These fan shaped earrings are nothing but fun! How could you not feel happy when wearing these?
The fan of threads contains so many delightful colors and when I found the stripy red beads I knew they were made for each other! I love these new earrings and hope you do too.
For today’s earrings, I decided to keep my promise to myself and continue to design at least a few earring pairs with my own enamels. Just like the last pair of earrings I shared, these enamels were designed for a recent bird-themed show. Although I typically go for matchy-matchy designs, I do like to mix things up every so often, and these similar-but-different hummingbirds were just begging to be paired together. I was instantly attracted to the soft print and pastel colors, and the copper blanks somehow reminded me of the gilded bird cages I saw hanging all over the souks in the Marrakech medina a few years back on a family vacation.
Knowing I wanted to give the finished earrings a romantic but subtle vibe, I embossed the copper before adding the powdered glass enamel base coats and kept the oxidation intact after applying the iron oxides. Now that the charms were done, the design of the earrings remained.
I remembered coming across some fancy copper connectors from Joan Langmo recently while rummaging through my boxes of treasured components and hoped I could remember where I saw them (if you only saw my “organization”, you would understand why I said I hoped)! I hit the jackpot when I found not only the connectors I was looking for, but also some lovely flat copper flower stampings that I had completely forgotten about. It took just a bit of finagling to get all the pieces to play nicely together (do you ever feel that engineering is the most challenging part of designing? I know I do quite often!) by adding dainty Czech glass flowers on top of the copper stampings. Next, I added the hollow lampwork from Alisha White, sandwiched between pretty copper caps, at the top – just the thing to add a bit of color without distracting from the hummingbird enamels. The last step was to add the dangling Czech flowers on each side of the connectors to balance the earrings and tie everything together.
I just LOVE this subtle mix of colors:
I’m still debating whether I “love” these or not – perhaps I’ll feel the urge to change them up a bit. But for now, they will appear this way later today in my etsy shop, TwinklingOfAnEye.
You can find other earrings in my fb group.
Thanks for spending a part of your day with me - see you in a few weeks! :-)
For whatever reason (I’ve yet to discover a definitive one), I don’t tend to design earrings with my own enamels. But being a brand new year in the midst of a very strange season, I decided it was time to mix things up a bit and change all that…at least for today!
I recently designed a flurry of bird enamels (or maybe that should be a flock?) for a themed show and tried my hand at some enamels that were more like portraits than my typical outlined “cartoon” style pieces. Much to my surprise, the process of making small translucent strokes, firing, adding another layer of strokes, firing (repeat ad infinitum), was somehow mesmerizing. However, having no painting background, my poor birds, although changing appearance with each layer, were not looking at all like what I had intended after even after a half dozen firings! Perhaps they were better kept for my own designs, where I could take my time figuring out how to bring them to life. Which brings me (finally!) to today’s earrings…
Here’s how my birds started their journey after cutting copper sheet and laying down the first base coats (the poor things would have a quite a journey of color ahead of them before they left the nest):
If you are familiar with my earrings, you know that I don’t tend to do anything simple – I guess it’s just not how I am wired. But I wanted beads that would complement the birds without distracting from them (after all, they had already been forced through quite a metamorphosis). I think I found the perfect match in a beautiful etched pair from Regis Teixera, and added some leather flowers (how cool is that?) to keep in line with a more rustic vibe, rich amber-hued Czech glass flowers and rings, and an assortment of brass caps. I really like how these turned out, but I also am aware of just how much I have to learn (I would greatly appreciate any painting tips you might have)! It’s difficult to know just when to stop...
Who knows? Maybe I’ll have a few more pairs of bird earrings to add to the flock by next time. But for now, these will be available in my etsy shop, TwinklingOfAnEye later today
You can regularly find other new earrings in my fb group.
Thanks for spending a part of your day with me. See you in a few weeks! :-)