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.

(This could even convince me to start playing with polymer clay, a temptation I have so far resisted...)

You can see this piece at my Etsy shop.

This is a blog hop! Check out the other participants' creations at the links below:

Regular contributors:
Jennifer Cameron
Diana Ptaszynski
Kristen Stevens
Jenny Davies-Reazor
Lesley Watt
Melissa Meman
Linda Landig
Susan Kennedy
Rebekah Payne
Caroline Dewison

Guests:
Hope Smitherman
Sarajo Wentling

Etched Metamorphosis

I was recently thrilled to have discovered the right tweaks to get my Press n Peel sheets to work for transferring printed images to metal. I've been an etching fiend ever since! I found some fabulous digital damask collage sheets at Aesthetic Addiction on Etsy and got started creating some things with an exotic feel. The raw pieces above are based on a tube bail I had made, but miniaturized, flipped upside down, and modified for earrings. Here's the result:

Gypsy Festival

This pattern made me think of a gypsy caravan for some reason, so I had to make it colorful! I started with amber and iolite, and added some peridot. Juicy!

Another set of these had a more distinctly floral pattern, with flowers that made me think of sunflowers. I couldn't get a saffron color out of my head for them, so chose some deep golden coin pearls as the central color, and fished around in my stash for what seemed like hours trying to find the right companion color. I wired on two sets of beads in other colors, only to cut them off in dissatisfaction. I tried going a little out of my comfort zone, and I was surprised how much I liked cool iceberg blue amazonite with the coin pearls. It was really vivid, and made me think of a French country house all done up in sunny yellow and robin's egg blue:

Haystacks in Provence

It also put me in mind of many of Van Gogh's paintings, especially "Haystacks in Provence."

I was really thrilled with the color in the copper in this pair--after I etched it, I had to anneal it to make it workable, and then pickle it. That took it back to shiny pink. Before I formed the tube shape, I antiqued it in liver of sulfur to bring out the pattern, and then heated it with a hot clothes iron to bring up the cherry/orange colors. It has a really warm glow now.

This last pair sports beadcaps I've been thinking of for a long time. I had sketched them eons ago but didn't know how to fit them together--and then I discovered tube rivets! So the other day I decided to give it a try. I had some textured copper strips lying around for other uses and so I just did them up really fast. They look kind of medieval to me!

Medieval Spring

I used them with a pair of Alisha White's hollow lampwork globes in taupey-mauve, some Czech glass in olive and lime green pearls. I have some more of these hollow beads and will probably do a similar design with the rest of them--I love how lightweight they are, and yet they have such presence!

I have one more set of etched copper tabs like the ones at the top of the post (the ones at bottom left), and the pattern seems to be telling me "Purple and Red!" so keep your eyes peeled for those!

Exercises in [Relative] Simplicity

I was ultra tired of looking at the same old crap in my shop (every time I put something new and cool in there someone buys it--HMPH!!!), so I thought this weekend I would just do a bunch of old fashioned "quick" stringing projects that would go together "fast." The first one took me all day. (What in the hell was I doing? Oh yeah, the crimp wouldn't cooperate and that goofed up the wire and I had to start over. And oh yeah, I didn't have the right size coil ends to I had to make those. And then I guess I had to make some chain because I didn't have that either...Then the photos wouldn't turn out. And then I guess I was fooling around with a few other projects at the same time and got sidetracked...)

Anyway, here are my "simple[er]" pieces from the weekend, just so there would be something new to look at in my shop. I used my first Artisan Clay charm for this one. With some leather and some nifty matte seed beads in a semi-metallic, subtly variegated denim blue from Fusion Beads.

Blue Jean Baby (there, now you'll be hearing Tiny Dancer all night! LOVE Elton).

I started wiring up the ceramic focal on this one below last night, from Macarroll. I am proud to say I had the whole thing finished this morning before the clock went to double digits (that is meaningful for me--if it's single digits it's still "early"). But then I wanted Mexican food all day. Bad. I couldn't stop thinking about guacamole, tortillas, queso dip and enchilada sauce.

South of the Border ("Yo quiero Taco Bell!!!")--See what I mean?

With poppy jasper, faceted moukaite, handmade olive green glass beads from Indonesia (via Happy Mango Beads), and fabulous wide leather lace from LeatherCordUSA. Cute little gingko charm from Fusion Beads (or was it ArtBeads?)

Oh, did I mention it's reversible?

 I was too lazy to go the store for tortillas so I made earrings to go with it instead:

Mexican food earrings

Then I sort of cheated and photographed and listed earrings I made the other day. So that didn't really count.

Mr. Blue Sky Jasper Earrings (HA! Now you have ELO in your head. LOVE ELO. Almost as much as Elton.)

But then someone bought them a few minutes after I listed them and I had to make them again. That DID count.

(In the midst of all this I was making another custom "Button Magic" (that's what I'm calling it) necklace from the remaining turquoise discs it turns out I DID have enough of after making the last one (but now I don't), so I was multi-tasking. Or at least bi-tasking.) I just happened to be thinking about lime and teal while I was working on this custom piece (which just happens to be olive green and turquoise--not so much of a stretch), and reflecting on the giant tub of Indonesian lime green and teal beads I had from Happy Mango Beads when I suddenly wondered what the little lime green spacers in the tub would look like on a jump ring. I had to find out RIGHT AWAY. So I took a little detour and ended up making these:

Lime and Blue Raspberry Beret Margaritas (HA!! Now you've got past-his-prime Prince in your head. It all went downhill after Purple Rain. )

 

I had other BIG plans for other "simple" and less "simple" pieces but I ran out of time. I didn't even waste any time bathing or going to the gym or eating (one must obey the Mojo) and I STILL ran out of time. DANG.

Roses are Red, Violets are Blue, This Necklace Is Red and a It's Bracelet Too

When I read that Etsy was having a Ruby Red theme for the month of July (July birthstone is the ruby), I obediently and slavishly set about making a red item because it does so much to prop up my withered little ego to be in a gift guide. And it would make me want to go on living if I could be on the front page. So I pulled out all the red stuff I have, most of it cannibalized from other jewelry I had fallen out of love with and stuff I had foolishly bought to make Valentine's Day items in December, and as is my wont, stared at it for about an hour. Changed my mind several times, and finally set to work. Three hours later, I had myself a bracelet. A bracelet that looked an awful lot like it would have been a really cool necklace if I had been more ambitious. DANG! I thought. But then...my tiny little wheels started turning, really really fast, and I thought, maybe it can still be a necklace! HEY!!! Maybe it can be a bracelet AND a necklace!!! It'll be CONVERTIBLE! I made some minor modifications, and discovered happily that the remaining piece of oxidized copper chain I had left over from the bracelet was the perfect length for an extender to turn the bracelet into an 18" necklace. So I engineered that, and the result is what you see here.

Now I'm thinking I'll have a whole section of convertible bracelets/necklaces. You saw it here first, tell me if you see anybody copying me. (I've done this with my own jewelry because I'm poor.)

Going to make earrings and then that will be just about it for that assortment of ruby red beads. Might have enough odds and ends to eke out something lame. You'll know it when you see it.