A feather, a flower, and a window

a feather: pattern source (in French)

feather with charms

flower blossom: link to original post

blossom lariat

Blogger has gone a bit crazy on me, but I'm trying to keep up my glacial posting schedule and crank out one post per week so I'm just going to write below the photos and not log off and plan to come back later. Later seems to have a way of eluding me.

This week I've got a feather pendant which I made from a French pattern from L'atelier de mimi.  Her blog is linked in the photo caption and has some beautiful examples of her plumes.  The little butterfly is a charm from Gardanne Beads and the quatrefoil bead is turquoise dyed magnesite.  The pattern uses 11/0's and 15/0's of the same color.  I pulled out some dark bronze Toho beads that had been rolling around in the bead cabinet for some time.  I got to whip up a fun piece and tackle my stash at the same time.

The final photos above are shots I took in the light box which my mom gave me a few years ago.  This is fitting because I made the Blossom lariat for her.  I wrote all about the piece in an earlier entry, but I will repeat that the blossoms are a pattern from Leslie Fraizer (Trumpet Flower Necklace, Beadwork Aug/Sept 2012).  These flowers have captivated me.  I just finished another lariat in a completely different (and very Pantone Spring 2013 colorway), but I still need to photograph it.

Finally, my husband has continued to build onto his mother's house in Mexico.  A few years ago he had a bedroom/bath room suite built, and now he has bumped out the living room.  He wants to make sure that his sisters' families will all have plenty of room to visit their mother during the year when he can not be with her.  Unfortunately, all this building has really taken a toll on her beautiful garden.  I have a feeling we will be working on that next.  Below is one of the new windows in the living room and some calla lillies growing next to nopal cactus.

nopal, callas, and roses

Saw it and made it

How much time do you spend perusing Pinterest?  I spend a little too much time being dazzled by the gorgeous beadwork I find.  I thought I'd better start making some pieces I'd seen on Pinterest to justify the time investment.

saw it and made it

One of my favorite wearable pieces is this bracelet by Lucila based on a pattern by Amparo Santos aka Quimeras on Etsy.  Every few days I would see it again and finally I decided to make my own.  I went to Lucila's blog and saw that the base component was designed by Amparo Santos whose patterns I have used before. 

source

Lucila found her amazing turquoise in Puerto Rico, but on my limited budget, I used turquoise dyed magnesite 8mm and 4mm beads.

my version

When I bought the magnesite, I found these matching quatrefoil beads and decided to use the as clasps.  Somehow they managed to perfectly fit.  Although Lucila finished her bracelet with coral beads, I wanted to keep a simpler color palette and stitched the 4mm's a bit more tightly together.

 

This piece is really a labor of love.  Each component with a bezeled 8mm bead surrounded by four 4mm is an individual piece.  There are 33 of these components stitched together!

Saw something on Pinterest and made it: Check.

Be still my heart

When I saw this group of beads from Gaea I knew exactly what I wanted to make. I had been stalking Gaea's Facebook page for a few weeks trying to pounce on a winged heart and a good looking set of beads before someone reserved them.  Finally success!  You can also buy Gaea's beads at her website and at Lima Beads.

Even though I knew what I wanted to make, it took me awhile to get around to putting the piece together because they arrived just before the start of school and all the difficulties of the fall term.

The wirework is dark annealed steel which matched the loops on the pendant.  The spacer beads are copper, the enameled bird is from Gardanne Beads, the little etched copper charm I made myself, and the tuquoise seed beads are vintage from my stash.

The necklace it about 36" long and the seed bead length hangs around my neck and ends just above my collarbones.  The wirework has a nice drape because of the Goldilocks weight of Gaea's beads (not too heavy, not too light).  The smallest beads are about 6mm and the largest around 12mm.  I sand my steel wire, then rub it with steel wool before forming links. For this necklace, I lightly hammered each loop and jumpring.

This was my first attempt to etch copper.  I followed at tutorial similar to this one from Copperheart.  I bought my ferric chloride from the hardware store...it is used in pool cleaning.  For resist I used StazOn permanent ink and a stamp with tiny detail.  I have more to learn about etching, but I was happy just to get any result.  I need to practice a little more.

a little over exposed

blossom lariat

A gift made for my mother based on Leslie Frazier's Trumpet Flower Necklace in the Aug/Sept 2012 Beadwork.  I picked out a color palette to coordinate with a winter outfit and my mom's favorite color of nail polish.

Mixiotes de Noche Buena

with my husband Remi and my twin brothers-in-law Joel and Javier

 A few years ago Remi and I were in Mexico for Christmas.  Dinner for Noche Buena required that he get up at the crack of dawn to kill turkeys with his cousin for dinner.  My Christmas Eve dinner only required early rising for the 18 mile trip to the grocery store in the next town.

his name was Dinner

 Remi's brothers came for dinner and we repeated Thankgiving and ate another multinational dinner for Christmas Eve.  Pollo con chiles y epazote, tortillas, sweet braised carrots, mashed potatoes, mac & cheese, cranberry sauce, spinach salad, and chocolate cake covered in bittersweet ganache with sea salt caramel and Tahitian vanilla bean gelato. 

My brothers-in-law who having been working here for a few years are obsessed with mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce having eaten a few Thanksgiving dinners with us.  I added sweet braised carrots from the Joy of Cooking for a little more traditional American cooking, and they requested mac & cheese.  I had never actually made mac and cheese, but had a great easy recipe for it from Ellen, my bf of 30 years!, which oddly I'd written inside the cover of a Rick Bayless cookbook after eating some at her house a few years ago.  The boys were a little disappointed that I didn't make spicy pecans to top the spinach salad and Remi explained to them that the blue cheese dressing was vinaigrette with queso apestoso (translation: stinky cheese...yes Mom, I know you agree).

Even though they didn't have to kill anything, the guys were in charge of the main dish.  They made mixiotes with chicken with sweet and hot peppers, epazote, and onions en papillote.  In Mexico we would have wrapped it all in the outer skin of the maguey or century plant.  I have had mixiote wrapped in maguey and it is delicious, but also illegal because peeling the outer skin of the plant can kill it. I just read about some sustainably harvested mixiote so I'm pretty sure we won't end up eating our little packets of food with our heads shrouded as if we were having some bizzare dinner of ortolan.

los tres mosqueteros

Javier and Joel are really interested in learning to cook more than eggs. We have been talking about recipes and I'm dying to get Joel's recipe for green sauce which Remi says is fantastic. We have a food exchange going: they teach me the green sauce and I teach them  pierogis with peppers and sausage (you can take the girl out of Cleveland...).  They had pot roast with potatoes somewhere and were asking me about the recipe.  They were pretty into it while I was telling them about browning the meat on all sides and trying to figure out the translations for the various herbs, but put the brakes on when it came to the actual cooking time.  So I guess I know what's for dinner the next time they visit.

Happy End of the World

Happy Black Friday

Source: Uploaded by user via Robert on Pinterest