BTW: Treasures Unearthed

This week on the bead table: Flowery dangly sparkly earrings!

I love Bead Table Wednesday for many reasons: I get to see what other people are working on and how they organize their workspaces, it allows me to really think and learn about the creative process, and it compels me to take a hard look at and maybe organize my beading area a bit because, really, who wants to show off a big mess? A funny thing happens when I clean up my beading area: I find stuff I forgot I had, or vaguely remembered having, or absolutely knew was somewhere in the mess.... When I cleaned up my bead table last week I unearthed a treasure trove of sterling silver findings and beads that I had set out into trays and cups for specific projects, then lost track of as I shifted to other projects and let things pile up. I thought I remembered stocking up on sterling earwires, headpins, spacer beads, and clasps last fall when silver was surging past $15 per ounce, but given how busy my life is my memory of such things isn't always reliable... So when I got an order for some sterling earrings a while back, I couldn't find a dang thing and figured, well, maybe I thought about stocking up and didn't get around to it because, sheesh, $15 an ounce??....

Project on the table: Hill Tribes silver trumpet
flower pendant with faceted amethyst, pearls



Also on the table: Hill Tribes silver rose
pendant with faceted garnet, pearls

Now that sterling silver is hovering around $35 to $40 an ounce (Thunderbird Supply shows the daily market price), I am over the moon to find the 50 pairs of sterling French hook earwires, 20 pairs of sterling leverback earwires, 200 sterling headpins, and 200 assorted sterling spacers I bought last fall -- holy cow, what a find! And so I have been making lots and lots of earrings this week, and will make lots and lots more, along with some necklaces featuring Hill Tribes silver flower pendants and faceted gemstones I bought in Tucson two years ago. I do love working with copper and brass, but sometimes a design really calls for sterling silver. You can bet I'll be keeping my bead table a bit cleaner from now on; if nothing else, I should refrain from laying out stones and findings and such until I actually have the time to execute a design, and just sketch out my jewelry ideas instead when time is short.
(It's a good goal to aim for, anyway...)

Leafing Out

Summer is in full swing, and out here in the Great Southwest the summer storms are gearing up, right on time. We call them "the monsoons," but I'm sure they don't compare to real Asian monsoons. They do, however, bring us much-needed rain and light up the parched earth with green and all the other colors of the rainbow. Inspired by today's rain I made these earrings (and a matching necklace, a simple bolo-style with a front-closing toggle clasp) of oxidized brass and Swarovski crystals. I plan to take them along with other recent pieces on a gallery-scouting road trip soon.

Let's do a leaf theme today, shall we? Okay, so at right is a mosaic I made (and showed here) last fall, my second or third one ever; this one is in a gallery in Albuquerque, I think, and I'd like to do a much larger, more ambitious one someday... this fall, perhaps? And below is a photo I took about two weeks ago in the mountains above Magdalena of a young oak just starting to leaf out. I was surprised to see how red and even almost purple the new leaves were; they'll green up as they go, then all turn yellow, red, and bronze again in autumn. I'll be back then for sure to see that gorgeous show...

Young gambel oak (Quercus gambelii), Patterson Canyon, NM, June 2010

Bead Soup Blog Party!

Thanks to the wonderful beads that Bead Soup Party partner Wanda sent me, I was able to stretch my creative wings and get back into jewelry making. I've used copper quite often, and the wonderful hammered copper pendant and butterflies in Wanda's package caught my eye right away. Then I noticed the blue and earth-tone ceramic beads and thought, wow, these are beautiful... how can I possibly do them justice? I knew these would take me in a whole new direction (I usually use gemstones, and have been getting kind of delicate lately) so decided to just look at everything for a while and see what ideas started to form in my mind.

Not surprisingly, when I finally had time to sit down with this project, my 6-year-old, who was doing Creative Day with me, announced she had an idea for the blue glass, green cat's eye, and copper rounds in the package and proceeded to appropriate those, along with several of the butterflies. No problem; I had more than enough to proceed, and as I started laying out the ceramic beads I "saw" spaces for my own Swarovski crystals and copper flower spacers and hammered rounds.

Wanda also sent me a lovely copper-and-silver toggle clasp, but since I had enough beads to also make a bracelet, and I had two sets of copper flower toggles, I used mine instead and saved Wanda's toggle for another project. Then, earrings: Maggie relinquished two butterflies, which I wirewrapped onto handmade copper headpins with Swarovski crystals and then dangled from copper heart earwires. I am so pleased with how these pieces came together and have really enjoyed this "party"! Now I'm off to see what my fellow creatives have made... when I find what Wanda made with the beads I sent her (I think she's showing off her creations on Thursday), I'll link to her -- I can't wait to see what she made! Again, many thanks to Wanda for the beautiful beads!

Here's a list of everyone else showing today:

14. Jen, Jen Judd Rocks
15. Kella, Me But a Little More In Depth
16. Emanda, Artemisia Studio
17. Marie, Skye Jewels
18. Loretta, Designs By Loretta
19. Stacy, Sissy and Jack's
20. Joanna, Filcowe
21. Diane, Diane Hawkey
22. Marianna, Pretty Shiny Things
23. (me)
24. Marcie, La Bella Joya
25. Lois, Que Onda Q'town?
26. Jayne, Mama's Got To Doodle

Go visit, enjoy, leave a comment, and be inspired. And I thank everyone for visiting me!

