I haven’t figured out a name for these yet… I just imagined them yesterday. They’re sort of inspired by these windchimes made by the Inverness Beach Gal. These are made of driftwood, coal, beach glass and limestone, all from Cape Breton beaches!
Archive for the 'Previews' Category
A bunch of super-talented local artisans and I are working on a gallery exhibition that opens in about a month. It’s all about birds and there are a LOT of great ideas flying around our intermittent meetings. Working with such creative minds is exhilarating… staring down a deadline, a little less so ;)
Here’s a tiny little update on what I’ve been working on. Eyeballs by Sarah Beck!
In the midst of unbelievable chaos, I managed to complete a last-minute batch of steampunk flower pendants before the CBCCD show in 4 days!
I especially love the one with the red/orange leather, below:
I had to make some more because I nearly sold out at my last show! These things go very fast.
I was tucked in behind the table at the C200 show and it was fun watching jaws drop from my nearly-hidden vantage point.
I started playing with sheet metal – copper and aluminum – shaped, hammered and hole-punched as a basis for the flowers. It’s working pretty great! You can see it on the left, above, and in the middle, below.
In other news, about a month ago I was building flat, round, upholstered display discs (see turquoise, above!) and in so doing, I think I over-used the duct tape and strained a tendon in my right index finger. It could also have been the heavy wire-work I was doing for ornaments and neckwires.
In any case, working was painful and it seemed the best thing was to rest the finger. So aside from my day job, I’ve been avoiding using that hand for four or five weeks now. Getting back to the bench and being able to create again was a relief! It’s still a little stiff but I couldn’t help myself.
I hope to get a few brooches done before the show, but it is hard to say if I will have the time.
The fancy martini fundraiser party is this Thursday, and you can contact CBCCD for tickets. After that, we are open Friday evening, all day Saturday and Sunday for only $2.00 admission. Hope to see you there!
Yesterday was SO productive! I worked 8 full hours in the studio, with hardly any lollygagging or shenanigans. It was all about preparation for the four shows I have in the next 5 weeks, to make setup as painless (literally) as possible. I:
Covered one of the presentation boards I got on the cheap with fabric that I guessed at the length for and was an inch shy of being not enough. This process caused me to stretch in ways I haven’t stretched in a while. Today I am paying for it with aches and pains. But it’s totally worth it! Then I loaded the presentation board so I can just slip it into its case and have the world’s easiest set-up.
Completed a wholesale order for… wait for it… Little Mysteries in Halifax!!! Squee! They took one each of my new Focus line, as well as a dozen simpler gemstone pendants with meaning cards attached. I’m so delighted with this I can’t even think straight. The photo below – of simple gemstones with simple meanings – is the culmination of my career. Literally, this is all I’ve ever wanted to do but could never figure out properly.
Printed cards for my rare beach glass pendants that fit into the new boxes I have on hand and loaded them up. They look so fancy!
Created new STEAMPUNK cards and loaded my clay steampunk into boxes.
Loaded some beach glass onto cards.
Loaded my ring tray.
Counted and sorted my inventory.
Did a dance of joy.
Been making crazy amounts of jewellery these days…
Check out how awesome that labradorite is!
Finished up a bunch of rings lately, some even with gears and such!
Managed to get a few gemstones going as well, although I’m not quite able to identify this one.
This rainbow one is totally fun.
And a huge flowery one! So cool.
For the first time ever I’m running a calendar and a production schedule. Today I’m supposed to be making ornaments :)
The new materials I’ve got on the bench are blowing my mind. Unfortunately, my vacation totally interrupted my creativity time and I can’t show you anything finished yet!
I can, however, totally tease you :)
And ok, you can see some of the half-finished bits in the background. Maybe I jumbled them together on purpose so you can’t make them out. Y’know. Maybe.
This is the most fun I’ve had in the studio in a while! Mostly I’ve had to focus on production pieces – making a million earrings in a row and spending weeks building rings; they’re satisfying to make but it can get monotonous. I finally decided to spend today doing something completely unique!
I didn’t have a serious plan for this one but it worked out beautifully. I’ve had these firescale carnelian ovals for a very long time and it was lovely to use them in a serious piece like this.
An unexpected burst of energy after supper resulted in 3 new pieces for today!
