I thought maybe that title was better than "I'm Soooo Sick." :) 💗
Over the past ten days or so, almost everyone in our household has been sick, and it was my turn to come down with this flu (or whatever it is) when Roger and I returned from a fun weekend on California's Central Coast on Sunday. I was under the weather on Monday and in bed all day yesterday with a fever, and today (Wednesday) I tried to finish a pair of earrings I'd been working on before we left on our trip and realized that I just didn't have the energy to focus on them.
So if you can bear with me, I will save them for another time and instead share a few of my old favorites from years back.
These two pairs, from 2012, are some I made with leather using beautiful components by Karen Totten and Kristi Bowman-Gruel. I made quite a few in this style; I loved making them, and people seemed to like them. It's hard to beat that!
The earrings below are from late 2013 or early 2014. I don't think they ever made it into my shop, as I traded them to another jewelry designer (they definitely have a good home). They're made with wonderfully rustic spiral beads by Barbara Hanselman of BHClaysmith and gorgeous asymmetrical drops by Rey of Grey Bird Studio.
These last two pairs are from early 2014:
The earrings on the left were made with Karen Totten's beautiful ceramic crescent moons, suspended by copper wires decorated by wrapped Czech glass and metal beads and by greenish-blue quartz rondelles swinging from a fancy copper chain. The earrings on the right were made with gorgeously textured ceramic spikes by Robyn Cove of Ragged Robyn, topped off with little lampwork rondelles and glowing lampwork glass beads by Basha. Yum!
It was fun looking back on the things I've created in the past and noting how my tastes have changed and my techniques have grown...and loving all of it just the same.
So...this is what I offer you today. I promise I will be back with new (and hopefully beauteous) earrings in two weeks.
I hope you're all well and not catching any nasty flus! Drink Emergen-C! Take care.
A creative slump. We all have them. Doesn't often happen to me but this week I've struggled to even summon up a pair of earrings.
I've been super busy over the last month with village events, real life and on-line shows, and grandchildren stuff and reckon I'm just tired and in need of a holiday - cue Halkidiki in a couple of weeks time to recharge my rapidly aging batteries!
So for this weeks earrings I decided to take Janine's advice and revisit an old design. Looking through albums from a couple of years ago, I found a pair I really liked and decided to make a new, differently coloured version - the originals had green kyanite with the red enamelled tins.
The enamelled tin sticks are, of course, by Kimberly Rogers . Those gorgeous lapis lazuli discs come by recommendation of Norbel, from funkyprettybeads. Very rich, with the deep red. Favourite colours of the Egyptians; Tutankhamen's sarcophagus abounds with lapis, although with gold rather than copper.
The etched copper rings are sadly no longer available - they were from Tracy Smith, of Cinnamon Beads, who is now concentrating on her jewellery (more's the pity - her copper findings were second to none). Those Tangled earwires are by none other than Lucy Haslam, who is re-opening her findings shop with some new, exciting things for us in mid-August after her move to wild Wales. Hurray, I hear you all shout. Not before time, ya slacker (don't tell her I said that!)
And they've set me off on a real red and blue thing...so expect to see more of these colours together. I'm busy studying my guide book from the Museum of Egypt in Cairo - I feel a collection coming on!
This week we will have our second heatwave of this year, with temperatures expected to exceed 40 degrees Celsius. We have no air-conditioning in our mobile home, so it will be a bit warm. At the end of the day we will possibly head to one of our favorite beach-clubs to swim and enjoy the beach.
As I couldn't get enough of stacked earrings I made another pair with beads from one of the beautiful muse packs from Smittenbeads.
Thanks for visiting. Wishing you all a wonderful day, full of joy, happiness, laughter and sunshine. See you in a couple of weeks.
June 22 was the 117th birthday of an artist named Oskar Fischinger, as I learned from a #GoogleDoodle. If that name doesn't sound familiar, you likely have seen his work in the animated Disney classic, Fantasia. His work is the opening with the graphical representation of the notes.
Seeing that sent me on a quest to find out more about what I came to learn more.