Nor'Easter

These beautiful lampwork glass beads came from an artist I met at the Tucson gem shows last February, who was there with her family and spent some time sharing her art with me. The focal bead, which measures 1 inch (22 mm) by .75 inch (17 mm), evokes a stormy ocean and has exquisite color and texture. In the bracelet above I combined it with four fancy rondelles from the same artist, along with some cultured pearls, Swarovski crystals, and sterling silver spacers. The earrings at right use two more beads from that set along with a cascade of Swarovski crystals and sterling silver findings. I love the swirls in these beads... evocative of a winter storm like the Nor'Easter currently charging up the East Coast... We get our share of stormy weather here in New Mexico, and I do sometimes miss some things about my former home back east, but the heavy winter storms... nope, don't miss them at all. I will, however, be forever grateful to the huge Nor'Easter of March 1993 that dumped over a foot and a half of snow and then ice over the Mid-Atlantic Coast, because that's what finally drove me out west, away from it all....

Soaring Hearts

Birds and hearts... my favorite combination. These beautifully detailed solid brass swallows have been given an antique patina and bear tiny glass hearts on their flight home for the night. The earrings measure just over an inch and a half total; the solid brass earwires are similarly antiqued. I also found these brass swallows in a turquoise-blue patina (at left), with a finish coat atop the patina to seal it. These earrings will be in my Etsy shop by tonight, along with some other sweet little brass birds with various patina finishes. I haven't yet learned the fine art of patina, except for my occasional experiments with Liver of Sulfur to blacken silver; it's another one of those "someday I'll have the time to..." things, I suppose. Now that I'm on a month-long break from school, I'm not only making jewelry at a frenzied pace but am also about to finally dive back into my mosaic work. I have six unfinished projects (more than I've finished, in fact) and about 479 ideas for new ones, maybe 10 of which will see the light of day in the next few months. I do finally have a good workspace for mosaics... as long as I don't invite anyone over for dinner (or they don't mind eating in the living room).... But really, which is more important, creating or eating? ;-)

On the Second Day of Christmas...

My two turtle doves made it into someone else's imagination! Gee, I feel almost famous.... Many thanks to Karen for featuring my earrings on her blog and for letting me know. Her art is wonderful; check it out and show her some love!

Sages

More birds: owls! I don't usually do "adorable" but these owls are kind of cool, too, and since it's "bird season" around here I thought I'd keep adding to my selection of avian jewelry. These little porcelain owls measure about 3/4 inch (18 mm); the pink ones are accented with brass and Swarovski crystal, the green ones with sterling silver.

I'm now on the hunt for cranes; late autum marks the return of the Sandhill Cranes to the nearby Bosque del Apache Wildlife Refuge, and I'd like to commemorate that in some jewelry pieces. I've seen some sterling silver origami-style crane beads that would work beautifully... so stay tuned; I'm feeling creative again!

Hand-Wrought

I do so enjoy making these earrings: cut wire, file ends, shape, HAMMER, adjust shape. I hammer out in back of the gallery, and as an experiment I left my metal bench block in the sun for a few hours to see how the sterling silver would hammer on a hot versus a cold block. I loved the results; the hammering went more quickly and the surface was a bit smoother, though I'm still going for a somewhat "roughed-up" look. Friend and gallery associate Nicole has a pair like these that inspired me; I went with a thinner-gauge wire (18-gauge instead of 12- or 14-gauge) so these would fit in more ears and be lighter. So that's all for now. Tomorrow, however, I will show a diminutive but fascinating piece of Smithsonite that I'm wirewrapping into a pendant. Not just any wirewrapping...

More amethyst (of course)

Among (many) other things, I found some beautiful, good-quality amethyst briolettes in Tucson to replenish my depleted supply. These cascade-type earrings sell very well, and I'm glad to have higher-quality gems to offer this time around. Amethyst is a quartz (silicon dioxide) colored by traces of iron and manganese. The amount and proportion of these trace minerals determines the color's hue and intensity, with darker, clear varieties considered the highest grade.

I use sterling headpins to wrap and attach side-drilled briolettes (a faceted teardrop shape) to sterling chain, and stepping the briolettes down the chain allows for the "grape cluster" effect. My variations on this theme have included darker amethyst on oxidized sterling (shown at right), which I'd love to repeat if I could only find those briolettes again. I suppose this is the downside of an eclectic approach to building one's supply, focusing on the unusual and one-of-a-kind. This simple earring style works with any briolette, of course, but we always seem to crave that which we cannot have... and so the quest continues.

Embers

One night, feeling the urge to try something new, I threw some sterling silver findings and just-finished jewelry in a stinky solution of Liver of Sulfur (an oxidizing agent), stirred it around for a while, pulled the mess out and rinsed it off, and stared at the dull grey pieces wondering what on earth I was thinking.... But then I started polishing and came up with this:



Now that's some cool transformation. It's entirely absorbing and meditative, too, to polish the pieces by hand... although I suspect that a Dremel or some such mechanized tool would speed along production of multiple pieces.

Soothing Lavender

My lavender is in full bloom! This heat-loving plant just loves our rocky, alkaline, barely hospitable soil, and it starts blooming just as the summer heat is approaching unbearably hot. These Swarovski crystal briolettes capture lavender's beautiful color perfectly, and the earrings go with just about anything, casual or dressy. I'll be getting more of these briolettes soon in various colors, so if you'd like this style in a different color, just let me know!

In other news, I'm going to Albuquerque tomorrow, and that always means shopping! I'll be stocking up on turquoise -- I always need more, and customers seem to prefer less-than-perfect specimens (more matrix, rougher texture) because they look more "real." Given how much fake turquoise has flooded the market, I can't blame them, so I'm being a lot more careful about what I buy and from whom. This article offers some excellent information about this amazing, highly variable stone, and I'll be posting some new turquoise pieces soon.