The Cerebral Dilettante: January 2014

Friday, January 31, 2014

Art Jewelry Elements Component of the Month Reveal

I was recently thrilled to join the team of regular contributors at Art Jewelry Elements (w00t!!), and this is my first time participating in AJE's Component of the Month event. Today is the reveal and blog hop. This month, Jenny Davies-Reazor is hosting the event--which means that she created the components everyone is using in their designs this month. Jenny is an artist who works in many media--ceramics, polymer clay, mixed media, metals--creating jewelry, ceramic shrines and tiles, collages, and more. For the January "CoM," she called on her polymer clay skills to create fabulous, resin-filled focal elements.

Look at this cornucopia of crazy goodness we had to choose from!

Jenny then chose various words and phrases from old book pages, and affixed them in the frame with resin. This is what she sent me:

As you can see, she chose the words "artist" and "artistic" for me--I will take that as a compliment, and an inspiration!

I love the vintage design, and the earthiness of the finish and material really appealed to me. The old-timey typeface and yellowed paper sent me over the moon! I love old stuff. This design made me think of both East Indian folk art, as well as vintage American "gypsy" decor--it feels to me like a little section of architectural detail surreptitiously popped off the side of a gypsy caravan and turned into jewelry. (If you follow my blog or my shop offerings, you'll know I have a thing about "gypsy" style.) I decided to echo the rustic feel with the rest of my elements, so I used some matte-finish handcrafted Indonesian glass beads from my Happy Mango Beads stash, in slate blue and turquoise to echo the colors in the focal. I love the slightly irregular shapes and sizes of these beads--it really gives my pieces a handmade, earthy flavor.

Caravan

I used some "pineapple quartz" glass ovals from my stash to draw out the pale yellow hues in the focal and add a little transparency and lightness, and knotted the strands with navy blue Irish waxed linen to pick up the focal color again. I took some of my favorite chain, from Chain Gallery, cut it into 3-link sections, and joined the sections together with 3mm Czech glass rounds in Montana blue. I popped a little Czech glass coin in opalescent yellow onto the ring of the clasp to tie it together.

(Here's what I did with the back--I wanted to have more length beneath the focal so I added a chain at the back):

I would love to work with something like this again, it was really fun! I love it when a focal element suggests a flavor and color palette like this. Very inspiring! And of course it makes for an utterly unique piece of jewelry.