To Gnome Me Is To Love Me

This month’s challenge, hosted by Art Elements, is “To gnome me is to love me…”  A gnome challenge is just what I needed! I made a ceramic gnome for my daughter last Christmas, but then just before I was ready to fire it, I broke it’s hat off! So I promised my daughter I’d make a replacement, but I’d never gotten around to doing it – until now! I glued the hat back on the broken gnome so you could get an idea of how it was supposed to look.

After I joined the Art Elements challenge, I made 3 new gnomes. However, I glaze and fire my ceramics at a community ceramics studio, which is closed now, due to Covid 19. So I’ll have to show the gnomes as just greenware (unfired clay). The other issue I had was that, other than a fettling knife, (a special knife for use in ceramics), all my tools were at my community studio. So these little guys are literally made by hand – only my hands, without any tools. They are a little rough, but I can clean them up once I can get back into the studio, before I kiln fire them.

Two views of new gnome 1

Two views of new gnome 2

And below is a photo of me smoothing the surface of the second gnome.

These first two gnomes were made about a week ago and have been drying ever since. Then last night I made a third, larger gnome. Here he is in the beginning stages. He has a body and a nose, but nothing else, at that point.

And here he is sort of complete. He needs to dry more and then get the details refined and the surface smoothed.

Two views of new gnome 3

Thank you for visiting my blog and viewing my unfinished gnomes. Can’t wait to get some tools, glaze and fire them. Thanks also to Jenny Daves-Reazor and Art Elements for hosting this challenge.

This is a blog hop. Please visit the artists below to see their interpretations of the gnome challenge.

AE team:
Marsha
Cathy
Jen
Jenny
Lesley
Claire
Niky

Guests:
Tammy
Linda – You Are Here
Hope
Cat
Sarajo

Flower Art Challenge

This month’s challenge theme from the Art Elements blog is Flowers. Nothing inspires me more than flowers do. I love their many colors, shapes and textures. I have always been deeply moved, healed and inspired by the beauty in nature. We once had a home that had over 1,000 daffodils in the back field – my husband planted them over the years because he saw how much joy they brought me! 🙂

I make greeting cards with pressed, dried flowers. I photograph flowers. I design flowered jewelry and ceramic items and I love to arrange flowers. I adore flowers!

I have a number of different entries for this month’s Challenge, but several things are still works in progress. I was sick for a couple of weeks in July and didn’t get everything finished up. However, early in July, I made this bowl, with a floral motif in it.  It has now had its first kiln firing, but I haven’t had time to glaze and re-fire it. I am still pondering which glazes to use.

I have set myself a goal of having a booth at a large Art To Wear show next April. Judging will take place in January 2020  My goal (besides being juried in) is to have all my own ceramic jewelry in the show. This is a lofty goal, because I have tons of jewelry with art beads from other makers, but I haven’t done a lot of designing with my own ceramic components. Mostly I have just offered them for sale to jewelry designers. So I have my work cut out for me and I used this Art Elements challenge to jump start my efforts.

I made these yellow earrings early this month. They include my ceramic roses which I accented with lampwork glass by Third Eye Gypsys.

After making these earrings, I decided to make a bunch more roses to use for simple post earrings and necklaces. I haven’t had time to glaze them yet, but I plan to make them happy and colorful! These are the earring pairs.

These are larger and will be used in necklaces.

Next I made some daisy post earring pairs.

These also have a larger version for necklaces.

Here’s another floral earring pair, in a more rustic style.

And a last minute necklace addition… I made this simple necklace this afternoon with a new pendant I made last week.

Last of all, I want to share a floral “event” that took me by surprise this month. I posted some flower photographs on Instagram and Facebook. Shelly Turner, the owner of the OOAK Artisan Showcase gallery, in Rome, NY saw my photos and asked me to submit two of them to an upcoming show. The show is titled “Summer Afternoon” and it runs through August 4th. She sent me a photo of one of my pictures in the gallery.

And here’s the other flower photo I submitted; a stunning purple poppy.

I would like to thank Art Elements for hosting this challenge, with special thanks to Marsha Neal Minutella who arranged it all. This is a blog hop so please take some time and look at the wonderful things people are creating for this theme. I invite you to visit the artists’ blogs and leave a friendly comment, (if you are having issues leaving comments, try using google chrome as your browser).
You can also see and participate yourself via social media by using the hashtags: #AEThemeChallenge and #AEFlowers

Here is a list of the Visiting Artists:
Alysen
Cat
Divya
Evie and Beth
Jill
Hope
Kathy
Linda
Louise
Martha
Melissa
Michelle
Rozantia
Sarah
Sarajo
Tammy

And the Art Elements Blog Contributors:
Caroline
Cathy
Claire
Jenny
Laney
Lesley
Marsha
Susan

Linda Landig Jewelry

 

 

Birds Of Prey Design Challenge

I happily joined the Birds of Prey Design Challenge hosted by the Art Elements blog.  Why? Because I love owls and have a lot of artisan owl jewelry components that need to be used.  I knew the challenge would inspire me to design with at least some of those components.

