The SmugMug Blog

The Comeback Kid: Blazing a New Artistic Path, the Beauty Captured With SmugMug

Name: Lyn Foley
Position/Title: Owner/Artist
Name of Company: Lyn Foley Lampwork Beads & Jewelry
Location: Round Top, Texas
Market: Handmade jewelry and glass beads
Bragworthy Factoid: Wrote and published a book documenting her worldwide sailing trip
Website: www.LynFoley.com and beads.smugmug.com

Career Highlights…

• Creating a new hollow bead style not based on blown glass
• Receiving awards at juried art shows and jewelry fairs
• Receiving an Award of Merit from the Ocean Cruising Club

Fave Features…

• Customization
• Quick, easy image uploading
• Archives and galleries for showcasing sold and unsold work
• SmugMug communities and Dgrin
• Private albums

Beading the odds

Lyn Foley has done amazing things. She has worked as an art teacher, a waitress, an insurance salesperson, a fiber artist, a street artist, a business manager and a retail store owner. She has mastered celestial boat navigation, battled Force 10 gales and logged 35,000 miles at sea on a trip around the world. But what does this multifaceted life force find astonishing? The salvation offered by the unorthodox glass jewelry she makes by hand, a single bead at a time. Foley, who turned to bead-making after 12 years of living at sea, found a unique sort of redemption in her art. Foley’s husband Jim, a gemologist who suffers from Parkinson’s, is her partner in both life and work. “Before I found glass, we did traditional work,” she says. “My husband was an award-winning jeweler working exclusively in gold. He lost a lot of his skills, so we switched to silver. I couldn’t get into art shows because I was using old beads; they considered that stringing. So I learned how to make beads, and I love it. It’s been nine years now, and I’m thrilled with it.”

Beholding the beauty

Foley, who learned the art of glass bead lampworking in 2003 from an artist in Texas after she and her husband returned to the mainland for medical care, relies on SmugMug to showcase her work. Her site is customized to the fullest—she benefitted from the help of design experts she found in the SmugMug communities—featuring large image display sizing to reveal the intricacy of her designs. Although she is not a photographer, she has found many of SmugMug’s features to be beneficial to artists; private albums in particular help her close sales. “When I make a set of jewelry for a customer, I usually give them choices,” she says. “I post the photos to a private gallery and send them a password. I also use private galleries to host photos I post on my blog, or in Constant Contact emails or other places. [Then] I know the links won’t disappear.”

Undergoing a sea of change

For Foley, transitioning from her old life to her new one took some effort, and happened in several stages. First, she left behind the retail life—she and her husband owned three stores in the San Francisco Bay Area for nearly 20 years—then matriculated from the seafaring lifestyle to one requiring her to attend jewelry fairs and manage an online business. Her husband’s medical needs require her to run her business from home; she had the inspiration to return to the arts and crafts circuit they’d relied on early in their careers, adding the online component to optimize their time together as well as sales. SmugMug made that process easier. “SmugMug is so easy because I can load photos and do captions and keywords all at once,” she says. “I can upload 10, 20, 30…and copy them all as needed.” Foley relies on email lists to market her business, attends about 14 art shows a year, blogs extensively and puts up lots of pretty pictures of her work—on SmugMug, of course.

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