GUEST POST :: Janine Lucas of Esfera Jewelry

Hello, lovelies! 

Sometimes we have an extra day or two in a month and when that happens we like to extend an invitation to designers that we enjoy to have them share their unique design perspectives. Today, the Earrings Everyday crew welcomes Janine Lucas of Esfera Jewelry. Janine is from The Netherlands and creates accessories with an eye for color, texture and pattern. I actually own one of her bracelets and a pair of earrings which are quite lovely and long, just the way I like them. She also travels around in a modified Mercedes-Benz truck, which I find completely fascinating! Check it out! ~Erin

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Serendipity, or how a mistake can turn out into something lovely.

These earrings are the result of a mistake. I first created a pair of earrings with those wonderful glass headpins from Numinosity Beads.

They were ready (so I thought) and I laid them out to take pictures. Looking at them through the camera I realized something clearly went wrong in the process of creating. The earrings were asymmetrical. And not in a good way. How did that happen? Where was my brain when I created them. So, what to do? There wasn’t much left of the wire of the headpin to string upon after undoing them.

After several attempts and a big dive into my bead stash I decided to combine them with patina leaves, Czech glass, some vintage metal components, spacer lampwork beads from Lampwork by Amy and handmade earwires from Faerystones. [Sorry, no pictures of the earrings before the redo. I couldn’t bring myself to show them to anyone. ;-) But I’m very pleased with how the redo turned out.]

 

These are available in my Etsy shop, Esfera Jewelry.

I would like to thank the wonderful team of Earrings Everyday for their daily inspiration. And a big thank you for having me as a guest on this wonderful blog!

www.etsy.com/shop/esferajewelry

www.esfera.me/travel/

Autumn Wanderings

I don't know why these little fellows caught my eye this week. I guess I was feeling playful and thinking about walking in the woods when I get some free time this weekend. I'm so ready for sweater weather and pumpkin everything. We had a little tease of fall weather all week but it was short-lived. Autumn is my jam, let's get on with it! 

I paired up the baby hedgies with Czech glass flowers, leaves, brass bead caps and tiny Humblebeads wobbles.

Autumn Wanderings by humblebeads 

I created a Polyvore outfit to match my earrings - wish I could sport little boots like that but it's too much heel, I'm such a clutz! But the rest, they are so me. I need some brown jeans now. (Click on the little icons to see the info for each item.)

You can find the baby Hedgie beads here. The earrings can be found here.

Canyon de Chelly Earrings

I made these earrings with some of my most recently made  lampwork headpins. 

In lampworking you end up with a lot of small ends of rods so I have been using them up in this stratification series.

I had just visited a ceramic studio where the artist was making geological stratifications with all manner of clays and materials. We found that our process and results were somewhat similar albeit mine are on such miniature scale.

  These are the headpins I started with. They have a combination of enamel and frit between the layers.

Different colors of glass melt at different rates which make of the difference in the flow and size of the layers.

Being rather hefty to begin with I just added a couple of my "Spacey Crusters' and some African brass spacers to accent the lampwork headpins.

I finished them off with some little Faerystones copper earwires

 Canyon de Chelly

by Kimberly Rogers of NuminosityBeads

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Bead Fest Energy

I just returned from Bead Fest in Philadelphia and I'm experiencing that strange combination of exhaustion and creative buzz that always follows my return home.  Today's earrings feature some of my new Bead Fest treasures.

The ceramic flowers were made by Diana Ptaszynski of Suburban Girl Studio.  Although Diana wasn't vending at Bead Fest this year, I stayed with her for a few days and picked up these pretty charms from her at that time.

I bought quite a few wood beads at Bead Fest this year.  They came in such yummy colors that I just couldn't resist.  The nice thing about these beads is that although the cubes are somewhat on the large side, they are so lightweight that they are totally comfortable to wear.

The flowers remind me of our dahlias that are blooming in profusion right now.  You can hang onto summer through early October with these earrings and with late blooming dahlias.  Enjoy!  The Dahlia Earrings are available in my shop.

-Linda

Linda Landig Jewelry

Embracing the Artist Within

Our lives are forever evolving and we are always *becoming. These last few years have been a tremendous time of change for me on many levels, professionally and personally. 

For my work and my art as well. 

As an artist who works, there is a struggle of making a living and also producing what's in  my heart. Feeding the artist within. And trust me when I say that creativity is a constant craving. 

My endeavor into ceramics feeds that artist within to a great extent. I can get lost in it for hours and not be aware of time passing at all. It is wonderful and soul feeding.

See my blog for more of an in depth look at my process.

http://www.artandsouljewelry.com/blogs/news/ 

These earrings feature ceramic beads from my latest kiln batch. White stoneware clay with variegated color glazes. Hints of deep blue, and golden brown with a white matte over-coat and background. Highlighted by the texture.

