I tried twice before to finish the Celtic Trefoil from Diane Fitzgerald's book Shaped Beadwork. Each time I broke one or more beads when I was zipping up the piece. After speaking to another beadworker, I switched to KO thread, and had success. I love this thread. It is so silky and didn't need any wax or thread conditioner. I'm hooked on this for projects that need a softer feel than Fireline.
I'm not in love with the color choices I made, but I wasn't really certain this piece would come together
I'm still working on my indoor camera skills. I tried a set-up I read about - cut off the bottom of a plastic milk jug and shoot through the top. I got my lights set-up and tried it and it worked better than anything I've tried before. I've got to keep experimenting to get better color and sharpness, but shooting a silver beady thing probably isn't the best place to start figuring it all out. I need to get out some matte pieces and see what I can do.
Two books caught my eye in the school library yesterday:
by Chloë Sayer
The colors on the cover are not quite as garish as they appear here, but they are bright, or I should say, Son colores vivos, because my classes are working on describing clothing they buy when shopping. The embroidery got me thinking about making a peyote cuff pattern based on Mexican indigenous embroidery. I bought a few pieces of Otomi embroidery while I was in Mexico this winter and I started thinking I needed to work up a design, but have not jumped on it yet.
I love the bright colors and mythical creatures. Even though I usually don't go for solid brights, to me, there is something so cheerful about these pieces. And as for designing, I have so much trouble with blending and pairing colors that using bold, saturated swathes seems to be what I need to remove a mental roadblock and make a pattern.
A few nights before Christmas, my husband and I went into a nearby town to visit his cousin who was selling his jewelry at a craft fair. David, who studies graphic design at school, gave up a job in marketing and joined a collective of artists from the state of Hidalgo who travel the craft fair circuit together. For some reason I did not take my camera, either because it was night or because it was too cold to take my gloved hands out of my pockets, but I have no pictures of a man working on embroidery like the piece above. He had drawn out the design on muslin, stitched around the edge of each shape, and was stitching across to fill in the shape. I could hardly move my fingers, let alone contemplate holding a needle. Below is a huge spray painted sign for an auto repair shop that David painted.
all over Mexico business advertise by painting on the walls outside of their shops - this is by David
David and his wife are Rastas. My husband, who is rather straight-laced, told me that his cousin was a hippie. We had to explain to him what being a Rasta was about. While we were looking at David's booth, my hubby kept picking up pieces and showing them to me and saying, "this one has another pretty flower/butterfly on it, maybe you would like to get it." Finally I had to laugh and explain that all those pretty flowers and butterflies he was seeing were marijuana leaves. The poor guy did have eye surgery a few weeks later so maybe it was just his poor vision, not his misunderstanding of his cousin's lifestyle that confused him.
David and his beautiful wife
The second book I grabbed is Sherri Haab's Beaded Macramé Jewelry:
She has a great technique in here for using a chain of lark's head knots to create a loop for a toggle or button. I have made a couple macramé bracelets recently and was looking for a better was to for a loop (better than just doubling the cord and tying a knot). The book is filled with gorgeous pictures which make me want to run and pull out some C-Lon or Griffin silk cord right now and get to work.
I finished a peyote cuff last week. I've had this pattern and the beads for it since last spring, but just got around to putting it together.
this one fits right into my current craze for pale purples
the 15/0's on the picot edging look a bit off color in the photos, but they really pick up the golden highlights in the petals
This design is by Viki at Fairy's Dream Jewellrey. I added the edging and changed one of the colors from her design (the amethyst swirl and all that is that color was a dark metallic blueberry which got a little lost against the charcoal grey)
My bead soup arrived from the snowy north at the end of last week. My partner K Hutchinson did a great job picking beads and I'm pretty excited about getting started. K's blog Running on Ink is full of bright colors and family fun. I was inspired just by the colors she uses in her collages, and am super happy to have a little pendant included in the soup pack with a butterfly collage. Even though she tucked this in, along with a skeleton key, just for fun, I think I'm going to try to use them my piece. Check out the photos below.
my partner sent some hot soup!
I think this butterfly will look great in the piece accented with some other blue
Here is my selection before I went wild and played.
I made these pieces last week when I made the peacock pendant. I have been carrying around the silver floral in my pocket all week as if it were a lucky charm. I still haven't bedazzled it, but I think I know what I will do. My mold and the polymer pieces are coated in some mineral powder. Mostly this is for release purposes, but I also like the way it looks, which is not like these photos. With super-macro they appear to be covered in powdered sugar, but in reality it is a bit more subtle. I still want to get out the alcohol inks and play around. They also need to be buffed a bit. I have found that denim works the best for me. Unfortunately, usually this means that I rub the polymer pieces against the leg of whatever jeans I am wearing at the moment.
I've been playing with polymer clay for the past few days. I got out some clay straight from the package and made some molds. This entailed walking around the house and looking for things I thought might make interesting impressions. Two little dogs were very excited that we were on a treasure hunt. I didn't realize that simply roaming from room to room delighted them quite so much.
I baked quite a lot of polymer clay, but when I decided to finally pull out some silver art clay, I just made two impressions from my new molds. I thought I would see how it worked out, then try some more after seeing what adjustments I needed to make.
I'm still shooting indoors without a photo station.
This is a small pendant with a couple of random peacock feathers. Yes, I noticed that the upside down one in the upper left rather looked like an ear, but I was so excited about my peacock feather mold I really didn't notice that I'd found Van Gogh's severed ear. I made the mold (below - in positive and negative) from a plate I bought at a thrift store this summer.
I made my pendant into a necklace with a blue quartz coin, moonstone roundel, and tiny crystal.
I oxidized the sterling chain and the pendant, but didn't give the dangles any patina. This wasn't a design strategy, I just didn't feel like going into the cold laundry room to mix up the patina gel when I finally sat down and decided to make the piece into a necklace.
my mold
here is a polyclay impression
side by side- negative and positive
I made another silver pendant, but I didn't like these pics well enough to subject that one to the camera. My second piece is a floral which I made from the decorative part of a barrette that I think has been floating around my stash of hair-do bobs since I was in college. I'm hoping it will stop raining long enough during the daylight hours for me to take a picture.
