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.

of whales and fairytales

A lot of the time when I'm working on a piece, I reach a point when I need something I don't already have, I run out of patinated wire, or I just don't know for sure which direction it wants to take.  I don't want to force it.  I want to midwife it gently - no forceps deliveries on my worktable.  Taking a break from the work usually means pulling up some weeds, loading the dishwasher, having a little lie-down ... but I especially like to read other people's blogs.  My favorites are on the left.  I'm so impressed when artists can coherently describe their processes.  It really makes me feel inadequate.  I love the blogs where an entire tutorial is presented. Words and photos.  How do they do it?  How would I ever become organized enough?  Would a photo showing the state of my cuticles make readers gag?

Here's the finished piece - Labradorite, bone, black garnet.  The Czech glass tube beads that make up the rosary chain are an iridescent grey that almost looks like the Labradorite.  There's the whale bone again in photo three.  Every time I move it, it leaves a little pile of calcium behind.  I wonder what kind of whale it was.  A humpback was sighted off the South Shore here this past week.  Every once in while one beaches and dies out on the East End of the Island.  When my kids were small, a young whale managed to find its way into the Inlet and then couldn't find its way back out into the Atlantic again.  We went down to the Bay to try to see him.  I think I remember that he was lured out by some fishing boats and my kids believed the story had a happy ending, but what happened to him in the wide Atlantic, I just don't know.  Was his mama able to find him?  I dearly would love to believe so.  I'm a sucker for happy endings.

April

Some new pieces for April:  turquoise, amber, lava and bone.  Copper and bronze.  All my favorites.  I'll just keep quiet and let the pictures speak for themselves.

And if I managed to do it right, there's a video of a little egg hunter if you make it to the very end.  Maybe not as funny as kittens being tickled, but pretty damned cute, I'd say.

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 ...

august just goes on forever ...

I am not a patient person.  I'm always ready to move on to the next thing.  OK, we've had summer. Enough already - let's get some leaf action going here.   In my ongoing efforts to "Be Here Now", I've been experimenting with finger weaving cords for necklaces.  Rhythmic repetition with the goal of reaching some kind of meditative state.   The local craft store had some bamboo fiber that was cheap enough to toss if the results were really awful and I found a long-running, multi-episodic British mystery series on NetFlix (this is MY version of meditating.  There are many paths up the mountain, after all) and got my fingers busy.  I tea-dyed the cord and I really like the softness and the texture of it.

A Prayer for Ausangate

a look at the prong-diddy from the back

It's a necklace for grounding, with a black garnet (from a previous post) a jade cicada, a little faceted citrine, and a beautiful stone that a friend picked up on Mt. Ausangate in the Peruvian Andes.  Ausangate is one of the apus, the high glacial mountains that the ancient Peruvians believed were the homes of gods.  The glaciers on the high peaks are melting and within a couple of generations, there will be no more sacred glacial water for the people to bless their crops with.

Then I figured I'd better have some lower price point items in the shop, so I made a few pairs of earrings.  The top pair has lapis lazuli beads with Turkish evil eye beads, lucky horseshoes, bone mala beads and little deer antler tips that my brilliant and beautiful friend Janet brought me back from her summer travels (you remember Janet).

The second pair have quartz crystal points, lampwork, recycled African glass beads, blue kyanite, and lovely little silver medals of the BVM.  I've never been a Catholic (in this life anyway), but I've always loved the Blessed Mother as one of the few representatives of the Divine Feminine that we have in the Western world.  I used to stop off at a church that I passed on my way to school to light candles to Her on test days, so She and I go back a long long way.  These particular medals are from Corsica (also courtesy of the aforementioned brilliant and beautiful Janet), so that makes them extra special.  I have a couple more goodies that she found for me that I'm saving for a special piece.

I also submitted another article proposal to Belle Armoire Jewelry with pictures of the charm bracelets that I made to keep for myself.

Do other people make jewelry for themselves (primarily)?  I only sell the pieces that I can bear to part with.  Which kind of segues into the current bloggers discussions begun by Sparrow Salvage and continued on Fanciful Devices :  how do you price your work so that you get a fair return on your time, unique materials and creativity, but still manage to keep customers?

This is such an important discussion to have and I'm grateful to Sparrow and Fanci for being brave and honest enough to address it. I think that as women, we are accustomed to undervaluing ourselves, and by extrapolation, our efforts.  You don't see Keith Lo Bue worrying about whether or not he's pricing his work reasonably enough, I'll bet.  After September 1, when the Belle Armoire Jewelry Fall issue comes out and I become incredibly famous and sought after, I will be raising my prices.  Fair warning.  So if you managed to read this far and want to buy something dirt cheap, I'll also give you 10% off if you pay before September 1.  Just use the coupon code AMULET2013.

So act quickly before I wake up and realize my own value.

new pieces

I am trying to convince myself to type something to the effect that this has been a challenging week when actually the week has sucked.  Big time.  Monsoon rains and a root canal.  The highlight of the week was discovering a new app to go along with PhotoToaster - TitleFx.  Now I can put watermarks on my photos with my business name.  I have the idea that this makes them look more professional.  Not like I took them on my old picnic table with the cheapest digital camera Costco had.  At least, I think so.

These two are pretty normal for me, but then I did this one -

The challenge with this one was putting it together so that the wearer could still open the ghau amulet box to put some keepsake or affirmation in.  The solution I came up with was to use a vintage lanyard clasp.  I think I may have grunged up the faux cinnabar bead and green Tara on the ghau amulet a little too much.  When I see it, I want to run it under the faucet.

I'm working on re-doing a neckace display bust I got half off at Michael's.  Some of the necklaces really need to be photographed on a neck, real or otherwise, and believe me, nobody wants to see my neck.  NObody.

(See the watermarks?  Is that cool or what?)