"At Spring Again"

My brother-in-law is what my daughter calls a "freegan".  He scours the neighborhood at all hours of the night looking for usable stuff that unenlightened businesspeople are throwing away.  Generally, he looks for scrap metal that he can cash in, but sometimes he finds some pretty cool stuff.  A couple of years ago, he came across a box of plastic hands behind a rheumatologist's office.  They apparently had been used to illustrate the difference between normal and severely arthritic hands and my husband has used the most grotesque of them to decorate on Hallowe'en.  I needed a way to display bracelets at a book signing where I was offered a table, so my brilliant and beautiful friend Janet suggested I use some of the hands.  I took all of the normal hands and painted them with acrylics to hide the worst of the scratches and wear.  I think they turned out pretty cool.  (And Dave still gets to use the distorted ones for his creepy Hallowe'en display.)

The book to be signed, by the way, is called "At Spring Again" and is a collaboration between Liz Casey (poetry) and Doris Diamond (photos).  https://www.facebook.com/AtSpringAgain.  Profits from the book will be donated to "Food Not Bombs".

Thank you Thing.

A couple of new pieces in the amulet necklace series, photographed during a break in the rain and fog.  I need to redo the photos... I was really pleased with the colors on the second piece.  I usually stay away from purple, but I love the way it plays off the heavily patina-ed copper and silver.  And the pink in the garden quartz drop ...mmmm

And another charm bracelet ...heavy on the mojo

I had posted some photos on the Ice Resin user gallery a couple of weeks ago and they were nice enough to choose one of the photos to feature on the Ice Queen E-Zine today.

Here's the link:

http://iceresin.com/icequeen/2012/05/a-geologist-and-an-archeologist-fought-over-a-necklace/

Thanks to Carol at Ice Resin for doing such a nice job!  (Years ago the NY Times did a full page article on my art quilts and printed one of the photos upside down.  The quilt happened to have things dangling off it and they looked like they were defying gravity - just a little strange.)

Procrastination is an art form

Altoid tin love mojo - open

Is the degree of creativity inversely proportional to the neatness of the workspace?  Does dark, fecund, primeval chaos provide the ideal breeding ground for artistic expression or does it just attract bugs?  Does she really want to sell more of her stuff and avoid going back to a nine-to-five desk job designing  accounting spreadsheets, or does she just want to wear everything she's ever made and listen to people say, "Ooooooo"? What, oh what is her problem???

Stay tuned folks ...

Altoid tin love mojo - closed

In the meantime, following my classic avoidance pattern, may I present to you pictures of some past episodes of "Maggie Zee's Short Attention Span Theater":

"Root"; hand quilted, cotton hand-dyed fabric, the shaman's journeys into the three worlds

In my hurry to get something posted last night, I left off the newest necklace. This one has Peruvian opal, Prehnite, green garnet, abalone, and mother-of-pearl.  There are two amulets attached:  a vintage one from Tibet that I think may be a bodhi seed and the little green dangle at the bottom that was carved by an Afghani refugee living in Turkey and looks like a bird or a bug to me.  Oh yes - and a copper Tibetan skull (I love these), a West African coin, and a triangular bronze bezel filled with a sequined sari fragment and topped with Ice Resin.

Time flies...

shaman's charm bracelet

Here on Long Island we waited three months for a winter that never came.  I actually like a little bit of snow to make everything look clean and pretty for a while, but  I'm not complaining.  We were far more fortunate than other places in the world.  But time has gone by really fast and I haven't managed to keep the resolution I made to post on a regular basis. (I also haven't exercised regularly, if you want to know the whole truth.)  To compound my usual procrastination, a short trip to North Carolina turned into a two week visit with my jewelry making supplies left at home.  In order to keep me from completely filling up her fridge and freezer with homemade soup and driving her insane, my daughter turned me on to Pinterest and I was an instant addict.
The thing is, every time I hit that PIN-IT button, I had the illusion that I was being creative, which was almost as satisfying as actually creating something.  I was becoming a virtual artist.  I told myself that I was doing "inspirational research" and that my Pinterest boards would look cool linked to my blog (which I just can't figure out how to do).  Fortunately my short attention span issues kicked in and some sweet little copper melon beads started crying out for a patina and before you could say "Liver of Sulfur", I was back at my work table.

http://pinterest.com/maggiezee/

Shells, I Ching coin, Tibetan copper skull, Egyptian rock crystal

I Ching coin, garden quartz, waterbuffalo tooth, Saharan bead, vintage MOP button

Amulet necklace with shed deer antler tip, ammonite, Saharan quartz bead, resin-filled bronze bezel

Close-up of bezel:  vintage brass button, sequins, artemisia vulgaris root

Close-up of dangles

Taking the big leap...

After spending most of the day writing my first blog post, I managed to hit "delete" instead of "edit" and sent the whole thing off into hyperspace oblivion.  How come every other program on this computer asks me a minimum of sixteen times if I really mean to do that before it actually erases anything? "Are you sure you want to delete that?  Maybe you should think about it a little more." That will teach me not to do anything of importance at 1:14 in the morning.  Sometimes my brain is not my best friend.

So let me start this rewrite by saying that I never expected to be writing a blog.  Although I really enjoy reading other people's, especially hearing about their creative processes and seeing their work, it feels a little self-indulgent to be doing it myself.  Why do I think anyone else might possibly be interested in knowing what I'm up to?  (Subtext:  Who the hell do I think I am???)  Well, I'm doing it because Etsy says so.  Etsy also says to link my blog to my FaceBook page, my website and my Etsy shop.

Right.

Detail of "The Empress" ,
quilt - hand dyed  fabrics

I've been collecting beads and buttons and little sparkly things ever since I learned to walk.  I still walk along with my eyes on the ground so I won't miss some treasure: a shell, a stone, a fabulous rusty runover bottlecap.  (And I'm still smacking my head into police call boxes and low hanging branches.) I take my goodies home and lovingly sort them and put them into those wonderful plastic boxes with all the dividers and sometimes in those plastic containers takeout food comes in.  And then eventually they find other things that they need to be with so they can have a conversation together.  Sometimes they want to be part of an Altoid tin shrine (I call them mojos).  Those are sort of like the art quilts I made in another life, reduced down to their essence and concentrated in pocket size.  I learned from quilt-making that if you want to be able to realize your visions, you need to have acquired the yardage to start with.

Amulet bracelet

So after several years of buying cool beads and things on E-Bay and Etsy and at every bead show within driving distance,  I've assembled more earrings and necklaces than I can possibly wear in a lifetime.  I've been inspired by Connie Fox's "brangles" and by ethnic jewelry of all kinds.  I've bought beads and pendants from refugees from Tibet and Afghanistan and from glass beadmakers all over the U.S.  Now I find myself unemployed and able to devote a big chunk of my time to developing my own style.  As I figure out the photography side of all this, I'll be posting more of my work.  I'm so inspired by the jewelry artists out there who are pushing the envelope and making pieces that look like artifacts from another civilization.  Some of their blogs are listed in my profile.  Please check them out - they are amazing.  My biggest inspirations are Dawn Wilson-Enoch and Susan Lenart Kazmer.  If you haven't tried Susan's Ice Resin yet, do yourself a favor and order some.

Thanks!

No ladybugs were harmed
in the making of these earrings
(but I had to rough up a 
spider a bit...)