have more followers than that and at least they don't take half. What's yours? The fee that was insulting, the promise that was empty, the red flag you wish you'd spotted sooner.

two open ink tins, one of them definitely crusting over. a proof I pulled yesterday that's fine except the one bit I can't stop staring at. the cat asleep on the only clean bit of newsprint. a coffee mug from three days ago that I'm pretending I'll wash later. and the tune I've been trying to remember for a week is finally in my head now that I'm not trying at all. I spent the whole morning just sharpening tools. that's the whole story. didn't cut a single line. just sat there with the oilstone and the slipstrop and got everything singing. there's something in that, though, the day you spend getting ready is still a day in the work. sure the kids'll be home in two hours and I'll have a hare's head and nothing else to show for it but half a dozen razor-sharp gouges. grand. tomorrow they'll earn their keep.