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!

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.

light and dark in equal balance ...

Such a long cold snow-covered winter ... the temps are still low, and all is brown and dead in my garden, but I hope.  Pale green is the color of my hope.

A charm bracelet - a very restrained one for me.  Charms to meditate on: peace, love, serenity, infinity, connectedness.

A necklace inspired by a pewter (?) French school medal, found on holiday by my brilliant (and beautiful) friend Janet and brought home for me in appreciation of my dog-sitting service.

Another Prehnite bead (my last one, I fear), shell, mother-of-pearl beads, more pale green recycled glass beads, Hill Tribe silver charms, quartz point, a carved Afghan jade bug perhaps?  Accents of little petrified wood rondelles to keep the energy from floating away.

As the Wheel of the Year turns once again, season follows season and I wish you a happy Equinox, in balance, darkness and light in equal measure.

muse-ing

The other night I was watching a pledgeweek replay of a tribute concert for Bob Dylan on PBS.  It got me thinking about an interview I had seen where Dylan was asked where he got the inspiration to write songs like "Blowin' In the Wind" and "The Times They Are A-Changing", songs that expressed the deepest feelings of many of us who came of age in the 60's.  He gets this really really sad look on his face and he says, I don't know --- they just came through me and I wrote them down.  The way he looked, you knew that hadn't happened to him in a long while.  For a time, he was a clear channel.  Or he was "visited by his Muse".  He didn't know how to make it happen again and though he's written some pretty good stuff since, nobody's looking to him as a prophet anymore.  

It must be a relief to some degree.

I used to spend a week each year at Nancy Crow's Quilt Surface Design Symposium in Columbus, Ohio when I was making "art" quilts.   One of the workshops I took was with David Walker and he had us start each morning with meditation and drawing with our non-dominant hands to left-brain type music.  Vollenweider.  That sort of thing.  The idea was to imagine ourselves as clear channels --- open to the creative juices of the Universe.  For some reason, it hadn't occured to me before that workshop that there was a spiritual component to the creative process.

At the best of times, I feel like the piece already exists in its whole and perfect form, in a parallel universe or heaven or someplace.  The Platonic ideal, maybe.  Like that quote that's going around on Pinterest, "If you get out of the way, the art will make itself."  My job is to bring it into being. I NEED to do that to be happy.

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.

Back in the groove ...

My freegan (please note: that's not friggin') brother-in-law has been out clamming lately and brought home a treasure which I immediately claimed as a jewelry picture taking prop:

It's part of a whale vertebra.  Great color and interesting texture, but after I was posing it and trying to find its best angle, I realized that my hands stunk to high heavens.  I'm hoping that the fishy smell will disippate a bit after it's been sitting out on the picnic table in the sun and fresh air.  I'm also hoping that the dogs won't decide that it's a very big treat for them and get sick on it.

So here are some pairs of earrings that got photographed far away from the stinky whale vertebra.

Notice please how minimalist these last two are.  Some people think I have no self control and don't know when to stop adding dangly things.

Sometimes when I'm doing an Ice Resin pour, I do not know when to stop.  I overfilled two of those lovely rectangular bronze bezels from Susan Lenart Kazmer and couldn't figure out how to get the excess off.  I have trouble keeping my grubby little hands off the resin while it's setting (three days?  You've got to be kidding me), so I hid them from myself and by the time I saw what had happened, they were already set up and hardened.  So since I can't sell them like they are, I made them into necklaces for me.  And since they're meant only for me, I blatantly ripped off a design by the amazing Dawn Wilson-Enoch.

corn dogs and racing pigs

Izzy

I just got home from four weeks in North Carolina and am still in adjustment mode.  "How can you be in two places at once when you're not anywhere at all???" (Firesign Theater, if you're old enough to remember them.)

This time of year, there are fairs and festivals on the Piedmont Plateau every weekend.  Succulent (just writing the word makes my mouth water) apple dumplings at the Bethabara AppleFest, corn dogs at the Dixie Classic Fair, pig races at both - PIG RACES - can you believe it?  Racing around a little track for Cheez Doodles and Oreos in the Fall - served up as barbeque in the Spring.  A fleeting season of glory.  What more can anyone hope for?  And wonderful music everywhere.  I'm such a sucker for Appalachian fiddlers.  Two notes into "Shady Grove" and my eyes are brimming with tears.

During the time I was gone though, I did not make one single solitary thing.  Not an earring.  I crawled around on the floor after an eight month old speed demon.  I crocheted her a serape in the softest, silkiest purple yarn.  I did some tie-dying with my two older grandchildren and I bought some lovely old keys at a country flea market that will be appearing in some future creations.  I was not what I would consider to be productive, but there were times when I succeeded in being fully present in the moment and for me, that alone was quite an achievement.

no worries ...

My husband never worries.  It's just not part of his vocabulary.  At night, he sleeps the "sleep of the just" and snores away while I'm awake trying to figure out how we'll manage to pay the property taxes next December and if I've trusted in the abundance of the Universe enough not to wind up in the street.  Maybe it can be chalked up to lack of imagination.  On his part, that is.  I certainly have enough to spare.

One of the things I worry about is whether or not something will break on my jewelry once it leaves my hands.  That worry has kept me from listing a necklace I blogged about a year or so ago.  The drop on it was a broken piece of Tibetan "beeswax" resin that I had made a little copper wire cage around.  Esthetically, I liked this very much, but I worried that if the buyer/wearer was fiddling around with it, it would loosen up and pop out.  I imagined that this was bound to happen and would certainly result in the loss of a return customer.

I'm very big on having a Plan B to get me through life.  Most of the time I also have a Plan C and a Plan D as well.  So Plan B for this necklace was replacing the beeswax with something else.  I happened to find a lovely, honey amber colored rutilated quartz drop that fit the bill quite well.

See if you agree.

with wire wrapped beeswax

rutilated quartz drop

plan B