heat wave ...

Lots of completed pieces to share.  I love the porcelain spikes on two of the earring pairs - made by Petra Carpreau of the Etsy shop, Scorched Earth.  They are GORGEOUS!! And look like they were made to go with the bronze clay.

more ...

OK.  I am obsessed.  It's amazing to be able to imagine something and hold it in your hand a day or so later.

And three layering necklaces that have nothing whatsoever to do with metal clay.  The silver hamsa was purchased at the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul by a traveling friend and has been waiting to be used.  It was too new looking, so I gave it a patina and bashed it up a little with my trusty hammer.

harvest

With the first really hard frost here on Long Island comes the necessity of dealing with all the half-ripe and green tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, and a ton of windfall apples from a friend's trees.  I enjoy food prep and cooking, especially now that the weather is so cool, but it takes me away from my workbench more than I would like. 

Just got this amulet listed on Etsy.  I love the bronze hand clasp and the diamond shaped Thai amulet.  I have come to the conclusion that my reluctance to part with a piece is an indication of how much of my heart I've put into it.  I hope no one buys this one.

time traveler

Time traveler.

Way back in the 1970's, I used to watch Dr.Who.  I was a fan of the Fourth Doctor, Tom Baker, with his unruly scarf and unrulier hair.  (I watch it on BBC America now too and am very impressed with the last three doctors, but I may just be watching so that my grandchildren think I'm hip.)  The idea of time travel has always intrigued me.  If I had access to a Tardis, the first thing I'd do is visit Broadway in the 1920's and catch the Marx Brothers live on stage.  The second thing is attend a ritual at Stonehenge when that culture was at its height.  When I hold one of these beautiful Russian fossilized ammonites in my hand, I am transported 60 million years (give or take a few million) back in time.  It's incomprehensible.  The quartz crystal bead above it is from Mali and I am told that children sift these beads from the sands of the Sahara, string them, and sell them to tourists.  Since there is no way of dating them, they may be anywhere from a few hundred to a thousand years old or more.

Here's another necklace that I wasn't satisfied with and decided to rework.  I added some more quartz crystal to the Labradorite and one of my copper wire DNA charms.  Now it makes me happy.  Just wish I could get the colors in the Labradorite to photograph better.  I have a cool new photo prop though - a nice little piece of driftwood with an interesting shape.

And one more new piece - this one feels so earthy - like the way that the woods smell in Spring.

february

The picnic table where I usually take my jewelry photos has about a foot of snow on it.  The temperature hasn't gotten above freezing in ages and I've had to resort to using a set up near a north window.  We cope.  It's not ideal, but it'll have to do for now.

Shoulder duster earrings with bone flowers, wooden skull beads and beautiful amber colored horn beads.  I wish I didn't have such a short fat neck and I could wear them myself.

Leather, copper, abalone shell and a bronze Thai Buddhist amulet.  Great casual piece.

Milagros earrings.  Praying for true love.

Another variation on the abalone and leather theme - this time with a fossilized ammonite shell, a fancy copper wire bead and a recycled glass bead that makes me think of a root beer bottle.

And oh - this one. 

 This one I may have to keep.  I love the brown and the green together.  The fossilized ammonite shell with its slight iridescence, the carved horn spike.  Oh yeah. I may need to keep this.

 

into the dark again ...

Do you ever feel like you're in danger of becoming stuck in amber?  Like it's sort of comfortable and safe to be surrounded by that warm honey-sap but you know where this is going to lead and it's not pretty.  You've got a couple of choices: you can wiggle and fight it and maybe get out, or you can just relax and see what happens.  Go deeper.  BE the amber.  Is it just laziness??  Laziness with a hefty dose of fear thrown in?  I prefer (at the moment) to think that I'm not just making the same stuff, I'm making the same stuff a little better.  And after all, does any of it really matter?  Can any piece of jewelry, even if I'm arrogant enough to consider it ART, really matter?

