I always love seeing the in-progress shots of artists at work, so hopefully you do too!
Laird and I have been honing our soldering skills at a basic jewellery forging class this winter, and it’s super fun! We’re working on a single bracelet each, but I tend to work pretty quickly and I’ve had a lot of luck, so with some extra wire I had lying around I made a bunch of circles (below top left), soldered them (middle) and then started manipulating them into different shapes (bottom right).
After I soldered and shaped the wire, I hammered them for strength and to give them this gorgeous sparkly finish:
I’ve got a shipment of faceted gemstone drops just awaiting pickup at the depot on Monday, and I think they’re going to be gorgeous combined with these frames.
As it turns out, the jewellery studio – with torches – is available for rent, so if these work out I will be taking advantage of that and doing more of this kind of thing. I really like the idea of adding forged work into my existing wirewrap to make something new – then I’ll be wiresmithing indeed!
Aren’t these fabulous? My friend Angie has been telling me about the virtues of alcohol ink for at least a year, but last weekI finally got my fingers dirty. And oh man! Fun! I will of course be making jewellery out of these. Look at the sets made from regular dominoes and tiny dominoes:
OH yeah, they’re DOMINOES:
Oh, lookit my custom order of lampworked beads from my favourite glass artist in Victoria ! I can’t wait until they get here!
Laird really wants to start lampworking and fusing glass, and I think when we get our place we’ll ensure there’s room for a glass area with a kiln and a torch and such. Meanwhile, I’m more than happy to just have gorgeous things like these show up at my door!
These are the earrings I made for the home show I had on Sunday:
And yesterday I got a whole passel of new beads, including flowers, raspberries, butterflies, leaves and crackle beads – so of course I had to make more! These are destined for the Cape Breton Centre for Craft and Design’s gallery on Charlotte St., so get your butt down there if you want some! [earwires to be attached soon]
Today I woke up wanting to make more starfish. The clay is exactly what I needed to kick-start my creative mojo again. I needed something different. Today’s batch is more colourful.
I also started to wrap them and they’re turning out pretty great. Exciting! I’m putting some leather in as well, that I got from the friend of a friend who’s a bookbinder. I am hoping to incorporate some beach glass.
And OK, one more thing. Snake sets!
I have had this plan in my head for so very long, and today was the first step:
Polymer Clay Starfish! Next step: leather and copper.
Oh yes.
I made more money from my jewellery in galleries in August than I took home from my day job. And I get paid pretty damn good at my job. I was told that September is about 3/4 of the volume of August – and then comes Celtic Colours, which is an internationally renowned, island-wide fiddle/folk music concert in October.
Since somewhere around Wednesday, I’ve made 71 pairs of earrings, 17 earring/pendant sets, one necklace/earring set and 18 single pendants, while still managing to feel idiotically lazy in front of the TV, watching House and Friends and MASH while making the earrings. I just spent two hours or so with my TV table out on the front verandah drinking in the beautiful fall air (I know, it’s technically summer, but this is Cape Breton) and building some of those sets and pendants.
I was going to say I don’t have pictures of all of this, but screw it, they’re here, the camera’s here, so I snapped a couple.
What I just did outside:
What a jumble of 70 pairs of earrings looks like (don’t worry, they’re all on cards, tangling should be minimal):
A messy, messy photo of some of the sets (there’s pendants underneath the gray cloth, I got lazy though):
I asked Laird to go through my encyclopedia of mythical creatures and choose one for inspiration to make a necklace. He chose the Phoenix (he started listing a few others but the phoenix caught me immediately). I actually sketched this out and went through a lot of angst to get it finished, and in fact the tail might need reconstructing because it’s made with beading thread not wire, but… here it is!
I’ve been dying for a strand of watermelon tourmaline forever. It’s totally gorgeous – from a deep pink through to dark green, with light and dark versions of each, and black and white. I actually have TWO strands now - a small button strand and a long chunky chips strand. They’re both amazing.
Every now and then I take them out, determined to do something with some of it.. and then I put it back, too afraid to cut the strands.
Today I conquered my fear!
Gorgeous, no? Especially on the specular hematite.
