Vintage Birds

Hi, I hope you've all had a good week, the weather is turning colder here and we  put some of the more tender plants into the greenhouse yesterday.

I have two pairs of earrings to show you on a vintage theme with birds. I really love these polymer clay components by Susana Paredes which are faux ceramic and I had fun carefully sorting through my beads to find some to match and compliment her components.

The beads I finally chose to match Susana's components which have tones of pink, green, brown and gold. are lampwork beads by Irina Samek with Czech glass bead caps and beads and brass palm leaf bead caps.

With this next pair I wanted to highlight the gorgeous colour of the bird and used etched lampwork beads by Natalya  Darlin together with beaded beads by The Curious Bead Shop, Czech glass beads and again brass palm leaf bead caps which I think go really well with the vintage look.

Thank you all for taking a look at my post. If you are interested in purchasing either they will be available in my FB group page later today, this is the link - Nicola Morse - Jewellery & components.

New Directions

While I've made jewelry for most of my adult life, I only began working with clay about 5 years ago. I've been mostly offering my ceramic components for sale to other designers, via FaceBook and my website. But I feel myself moving in a new direction right now. I want to reduce my emphasis on selling my components to other designers and mostly focus on making jewelry using my own ceramic pieces.

I've opened up an additional shop that solely focuses on jewelry featuring my ceramic components, such as these delightfully rustic, sage green flower earrings. I also have some easy going post earrings on offer.

There are also some earrings that you may recognize from previous Earrings Everyday posts, such as the following.

My new shop also has necklaces and bracelets and a few jewelry components. I am adding new jewelry all the time. I hope you will come, visit and check it out. My original website will continue as always, with a wonderful array of handmade jewelry and components. Here are the links for both shops.

Linda Landig Jewelry at the ClayShare Market, (my new shop for my ceramic jewelry).

Linda Landig Jewelry (my original website, with a wide variety of my jewelry to choose from).

As always, thank you for visiting Earrings Everyday and I'll see you again in 2 weeks!

Telling the Runes

Runes are the letters in a related set of alphabets known as runic alphabets, used to write various Germanic languages before the adoption of Latin, and used for specialised purposes afterwards. The earliest date from 150 AD onwards, found in Denmark and Germany. They were still used in rural Sweden for decorative purposes well into the 20th c.

I came across these gorgeous, pitted ancient looking beads while browsing Etsy. This one is Kenaz - the rune for creativity or knowledge. Josephine Wadman makes a selection of them them to order (and yes, I do have more!)

I wanted to express the nature of creativity with them so the earrings contain one of my favourite things to work with - Lucy Haslams 'punkies'. She know I love all things gothic and made some of these specially  for me to use as connectors - I've had large and small, long and short and love them all.  I'm not giving away her special recipe but there's a lot of  soldering going on...….and each one is unique, the very essence of creativity.

Natural stones seemed 'right' with these so I used slabs of silverleaf jasper, and beads of warm jasper and dark haematite.  The 'create' tag is pewter. And of course, vintaj chain. Great earthy colours.

                    I'll be popping these in my Etsy shop forthwith. See you again in two weeks!

                                                                           Lindsay x

                                                                        My Etsy shop
                                             
                                                                    My Facebook page

Rock pools

Hello earring people :-)

Here we are, hurtling towards the end of October already, and I should be designing with Autumn in mind....but.... I had these glorious blue ceramic rock pools, by the one and only Petra Carpreau. She makes these beauties from Earthstone and fills them with glass,  coats them with fine silver and fires them -creating beautiful, individual rustic pieces. Now I know the blue is perhaps much more suitable for summer (it makes me think of the Mediterranean) but I just couldn't resist.

I've been taking a course in silver jewellery and learning all about soldering and I've been loving it! I'm still a novice and everything takes me three times longer than i think it will...

I wanted to create something that would co-ordinate with the rock pools. I took some sterling silver sheet and spent a happy couple of hours sawing, sanding and texturing it, and soldering jump rings and ear posts to the little squares I created. Finally, I oxidised them and rubbed them back a little to create a reasonable match with the fine silver on the rock pools.