Luann Udell, whose art and words always resonate deeply with me, just had a post about the artist not remaining silent in the face of grave social injustice. She makes, among many other beautiful things, these powerful and evocative little polymer clay horses inspired by prehistoric carvings and cave paintings.  She writes, 

“…And I can do this with my hands, by creating my little horse, which symbolizes the power that comes from our choices, our actions, even in the face of despair.”

https://luannudell.wordpress.com/

Read her posts.  She is wise and eloquent, where I am just stumbling around in the dark, trying to make some sense of this screwed up society and my part in it.  10 years ago I would have been at a vigil or a protest and that would make me feel better.  Today I'm just sitting at my worktable trying to fend off despair.  Here are my latest feeble attempts to put a little love and beauty out into the world:  Just treading water artistically maybe, but still satisfying on some level.  This I can do with MY two hands - my offerings of protection for the darkness.

the wheel of the year

"Every year at this time, I slap myself in the head and think, "Doh!  Why didn't I pot those bulbs that I wanted to have blooming in the dark cold winter?"  The reason of course is that I am the Queen of Procrastination and one basically Very Lazy Person.  And in spite of that handicap, I've managed to identify and begin to overcome some of my fears.  In 2014, I want to deal with my fear of fire issues and learn how to use a torch (for soldering) and a kiln (for metal clay charms and beads)."  

This was the post that I started to write a few days after Christmas.  I never finished it because I was feeling a bit under the weather and despite dosing myself with vitamin C and various herbal concoctions, I managed to develop a serious case of pneumonia.  Breath is so fundamental to being alive that I really freak out when it's a struggle to get oxygen.  All creative endeavors were left to fend for themselves during the last four weeks, but I'm starting to feel almost human again and this afternoon took photos of an ambitious piece I finished just before the holidays.

The amulet pouch is made of a vintage piece of Hmong applique.  I sewed it into a pocket with a little piece of velcro to close it and hung it on a beaded necklace.  I started with one strand, but it looked too unbalanced, so I added strands until it felt right.  Labor intensive.

I spent a lot of time with my maternal grandmother when I was growing up.  She truly believed that "idle hands are the devil's workshop", so from the time I could hold a large, blunt-tipped needle, I was given handiwork to keep me out of trouble.  My favorite things to make were "pockets" out of sewing scraps with the pick of my grandmother's button box as closures and embellished with my own crude embroidered flowers.  I was thinking of those days when I was making this piece.

May the New Year bring us all good health and peace ...

nature ...

I have a big butterfly bush in my garden.  In the summertime, I love to sit out there and watch the monarchs balancing on the delicate purple flowers.  I am not the only one watching; birds line up on the fence opposite the bush and find the nectar satiated butterflies a sweet snack. "Nature, red in tooth and claw" right here in my own backyard.  The wings are left discarded on the ground beneath the bush, in perfect pairs. One of those wings is encased in Ice Resin, along with watch gears, sequins, and a fragment of an artemesia vulgaris root, in a bronze bezel at the heart of this necklace.

I hung an assortment of beads and amulets from the bezel: a tiny copper pinecone; a mother-of-pearl spirit bear fetish; a vintage carved bone bead on a copper chain; a honey-colored lampwork bead, a carved bone bead and a little copper charm with a spiral set in clear resin.  There's a pen knife that is functional and opens, a brass protective hand hanging from an old Nigerian raised-dot bead, and a faceted citrine. My intent was to call in air energy - inspired by the butterfly wing and the pen knife (a stand-in for an athame), but it's all about balance after all, and it felt too ungrounded to me, so I added a deer antler tip that I drilled and lightly polished to anchor the East/Air energy.  The photos really don't do the colors justice.  Maybe I'll reshoot it on a white background.  Maybe not.  It was pretty cold out there yesterday.

And another necklace of vintage bone, carnelian, lava, black garnet and copper.  Very earthy. Another shed deer antler tip.  I really am obsessed with them.  My husband made me drill them outside because he said the bedroom was smelling like a dentist's office.

And a very light, almost ethereal piece by contrast - white jade, citrine, mother-of-pearl and rhinestones, hanging from an Dutch East Indies copper coin.

One more - a piece that I made early on from a broken necklace that belonged to my grandmother. I frequently wear it but had never photographed it before.