All right Mr. De Mille, I'm ready for my close-up....

Me...23 lbs. lighter and a new do!!

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Beads and brass and bronze and bone.....

Oh My!!

Plugging away in the studio.  I'll break on Saturday to pull out all of my show supplies and figure out if I have everything I need to set up my booth.  Last year I was determined to make fabric side walls for my booth.  How could a year go by and I not get this done?  So the tent walls will go back up this year.  I'm going to look at getting sheers to hang up over them to give the booth a softer look....then maybe in 2011 I will find the time to make the fabric side walls....Yeah...Right. 

Then it will be back to production.  Why do I never think I have enough jewelry for a show?  There is always that little voice saying....make more...make more. 

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17 days to the show....

and I'm spending most my free time in the studio.  This weekend was no exception.  I never get as much done as I imagine I can.  There's always other things to take care of...cleaning, cooking, laundry...that get in the way.

Plus I have a short attention span.  I can work for 4-5 hours and then I have to go do something else.  I'm even like that when I take classes.  If it lasts too long or doesn't have enough variety....I loose focus.  l'm surprised I can do my day job since it's pretty much the same thing everyday.  I have to admit there are times when I want to let out a blood-curdling scream.  But I digress...

Here are a few pics of the weekend's work....

Coin Necklaces

Organic beads, bone, brass, and bronze

I have about 12 of these with all different focal beads

Battle shield with bone, brass, glass and an African coin

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Class Pic...

I lifted this from Jen Cabic's blog.  I never have pics of me in the classes that I take.  So here is one....with my typical eye's wide shut look...LOL

Mary Ann, Cathy, and me.  Noreen in the background

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Organics

Great organic beads...again from Joanne Zekowski

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Cuniform Necklaces

Our Day with Robert

My piece....I just finished watching The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency filmed in Botswana.

Yesterday was spent with Robert Dancik. There were 12 of us in class. A fun bunch to be sure!! This was the third class I've taken with Robert. Working with the Faux Bone was fun and I did tube rivets for the first time. Funny to think of some of the common techniques that I've never tried. Robert had me use an eyelet setter to start the flaring of the rivet. It worked really well.

 From front to back...Cathy, Mary Ann, Jen, and Robert in the background...all enjoying the day.

Robert demoing for the group 

Jen

Cathy sawing with such a big smile...I told her she looked much to serious and she started laughing. 

 Another demo.  Using a tin can as a bracelet mandrel for the faux bone.

The group and below is some of the work

 One of the coolest pieces is this bracelet made by Pat.  It is Faux Bone with alcohol inks used for the colors.

New necklaces

I threw in bone and glass and bronze and more glass to make necklaces.  The real genius of these necklaces are Joanne Zerkowski's beads. 
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All shined up....

The pics don't show all the detail (I need a better camera) but you get the idea.  I still like to cut gashes in the shields.  I will mend them with leather lacing.  I think of these as battle shields for the warrior in all of us.
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Primitive Bead Pendants

Beads by Joanne Zerkowski of Z Beads.  She is not on-line.  She can only be found at bead shows.  I ran into twice this year...in Santa Fe at Beadfest and Milwaukee at Bead and Button.  She makes these fabulous organic primitive looking beads.  These fall into my "lickable" category. 
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Bronze...I just can't quit you

I haven't worked in silver in over a year.  I'm just to synced into the bronze.  I'm still working in the original too.  The colors keep me working in original.  Yesterday as I worked in the studio there were a lot of thoughts going through my head about the things I've heard about metal clay's other than silver. 

I've heard people complain about the bronze...it's messy, it takes to long to fire, blah, blah, blah.  Some have even gone as far as to say it isn't really a metal like a sheet bronze, it's not strong, you can't forge it. 

Well...it's not sheet metal.  Neither is silver PMC.  It's different.  Just like acrylics aren't oils aren't watercolors.  They are all different forms of paint.  And strength....I've been wacking the crap out of it all weekend long and it's forging beautifully.  Messy....yes it's messy.  The fast fire bronze is cleaner...but still messy. 

I was enjoying myself yersterday working at the bench.  I was thinking about various other art forms and the inherent messes that are associated with each one.  My only conclusion was.....put your Big Girl panties on and deal....or go do something else. 

That had me laughing all afternoon.

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I was about to conquer the world but got distracted by something shiny....

I missed class tonight because I had to work late but the upside was that Lou and I went to the Moosehead Saloon for a late dinner.  He's travelling off and on so we have to catch time together when we can. 

It also gave me a chance to finish hand polishing the pieces in the picture.  I kept thinking that I should just throw this stuff in the tumbler but I don't want to lose the color....especially in the cuniform pieces.

 I'll be busy in the studio again this weekend....which is fine by me.  I still have at least 2 loads to prep for the kiln...more pieces parts and some medallions and shields.  Plus I have an idea for incorporating some leather into the pieces that I want to try out.  Too many ideas and not enough time.