So, there we have it! Not autumnal at all, but sometimes you just need to take inspiration from whatever catches your eye. See you next month

Sue
Utterly Lovely Stuff

Flower on top

Hello lovely earring friends,

For the earrings in this post I used wonderful charms made by our very own Nicola Morse, a very gifted artist. 

 Her use of color is wonderful.
I wanted to put a flower bead cap on top of the charm, which took some fiddling, as the structure had a mind of its own, and would not hang straight. But I managed, after using some swear words (my apologies).
The polymer clay beads are made by Cindy Hinds. Sadly, she doesn't ship to the Netherlands (or Greece) anymore. Luckily I bought quite a few of her beads years ago.

Thank you so much for looking and your support for Earrings Everyday :)
Share the love, don't be shy and leave some words. And do check out the other posts of my friends here. 

See you in a couple of week. Wishing you all a wonderful day, full of laughter, joy and lots of love.

Janine
Esfera Jewelry

"Pins and needles, needles and pins, it's a happy man that grins."

Joan Miller, my Queen Of Halloween bead maker, just had her first show of the season and I was lucky enough to purchase these wonderful little autumn-inspired flowers. Fresh green and butter yellow are one of my all-time favorite color combinations. 

I always see little fancy black spiders in the center, do you?? Anyway...

I wanted to play up the beautiful green so I added some lovely vintage glass beads with small black slashes.  They have a wonderful matte finish and look very much like pods.

I could have left them alone at that point, but oh heck, it IS almost Halloween and I had the most perfectly adorable, teeny-tiny skulls, sooo... look who is now popping out of the pods...lol

My favorite thing to do in a design is add a little element of surprise.  From a distance, they are just pretty little flowers, but up close, someone is looking back!  My friend, whom I bead with every Saturday night, saw the earrings from across the table and said "Oh, how pretty!"  Then looked closer and went "Whoa!"  We've been friends forever and REALLY, she should have known better!  lol

Thank you so much for joining me and having a look at what I've been up to!  I'll be back in two weeks' time!

Loralee XO 

loraleekolton.etsy.com

Treasures, Old and New

Recently when I was cleaning in my office, I was putting things back on shelves, taking things off shelves that didn't belong there, and straightening things on the shelves.  At some point, I stopped tidying and started looking through the drawers and boxes of artisan-made ceramic beads I've collected over the years.

There were so many beautiful pieces, from delicate porcelain charms to large carved and vividly colored tribal style beads.  I really did have all the best intentions of finishing up the cleaning I'd started, but I found myself picking up beads I hadn't seen in a while, turning them over in my hands, reacquainting myself with them.

When I got to my stash of beads by Karen Totten (one of my favorite artisans), I saw a pair of beautiful green spiral connector beads I'd had for quite a few years.  I turned them over and looked closely at them and wondered what if I paired them with rustic, whimsical ceramic faces I'd bought from artisan Judie Mountain in Tucson this past winter? 💗 

From that point, it was on.  Once I'd finally determined what all the components were going to be (Karen Totten's green spiral ceramic beads, Judie Mountain's ceramic faces, an oval copper connector, a scalloped ceramic ring also by Karen) all that was left was putting them together.  I really had fun making these rustic and whimsical and asymmetrical pretties.

Thanks so much for reading!  I won't be here for my next scheduled time (October 24) because my husband and I will be in Hawaii to celebrate our son's wedding. 💗 But I'll be back.

I hope you and yours are all well.  Have a Happy Hallowe'en!

xo
Meridy
My shop

Haunted House

This week I'm gearing up to Hallowe'en and decided to have a bit of fun with some new polymer clay pieces from my friend Helen Backhouse. On holiday this summer my granddaughter found a washed up piece of broken terracotta pottery with nice lines on and I brought it back for Helen to use as a mould. The results looked to me like a panelled door, so I jokingly asked her to put a keyhole and door knob on.

I had the idea of making some spooky house earrings, with my little collection of Hallowe'en components.

Along with Helen's pieces, we have a copper ghoul face by Kristi Bowman Gruel, polymer pumpkins by Rejetta Sellars and Karen Jackson, and cute ceramic bats by Jana Bliznakova. You would, of course, have the door to this house securely locked, so there is a nice fancy brass key.