Paired with natural, found sea glass that really off-sets the glaze colors. Wrapped in silver wire with Hill Tribe fine silver beads and dangle. Ear wires are hand forged sterling silver. 

Available at Art & Soul Jewelry. 

peace & blessings, 

Tutorial for Hoop Earrings

Hello, hello, hello!

How have you all been?

It's been awhile and I've been busy making a lot of changes on my website - which is still not reopen for business. There's a lot of changes, and it's going to take a bit longer than I thought.

Since my site is not ready yet, and I don't have new earrings ready to share at this point, I wanted to share one of my very popular video Tutorials that I have on my YouTube Channel - with over 30,000 views, it has helped many make hoops fast and easy to do.

It's a video that I filmed back in 2010. I hope you will enjoy it and try making your own hoops :)

But you don't have to stop there, you can embellish your hoops with 'drops' and also wire wrap some pretty beads all around too :)

Regular Sterling Silver hoops - these are made with 16 gauge wire (for those with larger holes)

You can wire wrap some pretty beads and gemstones around the hoops for a totally different look :)

You can use 14kt Gold Filled wire, or Rose Gold wire to make sparkling gold hoops for the holidays!

I hope that this tutorial will help you make hoops faster.

Everyone works differently. I just find it nice to be able to watch someone make something and learn how they do it...

Thanks for watching and I hope you'll give these a try!

Nathalie Lesage

http://www.NathalieLesageJewelry.com

We're All Ears :: August Reveal

This was one month where I had the material picked out before I even had the inspiration! I actually went in search of something that would pair up nicely with the material that I had in mind. When I spied the images that I shared of the Antelope Canyon, I knew that I had it right.

Unfortunately, I typically bite off more than I can chew. What I imagined I would do couldn't possibly take more than an hour to complete, right?

Wrong.

So there I was sitting with these fabulous pieces that I picked up at the Bead & Button show.

 These are all Red Creek Jasper earring pairs. I went a little nutty. I actually bought 24 sets in 5 different shapes. All I could do was sit and hold them in my hands. Can you blame me? They are stunning!

They look like they each have a story to tell. And that is exactly what I thought when I found those pictures of the canyon with the undulating sandstone walls bathed in light and looking like some prehistoric temple. I wonder what mystic chants were uttered in those passageways.

"USA Antelope-Canyon" by Lucas Löffler - Own work. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

I really wanted to make the focal of each pair of earrings the stone itself. Because natural beauty really needs no further adornment. I had this great idea to make a sort of bail from either sheet metal or wire. I could picture making a balled headpin hinge to hold it all together for a little bit of movement. Unfortunately, by the time I started it was well after 8pm on Thursday and my studio is in a bit of a shambles as I try to reconfigure it (and work in it at the same time) so I would never be able to pull off the bail idea. Still, I did try and was feeling pretty pleased with myself at the cold connections, when I pulled the wire a bit too tightly on the second one and snapped off the top of the stone pendant. Drats. Well, now I have a necklace.

So I tabled that idea (I will revisit that in daylight). And I decided that I just need to treat each shape differently. So I pulled out a little metal and some wire and beads and just dove in.

I love that the red jasper really looks like cave paintings or photographs of a canyon. I could get lost exploring those caves, or gazing at these stone pairs. For each stone tells a unique story that is as old as time and has something important to impart to the one who beholds it.

Your turn!

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Sufficient Bliss

Frantically busy here, so it's short and sweet from me today. Here's another one of those pairs of earrings that are half formed for a while, before you find the final missing piece.

In this case the missing piece was the sliced shell flowers. I've teamed them with some Scorched Earth drops, some oxidised caps, some teeny pyrites and Greek ceramics, and some of my dyed, patinated chain. 

They're available here in my Etsy shop.

Bye for now, Claire

www.somethingtodo.etsy.com

www.somethingtodobeads.etsy.com

www.somethingtodowithyourhands.com

Raiding the Sewing Cabinet

Let's talk about thimbles. 

They're wee, they protect our precious fingertips, they are passed down from generation to generation of nimble-fingered women. Even the word puts a smile on your face. I'm not even sure if thimbles are used much anymore? Then again, I'm not a seamstress. I'm sure if they made finger protectors for metalsmiths, I'd be all over it. 

I enjoy incorporating oddball found objects in my earrings, so antique shops can be a treasure trove when it comes to sparking my muse. One of my favorite Etsy supply shops sells lots of vintage, old, crusty, imperfect artifact bits from Eastern Europe. These items range anywhere from 100 years old to a few decades old. 

During one order (read: binge) I came across these vintage brass thimbles and the first thing that came to my mind was BEAD CAP! The edges are ragged and they have a dark green verdigris patina on them, and a lot of people may look at them and think "junk, gross, why would you want to wear that?" 