However jewelry isn’t my only creative endeavor, so the first thing I’ll be sharing is a needle felted barn owl I made, shown here enjoying some afternoon sunlight.

Next I dug into my owl stash to create this bracelet.  Unfortunately I no longer remember who made the little owl bead.  If you recognize the artist, will you please let me know in the comments? I always like to give credit to the art bead makers. I love how all the beads came together for this bracelet. I enjoy looking at each one and marveling at the creativity that makes each bead so unique. In addition to the owl, there are ceramic beads by my friend Karen Totten, Xaz Bead Company, Mary Ann Carroll and myself. The lampwork glass bead is from Beads and Botanicals. The rest of the beads are stones, bone and glass. I named this the Little Hoot Bracelet and it is available on my website, Linda Landig Jewelry.

After completing the Little Hoot, I made a second stretch bracelet, featuring an adorable owl dangle by Kylie Perry Studio. The swirly bead to the left of the owl, was just a random bead I had in my stash, but it is a perfect color match for Kylie’s owl.  Love it when that happens! As of this writing, I haven’t listed this bracelet in my shop yet, but it’s on my to-do list for this afternoon. 😉

Lastly I will share a pair of earrings, that I made before this challenge, but which fit the theme.  These are on my website as well. The copper owls are by my good friend, Kristi Bowman and the fiber beads are by Spanish artist, Jimena’s Jewelry. I love how the copper leaves create a woodsy setting for the owls.

This is a blog hop, so I encourage you to visit all the other participants.  I can’t wait to see what everyone has made.  And a big shout out to Art Elements for hosting this challenge.
Guests:
Tammy
Beth
Cat
Anita
Kathy
Alysen
Linda you are here
Rozantia
Jennifer
Hope
Sarajo
Melissa
Sarah
Team Members:
Caroline
Cathy
Claire
Jen
Jenny
Karen
Laney
Lesley
Lindsay
Marsha
Niky
Sue

Linda Landig Jewelry

Brrr, Winter

Winter is here and many of us are shivering under layers of clothes.  But once you peel off your coat, scarf, hat and gloves, some wintery jewelry might just take the edge off the brrr.

Blue Snowflake Necklace 

This rustic necklace features a ceramic pendant by my friend Diana Ptaszynski, a handmade clasp that echoes the angles of the snowflake and gorgeous deep blue batik ribbon. Nobody will accuse you of being boring when you wear this unique artisan necklace!

Casual Snowflake Necklace

Perhaps you’d like something a little more subtle; something you can just slip over your head with a simple tee shirt or sweater. This necklace features my own handmade ceramic snowflake and a raku bead by Xaz Beads.

Let It Snow Earrings

I also have a couple of winter themed earrings in my shop.  These earrings have ceramic snowflakes by Bo Hulley and lampwork glass by my friends at Paradise Bead. All the wire is Sterling silver.  These are so pretty!

Tranquil Snowflake Earrings

These are my favorite of the four shown here.  The lampwork beads by Sue Beads shimmer with a silvery iridescence and the artisan sterling silver snowflakes are exquisitely detailed. These will make your ears happy!

What do you like best about winter? I like walking in crunchy sounding snow. How about you?

I am always delighted to read your comments! Hope to hear from you.

Linda Landig Jewelry

Art Elements Sunflower Challenge

Art Elements blog is hosting a Sunflower blog hop challenge today.  Participants have all agreed to create jewelry or other art forms with a sunflower theme.  I love sunflowers, so I hopped right in.

I took this close-up photo of a sunflower I had in a floral arrangement I’d made.  I love the streaks of reddish-brown on the yellow petals.  To achieve that effect on my ceramic pendants I layered two specific glazes.  The top glaze crackles when layered over the reddish-brown glaze beneath, allowing some of that lower layer of color to bleed through. I was so pleased with this effect that I made a whole pile of sunflower pendants, just because I was having so much fun with them. As you can see, each one is a little different as I played with different aspects of the design.

I made one pendant that was a bit larger the those above and which had a big enough hole to accommodate some leather.  I used that pendant in my necklace for today’s challenge.

I attached the pendant to the leather with a simple larks head knot and above it I placed two hand enameled tubes that I believe were made by Mary Dodd.  The leather then connects to some Terra Cast copper rings with a nice surface texture. I love how the copper color echoes the browns in the pendant.