I stumbled next upon a TEDx talk by Dr. Hunter Ewen entitled Music is a Visual Art. In that talk while sharing the visual representation of a score that allows for a musician to really grasp the concept of the musical sounds the composer is after, he said the following,
"So by visualizing this piece of music we are all of a sudden open to a number of things we might not notice when just hearing it. We can see patterns and sequences more easily. We can see which instruments are playing and where and how. We can see when harmony becomes melody. And we can see when there's one note versus when there's many notes."
I really liked the idea of seeing patterns and sequences and watching where the notes take us on the unique journey of the musical score. And that is when I stumbled upon the work of two artists in graphic notation or animated scores. I see a lot of possibility for crossing over into making beautiful jewelry.
Check out this score by Andy Fillebrown for Debussy's hauntingly beautiful Clair de lune
I love the circular representation of the score and the way the lights flare and trail off as the notes are held. It is mesmerizing.
Seeing this led me to believe there were other artists out there doing something similar and I landed on the YouTube channel for Stephen Malinowski or smalin. His visual representations are different, but no less compelling. Here is one of his takes on the same piece of music, but with a solo guitar instead of piano
The color are again mesmerizing, and I love the way they are connected by the lines.
I have spent many days just letting these animations play in the background. Each is so different and so beautiful.
So the challenge for July, should you choose to accept, is to find a piece of music with a graphical notation or animated score, from either Andy Fillebrown or Stephen Malinowski - they each have dozens and dozens to choose from - or any other artist really. Then represent that in a pair of earrings. The nice thing about YouTube is there is a little embed link that will allow you to grab the HTML code to put into your blog post. I would highly recommend that you share the visual in your post or at least a link to the one that inspired you.
Can't choose? Check out my favorites from both of them:
Last week I mentioned that I had been going through my photos of years of jewelry designs I had created. And, I came across a few that touch on the subject above: These earrings are all made with scraps that were on my bench. Since I wasn't well this week, I didn't make anything new, but I wanted to talk about scraps and leftovers.
Do you aim to re-use everything leftover when you make jewelry? What do you do with all the scraps and odds and ends? Whether I work with metal, or polymer clay, precious metal clay, etc... I re-purpose/re-use/transform scraps into new components and pieces. There's basically zero waste in terms of materials in my studio and I'm quite proud of that :)
Here's some earrings I made using scraps:
Tribal shields: Scraps of Sterling silver wire balled up, flattened, soldered to leftover pieces copper from another project, and everything is soldered to the sterling silver wire frame, and decorated with two small Turquoise stones:
These Moonstone Moon Earrings are not made with scraps, but there's a part of these that ends up in other designs - I use a sterling silver round disc blank, and I offset it in my disc cutter to quickly cut out a crescent moon shape to make these earrings:
So when I make these, I'm left with 'eye shaped' or 'marquise shaped' pieces of sterling silver. Some of those scrap pieces ended up in these designs:
Mother Earth Earrings: The textured sterling silver piece (shaped like a marquise a bit - vertical) is soldered on top of the 'dome' in this pair. I textured the pieces and soldered them to the base round disc shape.
And in this pair of Kyanite Chandelier Earrings, I used that same leftover cut-out shape from the Moon earrings, but this time, I used them horizontally to make the foundation of this unusual pair of chandelier earrings:
So how do you like 'scrap' earrings? Are you happy with how much you can re-use and re-purpose in your own studio? Can you share some of your re-using tips with us? We'd love to hear what you do!
I will be back later on this month with new earrings to show!
Hello. I hope all of you in the US were able to enjoy a four-day weekend, and had a good time whatever you did or chose not to do. 😊 One Two Three! meant I was going to make a very cool "quick" pair of earrings with three components: ancient Roman glass, silver chain, and a really wonderful pair of ancient appearing "pods" by Lorna of Balela Ceramics.
Rather than go into all of the details of the difficulties I ended up having in making these, I'll just say, it didn't go One Two Three! It took about six hours, maybe more, when all was said and done, that's just making time. It's funny, how something that appears to simple can trip me up. I'm pleased with them. They match the vision I had, for the most part. The ancient glass is from a strand I purchased from Kim Rogers of Numinosity Beads. She is on vacation but I believe she has strands left. I hope to grab one, also. I used one piece of glass in blue and one in green on each earring.
