Late to the Party

I've been under the weather with minor health stuff the last several months, and super busy at the day job, so I'm just not keeping up with all my jewelry to-do's. Unfortunately, one of those to-do's was the June Component of the Month challenge at Art Jewelry Elements. The reveal was Thursday July 3, but I missed it! However I'm feeling a bit better and had a long weekend with the holiday so I got busy!

June was hosted by the multi-talented Linda Landig, a jewelry artist who also creates beads and components in polymer clay, and now ceramics. (To visit her Etsy shop, click HERE!) Linda made a fabulous assortment of her new ceramic charms and focals available for the challenge:

Linda has been designing jewelry on and off for over 30 years, and started with metal. From there she moved on to beadwork, indulging her love of color, and eventually began making her own jewelry components and beads, first with polymer clay, and now with ceramics.

Back in May (when I was feeling perky--unfortunately that turned out to be an intermittent thing), I snagged one of those sweet little sunflower elements (and actually remembered to photograph it before I started my piece). I love the rustic texture of the stoneware.

I noodled over it, and had a general idea what I wanted to do with it, I just didn't have the get-up-and-go to do it. So when some of my energy came back this weekend, I already had it half-designed in my head. I knew I wanted to introduce some sky blue, and would probably use copper for the metal parts. I thought and thought about the bail for it, started and stopped some other approaches, and finally came up with this:

For this, I used one of my folded end cones that I talked about at AJE this morning. I just modified it by folding over only the very ends so that it's a rectangular shape. I created a large loop with wire at the top (the wire goes through the hole in the pendant and then both ends go up through the hole in the metal cap, where you can shape them as you wish.) I attached an open metal tube to the loop for hanging.

Here's the whole piece:

The longest strand is three lengths of cocoa-brown Irish waxed linen (I bought whole spools--SQUEEE!!!!--from Element Beads on Etsy) dotted with recycled glass flowers in light blue from Happy Mango Beads; the second strand is tiny lime green glass seed beads, also from Happy Mango (with some brown seed beads in "dirt brown" from Fusion Beads thrown in); and the last strand is larger 8/0 seed beads in cocoa brown (also from Fusion Beads), a few Indonesian glass seed beads in a wonderful sand color from Happy Mango, and one little corn-yellow seed bead from a local shop.

I used my end cones from this morning's AJE post on the ends, with deertan lace in cocoa brown and some of my hand-forged large oval chain.

Linda's stoneware sunflower perfectly complements my style! And I adore the warm colors she chose for her glazes.

You can also visit Linda at her Facebook page, and stop by her blog!

And be sure to visit the other participants and see their creations!

Guests

Ann Schroeder

Mischelle Andrade Fanucchi

Therese Frank

AJE Members

Susan Kennedy

Diana Ptaszynski

Linda Landig

LesleyWatt

MelissaMeman

Caroline Dewison

Francesca Watson

Jenny Davies-Reazor

Rebekah Payne

Kristen Stevens