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.

SALE!!!!!!!

In honor of all who work with their hearts and with their hands, please use coupon code "LABOR2014" at checkout to get 10% off all purchases in my Etsy shop, "maggiezees".  Good through the end of September.

My first necklace and earring "set".  How bourgeouis of me!  Anyone who has read my feedback on Etsy knows that sometimes, when the mood strikes me, and the Moon is in the Seventh House and Mercury aligns with Mars... and I'm still not done playing with the beads that are all over my work table, I include a matching pair of earrings as a thank you for the purchase of an amulet necklace.  I know that it's hard to find something to "go" with some of my odder pieces.  But on the couple of occasions when someone has tried to make it a condition of the sale that I throw in a free pair ... well, that just gets me annoyed.  Some pieces demanded earrings to be made - some didn't.  It's not up to me. I'm an ahtist, damn it.

a sad story ...

I've been sitting on some packages of Fimo for a while.  Literally sitting on them because I bought them some time ago and they're a little dried out and tough to work with.  I can soften them up while I'm doing something else.  Multitasking at its finest.

I layered translucent and cream to make a faux ivory kind of pattern and then I made them into facsimiles of some of the antler and bone pieces I love to use.  Grunged them up with a little burnt sienna paint and then polished the hell out of them.  The solid pieces survived, but the larger amulets with the indents - well - let's just say they lacked structural integrity.  Which is too bad because I really liked them.

The shields that survived my loving touch got made into earrings.  Lightweight and completely vegan.  Except for the bone beads.

I decided that I didn't really like working with plastic.  It felt like it had no soul, compared with the old, natural materials.  So for now anyway, the Fimo goes back into the storage bin.

I usually don't get so creatively stagnant until halfway into the month of August, but my Summer Doldrums came along early this year.  I gathered together beads with a red theme, thinking of Women's Mysteries - in particular, Croning.  The dictionary definition of "crone" is "an old hag" or "dried up old woman", but fortunately it's one of those words which has been reclaimed by the Goddess revival in the last couple of decades.  Now a woman who has gone through menopause is celebrated as a Wise Woman.  Two women I admired greatly as embodiments of the Crone, Maya Angelou and Margot Adler, passed on recently, and so the two necklaces that were born from this little flicker of creative activity are dedicated to them.

The reds are really more rusty in person.  They look kinda cherry red on my monitor.  This piece could be worn everyday.  To the office. Or the supermarket.  And everyone would know just by looking at you, what a juicy woman you are.  "Dried up", my ass!

The other one I picture being worn at a Croning Ritual.  With all black clothing.  Or all white.  Or best of all - sky-clad!  How magnificent that would be!