I added a short strand of vintage glass beads and peanut beads, that I suspended from the rings, as well.  When worn, they drape just on top of the leather and end about an inch or so above the pendant .  Leather cording finishes off the back of the necklace, which ends in a copper-colored lobster clasp.  This is a nice long necklace, which I could have made without a clasp, because it slips easily over the head.

I have one sunflower pendant listed on my website, but if you want more, just message me here or through my website.

My thanks to Sue and to Art Elements for hosting this fun summer challenge. This is a blog hop, so be sure to share the love with all these other great artists!

Guests

Alysen
Anita
Cat
Divya
Jill
Kathy
Linda You are here.
Linda
Mischelle
Norma
Raven
Sarajo
Tammy

AE Team

Caroline
Cathy
Claire
Jenny
Laney
Lesley
Sue

Use Your Own Stash Challenge

This month I’m playing along with the Art Elements‘ monthly challenge blog hop. January’s challenge was to create jewelry using components in our own stash.  All of us have accumulated sooooo many beads.  I know that my beading table has mounds of beads on it.

With the New Year beginning, it would be nice to clean this mess up and work on reducing my stash and putting it to good use in some finished jewelry! To that end, here’s what I have made so far.

Several years ago, I helped Genea Civello teach her first class at Bead Fest in Philadelphia.  She taught several projects using Wooly Wire in combination with her gorgeous lampwork glass.  As reimbursement for my assistance, I got to choose a number of her lampwork beads, including the pair I used in these earrings.  The copper headpins are by Handmade by JGL.

I used some head pins from my stash to make the next pair of earrings.  I’m not certain whose heads pins these are.  Maybe Havana Beads, but I can’t say for sure.  These earrings are now living in Oaxaca, Mexico, with a friend of ours who is an anthropologist there.

I made the following pair for my monthly blog post on Earrings Everyday.  They feature lampwork by Paradise Beads and OutWest Glass that I’ve had in my stash forever.  Jenelle and Daniel (of Paradise Beads) used to live in the same town I do.  The little orange beads date way back to that time.  They’ve lived in Todos Santos, Mexico for at least 3-4 years now, so that’s how long those beads have hung out in my stash!

Admittedly, this final pair of earrings only partially fits into this challenge.  The polymer clay components by Heather Powers of Humble Beads are brand new, but the beads I stacked above them have all hung out in my stash for a long time.

So there you have it – a month’s worth of stash reduction.  I have so much more stash to work through.  It’s a tough job, but someone has to do it….

This is a blog hop, so check out all these other stash reducing bead stars!

Guests:
Kelly Rodgers
Sarajo Wentling
Samantha Wescott
Kathy Lindemer
Patty Miller
Linda Landig
Renetha Stanziano
Art Elements:
Jenny Davies-Reazor
Jen Cameron
Claire Fabian
Sue Kennedy
Niky Sayers
Lindsay Starr

Linda Landig Jewelry

 

 

Holiday Ornament Blog Hop

I’m running late, but am jumping into the 7th annual Ornament Blog Hop over the Art Bead Scene Studio blog.

We recently got some new clay at our ceramic studio.  It is a mid-fire porcelain, called New Zealand white.  I love everything about it! It feels good in the hands, it is fairly forgiving and it is a brilliant white.   It turns out that it is perfect for ornament making. So I got a little carried away…  I made a couple dozen ornaments.  Some are small enough to be a pendant, while others are large enough for a tree with strong branches or are even suitable to hang on your wall.  I’ll just share 4 of them here.

The mitten is one of the ornaments that could also be used as a pendant.  It is decorated with a wintry holly and berry pattern.

I adore the simple contrast of the blue and white on this snowflake ornament/pendant.  That same simple contrast works just as well in red and white.

After making loads of smallish ornaments, I went big.  The ornament below is a little over 3 inches tall.  And I’m still having fun making these.  I have a tray full of the large ornaments, sitting on my work table, ready to be glazed.

This is a blog hop, so I encourage you to head over to the Art Bead Scene Studio blog where you’ll find links to the other participating blogs.  So fun to see what everyone has made, in so many different styles and media!

 

Linda Landig Jewelry

 

 

 

Art Elements Component of the Month Reveal

Niky Sayers makes the most delightful clasps out of old coins. I’ve designed jewelry with her clasps before and was excited to throw my name in the hat to win one of her hare clasps this month.

I am always inspired by autumn colors and textures.  It’s easy to picture hares hopping through fallen leaves while scoping out safe burrows for their winter retreats, (although, do hares only live in drier regions? Hmmm, I may have to look into that… )

And that’s how the idea for this bracelet came to be.  I paired one of my ceramic leaf bracelet focals with Niky’s hare clasp and accented it with earthy, fall colors.