Ahhh...if only I didn't have to work the day job....the jewelry that I could make.   Hey...Bill Gates, Warren Buffet...don't you have a spare million I could have.  I mean you can only do so much with your 50 billion dollars.  Really....you wouldn't even miss a million.  I'd give you free jewlery...LOL.
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Studio Weekend

This weekend was the best kind of weekend.....no plans except to spend time in the studio.  I put some necklaces together.  Carved some bronze connectors that are now in the kiln and worked through another 200 grams of bronze with some new tear-aways.

The November show will be here soon so I wll be spending a lot of time in the studio between now and then. 
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Colors from the Kiln

I'm always amazed....every time...at the colors on the bronze when it's fired in coal based carbon. 

There were two layers in the kiln pan.  The tan pieces were on the top layer.  The best colors always come from the bottom layer.  These pieces are thick too.  I wasn't rolling them out.  Just making balls or snakes and pressing them in between the tablet and the mold.  Varing the pressure gave different thicknesses and sizes. 

Here's a pic that shows the bas-relief and sunken relief of the different sides of these pieces.  I'm loving these.  I have to admit as I was making these I thought I was having a genius moment .... LOL .... well ... maybe not genius ... but at least a moment.  A good moment!!!

I have more pieces in the studio to prep.  These were just the pieces I got into the kiln before I went to bed last night.

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Cuni-Sticks

Busy day today.  Three loads of laundry, went to the computer store, the office supply store, the drug store, the auto parts store, the grocery store, made jambalaya and blew through 400 grams of bronze clay. 

I needed some quick things to make for the show coming up in November so I pulled out the coins molds for pendants and made more connectors.  This time instead of carving, I pressed the connectors between a cuniform tablet and a mold of the tablet.  The effect was cuniform in bas-relief on one side and sunken relief on the other. 

I started to call them Cuni-Sticks....like Cinna-Sticks.  Only you wouldn't want to eat these...but I might lick them once they are out of the kiln.  You know how I am with shiny things...they're all lickable to me.

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New Necklace



Pendant made from my new set of tear-aways.  The hand drawn design was based on some mudcloth that I have.

The chain is 30" long and includes blue glass from Africa, a coin from the Belgian Congo, white bone discs from African, one of my new connectors, and three greenish brass beads from.....you guessed it...Africa. 

Hmmmm....there's a pattern here. 
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Book Review: Jewelry Design Challenge

Actually the full title is Jewelry Design Challenge: 10 Materials * 30 Artists * 30 Spectacular Projects.  A first pass through this book and I am in heaven.  This is my type of jewelry.  Mixed metals with that a funky, hip edge to them.  When I looked down the list of artists.....some of my favorties just jumped out.  Thomas Mann (whose work I have loved for about 20 years), the charming Robert Dancik, Sara Westermark, Bob Ebendorf, the wonderful Mary Hettsmansperger, Deb Karash, Tim McCreight, Eric Silva, Joanna Goldberg, Sara Hood, and these are just the ones I recognized.  There are 20 more great artists (who I plan to become more familiar with).

The artists were allowed to add one wild card material to the piece which really allowed their individual styles to come through.  And each artists has included a sidebar on what their thinking was in making their piece.  This has definetely become one of my favorite books....if just for the eye candy.  But it is so much more...instructions and even some templates in the back. 

P.S.  Amazon has it right now for $14.93.  That's a steal for this book!!!

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New Teachers....are like a box of chocolates

Last night was my first class with Brandon Holschuh, author of The Jeweler's Studio Handbook: Traditional and Contemporary Techniques for Working with Metal and Mixed Media Materials

When you take a class with someone new, its just like Forest Gump and his chocolates.....you never know what you're gonna get.  Well I'm happy to say Brandon is a delight!!  He's young, full of energy and loves to teach.  I got to class early and had a chance to talk with him one-on-one for about 30 minutes.  He's been making jewelry since he was 12....which means he has roughly 20 years of experience.  He's also a tool junky and makes a lot of his own.  We all gathered round as he took us on a tour of his tool box. 

It's 8 women and I already know 6 of them.  This is gonna be fun!!!

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Connectors

I was looking at Jatayu the other day....and by the way...if you haven't seen Connie Fox's site you need to go there.  You can spend days looking around her website. Anyway, I was looking at a few of the tutorials for wire connectors and ran across what I call dog bones.  A double eye-pin with coils.

I've made them before and was contemplating making some in bronze wire but then had an ah-ha moment and decided to make connectors in bronze clay.  And once they dried...of course they needed to be carved.

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More from the kiln...

More pendants and small connectors

This was created using the kaleidoscope function in Photoshop.  It looks Inuit to me.

The tree of life on the upper right.  If you scroll down through the blog you will see the picture this came from.  Doing all this research on Africa it only made sense to do one of those amazing trees.  The pendant on the bottom left should give you a good laugh.  The Chinese characters are backwards.  I screwed up the tear-away.  Lou gave me a card last year that had these symbols on it....partner, lover, friend.  I really like it so I made it into a pendant. That one will go into the scrap pile.

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Never underestimate a cat......

Sophie....on one of my shelves in the studio.  She saw it and started whining.  I knew she wanted to get up there.  So I took down some of the baskets to make room for her.  She need room because she had a pretty big jump to make......

Amazing!!!

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