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