The buttons have been laid out in these colour combinations on the workbench for at least a couple of weeks but I just couldn’t make it work in my head. I added the inverted washers, which was better, but it still wasn’t right…. until I opened a drawer and saw the vintage skeleton keys a locksmith friend had dug out of some tubs of random bits on his garage this past summer and realized they’d be *perfect* bases for what I had in mind.
The keys are fairly hidden behind the buttons but you can mostly see the ends poking out, plus it’s really great just to know they’re in there!
Here they are all together so you can see the necklace part:
The orange-ish one has a massive inverted washer in the middle underneath that fabulous terracotta-coloured button. It was exciting to find that they fit together so well! This one also features 3 connected vintage leather flowers that were in a box of my grandmother’s broken jewellery bits.
I had actually tried with the blue combination last week but felt it was flimsy and didn’t care for it. My success with the keys had me adding a few reinforcement wraps here and there which tightened it up considerably and helped me feel like it was more complete!
I just really loved this purple button. And those inverted washers give me joy!
A dozen or so heart pendants in blood red, sunset orange, and sweetheart pink, plus one special hammered pendant in extra-large. These will be available at the Cape Breton Centre for Craft & Design later this week!
A book of art nouveau designs caught my eye as I was passing the bookshelf in my downstairs hallway on the way to the studio so I grabbed it and brought it down with me. Flipping through was pretty inspiring so I grabbed a heavy-gauge wire and my hammer! There’s minimal bling on this one because the design itself should be the focus. I used a bit of grosgrain ribbon for the rest of the necklace.
Lookit how pretty!
This piece is available in my new Etsy store, too :D
After I made the hair clips last week, I had more time in my day so I looked around for something else to do that was different and new, and my eyes lit upon a package of fancy fibre-y yarn/ribbon thingums. I thought the little feathery bits would be a fun accent into a wire piece, but what else could I put in there? And it hit me: actual feathers! I dug out some dyed craft feathers I had and also a few bits of reclaimed leather, and went to town.
Simple and Fun! I think the bright colours will look fab in my booth at the Christmas Loft craft show this year.
I teased you with 3 new products last week and only just now have managed to get photos taken. And actually I only got photos of 2 of the 3 so you’ll still have to wait for the third one. That’s not me teasing you on purpose, that’s just me being stupidly busy.
I was making these up as I went along.
First, teeny little hair clips:
(Yep that’s me. Thankfully my ears were clean!)
Here’s how they operate (please ignore the skin falling off my fingers, it does that). Open:
And closed:
They clip pretty tight and there’s a little plastic/rubber strip in there that keeps them from getting stuck in your hair or damaging it. I love these little guys!
You know what, that’s enough for one post. I’ve got some work to do so I’ll post the others tomorrow.
This isn’t strictly jewellery-related but I’ve been dying to take photos of our backyard for about 18 months now, and I could never properly capture the forest-like proportions until the new camera got here. And this morning, the gorgeous fog and sunrise I see out my bathroom window nearly every day didn’t fail me. I popped out the window screen and, completely on auto, got this:
Which is totally gorgeous and almost conveys the real beauty of this scenery (and also how dirty my windows are, but that’s not the point).
But then I started to play with the zoom. Watch at I manually get closer, and closer, and closer to the point where I am literally photographing things I can’t see with the naked eye:
Click that last one and choose Actions >View All sizes to really see how close I got and the details on the thing.
Let’s take a closer look at that 30x zoom. I can only approximate where the zoomed-in portion was on the original because seriously… the camera sees better than I do.
!!!!!
Also, some zero-editing (well, a very slight histogram edit) beach glass photos from this afternoon:
Common Colours
Aqua, true Black, Lavender, Lemon Yellow
That’s all I accomplished this weekend… had a very sleepy Saturday and spent most of Friday hanging out with kittens. It’s hard to tear myself away for any reason!
I had an excellently productive 4-day weekend! More steampunk-vintage-whatsits (more on those later) as well as a big pile of firepolished glass pendants and earrings. I didn’t take individual photos of the pendants, but here’s a pretty good shot of most of them:
They’re pretty fun to make, lots of organic swirls and such. What I really like about these pendants & the earrings is picking out the colour combos. I’ve got dozens of colours of firepolished glass beads and I can spend hours just picking out fun new ways to put them together. Then of course I have to wrap them but that’s fun too :)
Laird and I bought a new camera on the weekend – a Fuji Finepix HS10. It’s got a 30x zoom! It’s got a 1cm macro! It’s beautiful! While I still need to find the time to do something beyond “auto”, the “auto” setting is doing pretty damn good for me so far. I’ve had to adjust exposure on these, and white balance on some others, but I’m so very happy with it.