If you celebrate All Hallows Eve, I hope your preparations are well under way - bats will be flying!

                                                             See you in two weeks time.

                                                                     Lindsay x
                                                             
                                                                  My Etsy shop

                                                                My Facebook page

Day Of The Dead Calaveras

As some of you may know, about 6 years ago, my husband and I spent a month on Oaxaca, Mexico; from mid-October till mid-November. This put us right in the middle of one of Mexico's most exuberant celebrations of The Day Of The Dead. Handmade altars, decorated with food, flowers and sugar skulls, were constructed all over the city. Huge skeleton puppets were paraded in the streets and placed in business storefronts.

Near Llano Park in Oaxaca, Mexico

The puppets as well as the sugar skulls, were often crowned with colorful flowers, especially marigolds. Orange marigolds are said to guide the spirits of the departed, back to their homes on the Day Of The Dead.

In keeping with these customs, I dangled bright orange flowers beneath these wonderful pewter skull (Calavera in Spanish) charms by Inviciti.

The flowers have a golden luster finish that looks especially pretty in the light. I made my own Sterling silver ear wires to go along with the skull earrings.

The skull motif is popular year round, but these would be especially fun to wear this month! You can find these earrings in my shop now.

Linda Landig Jewelry

The sun, the moon and one star

Hello Earring Folk

I've a pair of earrings for you which were inspired by my holiday in Spain this summer. We spent a few days in Barcelona, which was wonderful. Vibrant, colourful and diverse - it was fabulous! We spent a day at the Fundacio Joan Miro (the Joan Miro Foundation -packed full of paintings, sculptures and even textiles created by the Spanish artist). One of my favourite pieces is this one - the sun, the moon and one star created in the late 60s as a public monument for the city of Barcelona. The view over the city acts as a perfect backdrop to this beautiful piece

 And now to earrings! Well, clever old Petra Carpreau of Scorched Earth created these beautiful ceramic components with Miro in mind. I decided to keep the design simple and bold -with dark oxidised hoops and chrysocolla rondelles

Isn't Petra clever? Love these. I toyed with using amber or citrine, but I really liked the fresh, deep green of the chrysocolla. Hard to see from the photo above, but the sculpture is set in water, so green seemed apt!

That's me done. See you in a couple of weeks.
Sue x
utterly lovely stuff

Dream

Hello lovely earring friends,

A bit later than usual, but here is my post for today.

I so love the work of Helena Benkoczka. She is not only a lovely lady but also a very talented artist. Her polymer clay beads and charms are whimsical, colorful and just beautiful. She also creates wonderful faux tin components. And of course, I could not contain myself and had to buy some.

These gorgeous charms put me in a very romantic mood, which is a rarity lol. I layered the charms on brass links in which I wire wrapped some Czech flowers. The white polymer clay roses are made by Ira Vorobets. Some Czech glass beads compete the design. 

Thank you so much for looking and your support for Earrings Everyday :)
Share the love, don't be shy and leave some words. And do check out the other posts of my friends here. 

See you in a couple of week. Wishing you all a wonderful day, full of laughter, joy and lots of love.

Janine
Esfera Jewelry

Devilishly Charming Is What They Called Him...

Hello,  Happy October To You All!

Take a look at this strikingly bold and playful image Anna Pierson of Sagahus Components used on her faux tin charms!  I really fell in love with this guy and ordered a few pairs to play with.  

These charms were made on copper and have a nice substantial weight which dome beautifully. Doming the image really enhanced the facial features and gave it life!  

Don't you just love the little headdress of skulls he's wearing!  What also makes this design special is the soft muted yellow background, it really makes him pop!

I wanted this design to be a bit modern yet keep a warm rustic feel.  I loved the idea of extending the main image so I created a goatee for him!  It's like when an actor leaves the stage and comes into the audience! ha! 

In my stash I had these cool little wire wrapped charms by Shipwreckdandy Supply which were just the right size and shape!  Also, the tin is very smooth and the wire wrapping lends a lot of rich texture. 

Thank you so much for stopping by and taking a peek on my worktable!

I will see you back in a couple of weeks!

🔥

Loralee xo

www.loraleekolton.etsy.com