The bracelet went through two iterations.   Version 1 is shown below.  Originally I wanted the clasp near the front, hoping it would be more in the spotlight there. I was pleased with version 1 initially.  I took all the bracelet photos for this blog post and went about the rest of my day, wearing my new bracelet.

However, the more I wore it, the less I liked it.  It was too bulky and it didn’t drape gracefully on my wrist. It just looked stiff and chunky.

Should I start over, including re-doing all the photos?  Yup, it just wasn’t right and I knew that I would always feel uneasy about it, if I left it as version 1.

Enter Version 2.  Much better.  Some of the bulk in the front was reduced by moving the clasp to the back of the bracelet. I also replaced the bulky and awkward tip drilled pearls, with a double strand of smaller “peanut” beads.

Now there is a focus of interest in both the front and the back. The bracelet curves to the shape of the wrist, rather than standing out at stiff angles.  I’ve said this before, but I think that creating jewelry is like writing an essay.  First you free-write to express all your ideas. Then you go back and do the painstaking work of editing it down to the down to the crystallized essence of your vision.  I hope you can see that process at work here.

Many thanks to Niky for the opportunity to design with her awesome clasp.  And thanks, also, to my friends at Art Elements for hosting this giveaway and blog hop.

Now please visit all the participants in this blog hop, to see how they have used Niky’s clasp in their own unique designs.

Guest Designers

Linda Landig

Kathy Lindemer

Divya N

Art Element Team

Claire Fabian

Jenny Davies-Reazor

Cathy Spivey Mendola

Susan Kennedy

Caroline Dewison

Lesley Watt

Diana Ptaszynski

Lindsay Starr

Laney Mead

Niky Sayers

Linda Landig Jewelry

June 2017 Component Challenge

Today is the reveal for the June 2017 Component Challenge, hosted by Janice Everett in her Facebook group Artisan Create Together.  Mari Carmen of Majoyoal  donated 12 pairs of her beautiful ceramic components for this Challenge. I received one of the violet pairs from the picture below.

I  really admire Mari Carmen’s way with glazes.  Her color combinations and the way she swirls the glaze colors together, without them ever looking muddy, just fills me with awe. 

For some reason the larger Czech glass flowers in my photos look like they are blue.  In reality they are lavender and purple with hints of gold. The Swarovski crystals are a pale, translucent green which echos the green at the top of Mari Carmen’s ceramic components.

Mari Carmen lives in Spain and I speak a little very basic Spanish. Whenever she comments on my Facebook page in Spanish, I try to read it without hitting the translate button, although she frequently comments in English too.  If I am able, I like to comment on her posts in Spanish.  You may remember that we lived in Oaxaca, MX for 3 months, two or three years ago. So I like to use my tiny bit of Spanish when I can.

I just want to thank Janice for all the work she puts into Artisan Create Together and I’d like to thank Mari Carmen for generously sharing her beautiful ceramic components with us.

Linda Landig Jewelry

Art Elements COM

This month I’m playing along with Art Elements Component of the Month challenge. The super talented Lindsay Starr, created these innovative leather cabochons. To learn how she made these, you can read about her process here.  The cabochon I received is the second from the left, in the top photo.

This was an interesting challenge for me, because I’m not a seed beader, so I couldn’t create a beaded bezel.  Upon further reflection, I realized that I could use some techniques that I learned in a pine needle basketry course that I took about a year ago.

As you can see, the center of my basket is a stone cabochon.  My idea was to use Lindsay’s leather cab in a similar manner, but only weave two rows of pine needles around it and then use it as a brooch or pendant.  I glued a sturdy fabric to the back of the cab and prepared my pine needles.

Using dark green Irish waxed linen, I added the two rows of pine needles.   In the photo below, the second row is close to being finished.  I laid the cab on our glass coffee table and started playing with some different possible embellishments.  When I found a combination I liked, I trimmed the remaining pine needles to a tapered point and wove them in.

I used Fire Line to add the flowers and leaves.  I haven’t added any findings yet, as I haven’t decided if this should be a brooch or a pendant.  What do you think?

I’d position the cab sideways, as above, for a brooch.  If I were to make it into a pendant, I’d position it vertically.

A big thank you to Lindsay for sharing the leather cabochons with us. I also want to thank each of you for visiting my blog.  Now hop on over to the all the other participants and see all the fantastic things that everyone has created.

Guests:

Ann

Renetha

Patty

Sherri

Kelly

Linda

AE Writers:

Lesley

Laney

Lindsay

Caroline

Cathy

Cooky

Claire

Diana

Jenny

Susan

Niky

I am always delighted to read your comments!  Hope to hear from you.

Linda Landig Jewelry

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