It’s been a LONG time since I’ve made any rings. They’re quite difficult in terms of finicky-ness and painful-ness; unfortunately for my hands they’re also one of my very best sellers. Luckily I had a LOT of stock left over from last year so I hadn’t needed to make any for a while, but they’re just about sold out so this weekend I got at it again. They’re so painful, though, that I’ve been debating either putting a halt on their production entirely, or raising the prices so that they’re not quite as in demand. But I take forever to make decisions, so meanwhile, they’re still $22 each.
And of course, I can’t make the same kind of thing too many times in a row without trying to do something new! So here are a few slightly new types of rings (along with a couple of standards):
OH and I don’t want to become a cat blogger (I’ve never even had cats before), but my fiance and I got two kittens last week and today’s post took twice as long because I had two furry purry kitties watching me type like it was a tennis match they could join in on. Lookit!
I went just a *little* dangle-crazy with the last batch of steamfunkery pieces. I couldn’t help it! I dug out all the metal bits and bobs I could find and in there were these chandelier-earring-type findings that just begged to be incorporated and to have things hanging off them. And so a bunch of the newest pieces are really, really long. They also have colour, which is new for this line, based on someone saying that even steam-punk-goth girls aren’t hurt by a nice piece of shiny bling :)
I also just got a massive, unexpected case of these ribbon-cord necklaces – my fiance and his business partner have long gone to flea markets and outdoor vendor shows to sell low-priced goods, including jewellery they’ve bought or made, to make a few bucks a week. This week they got out of the business for loftier goals and I’ve inherited the giant box of ribbons they’d just acquired! It’s the first time I’ve had any reliable sort of alternative to the chains that come with my pendants, and I’m glad for it, because I’ve been having a hard time finding good quality chains. I have come to realize that most people have their own chains anyway, but I still would prefer to package my work with something a little nicer. I think in many cases these brightly-coloured ribbons will hit the spot! I certainly had fun digging through the box to find colours to suit these pieces:
Not everything was dangly and massive, however:
(ok, maybe a little massive)
More here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nightingayle/sets/72157624468313753/with/4833521047/
I was in a hurry to take these photos so they’re not as beautifully crafted as the previous set. But… BUT!! The final architectural detail in my studio is complete (after months) and the next update will be to show you the amazing, wonderful, fabulous, delightful new area in the studio that will help me transit from physical to digital with ease. Keep an eye on this space!
I’ve been doing a version of these for a while, but this is the first time I’ve had access to real watch parts (mostly I’ve been using scrapbooking embellishments). I had a great time putting together complex elements to then wire-wrap.
I also had some success with photography! I believe the secret is to add more elements than just the pendant to the composition, to allow for a better automatic white balance and also to add interest. So take a look!
These (and several others) will be available at the Cape Breton Centre for Craft and Design as of Monday July 5th.
I came across the idea of combining various colours of beach glass online the other day, and became somewhat obsessed with it. Not sure why I didn’t think of it before, because combining colours is my favourite thing to do… Possibly because wrapping one bit of glass takes long enough; in any case, here are five new necklaces I created using colour combos. I had to basically invent a new way of connecting them, which was also fun.
Each of these contains at least one uncommon-to-rare-to-find colour, and most have several, which is making pricing difficult. I’m trying to keep them affordable and also in proportion to the singles I do… oh, who am I kidding, pricing is always difficult.
Anyway. Here are the pictures!
Only that last one got the olive oil treatment before assembly, sadly.
What do you think?
I finished up the first batch of these. I’m quite pleased with how they turned out!
I’ve got some Ametrine, Amber, Pietersite, Rutilated Quartz, Apatite, Kyanite, Chalcedony, Firescale Carnelian, and orange Carnelian, plus a couple of firepolished glass beads to round it off.
This is the type of filigree work I was doing a few years ago, but I got a little too far into the low-end production stuff last year and really wanted to work on something a little more creative and special. These will do nicely!
Now, back to work for me!
A really popular, simple pendant of mine that tends to sell out in the spring, these are mostly firepolished glass, pressed glass, and czech glass with silver wire. I’ll be making a large amount of these over the next week or two. They usually end up only at the CBCCD gallery shop on Charlotte St.
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