But to me, they bring to mind previous generations of strong, make-do, self-reliant, hard-working women. Women who tended and cared for those they loved. Women like my grandmother who lived through the depression and still mends towels and undershirts and socks to this day.


To turn these thimbles into wearable art, I carefully punched holes in the top and hung them with natural spotted jasper stones in complementary hues of sand, terracotta, army green, and vermillion. I then gave the stones blackened silver soldered caps and hung everything from my extra long ear wires. They dangle freely beneath the thimble, making for really unique nostalgic statement pieces.

Happy Wednesday!
Nikki
LoveRoot on Etsy

Apostle Island Earrings

Apostle Island Earrings

Ever since I moved to Minnesota long ago, one of my favorite places to go for a long weekend getaway is Lake Superior. In three hours I can be on a rocky beach looking for surf tumbled rocks and driftwood, or just soaking up the sun and the cool breeze. One of my special destinations on Lake Superior destinations is the Apostle Islands. They are located off the shore of Bayfield in northern Wisconsin, still a short trip from my home. These islands are special to me for their rugged beauty and peaceful charm, so much so that I have named a recent collection of jewelry for them.

All of the pieces of my Apostle Islands Collection are a blend of hand faceted gemstones with rustic copper components. For this earring design, I formed sticks of hammered and heat patinated copper to blend with aqua fluorite cubes and apatite square cut beads. Simple and rustic, as is the place for which they are named.

Lake Superior Photo by Damon Ewing

Lake Superior has many moods. In August you may find it smooth as glass; visit again in October and you may see its surly side with powerful wind and crashing waves.

The waters of Lake Superior are usually a deep blue, but every day is different and under the right light conditions it can also be a beautiful shade of green.

Gloria Ewing

Chrysalis Tribal Jewelry
Chrysalis Too on Etsy

Southwestern Bold

These Big Bold Sea Urchin Buttons have been hanging around my studio for some time,

I decided to finally use them myself!

I received these amazing Southwestern Headpins not long ago from Karin Hruza of Beadfairy and I've been dying to use them!

So I decided to go for it and make these long and luscious Southwestern Bold Earrings!

I added Faceted Turquoise beads on top!!

They are 3.25" long, I think possibly the longest I've ever made!

You can find them available for sale

HERE!

Thank you!

Kristi

KristiBowmanDesign.com

KristiBowmanDesign.Etsy

KristiBowmanDesign on Facebook

Fall Finery

Do you feel it? We've all seen the back-to-school promos and pencil-notebook-crayon-eraser-filled aisles. The cooler mornings and shorter days are a sure sign. We are even seeing hints of colors dappling the trees. No doubt about it, autumn is slowly creeping her way on to the landscape. 

And I'm super cool with that. If heaven were a season, it would be fall. So I took a few minutes to whip up some earrings to celebrate!

These long dangles feature Humblebeads disk beads in birch and leafy patterns. (Grab them at Bead Fest next week!) It's a little hard to see the bronze and copper glass o-beads that are working hard as spacers, but they are there! Czech glass leaves in a mustard yellow remind me of my favorite knitted scarf. 

Yep, I'm ready for sweater weather, autumn colors and everything pumpkin spice! How about you? 

Actual autumnal evidence from my front yard! 

Have a great weekend!!!

-Heather

www.humblebeads.com

Apogee ~ Homage to Pluto

A hearty hello from the road!

 I penned this post back in Alaska on a cool and rainy day after a damp blueberry picking expedition and I imagine at this time of publication I may be enjoying cool Maine breezes by the bay after our road trip from Michigan to Maine. I will have gone on a  search for different blues on our Leland Blue slag glass finding trip on Lake Michigan with our LoveRoot Nikki Zehler.

 I jumped on the bandwagon of designing with amazing jasper stone sticks after spotting this pair at the Tucson Gem and Mineral show. I think they are Dendritic Sonoran Jasper and since I live in the Sonoran Desert part of the year it was fitting that I acquire some.

I paired them with some ever so slightly mismatched sized lampwork rounds of mine that I would be hard pressed to replicate. I write little to nothing down when I'm creating, such is my muse.

While I could have brought down the shine of the copper wire (22 gauge) I found I enjoyed the brightness with this combination.

These are the first I've made of this sort with stone sticks. I think I could get addicted to designing this style.

Thanks for looking!

Kim

www.numinositybeads.etsy.com

www.facebook.com/numinositybeads

Folk Art Hand Earrings by Cindy's Art and Soul

Our hands represent our love, our life, our work. How we hold each other. How we are able to express our creativity through art, music and poetry.

 Created with white bronze hand charms by Lois Venarchick, pure silver fused rings, small gemstones of hessonite garnet and kyanite paired with funky stoneware ceramic beads by cindy's art and soul, finished with a topaz glaze.

Available at Art and Soul Jewelry.