Its time for another ♥ i heart macro ♥ !
Our house is surrounded by woods on 3 sides, which means an abundance of ferns. I love their curled tips in the spring.
Lori of Studio Waterstone hosts a weekly blog hop of close-up photos.
Visit Lori to get links to more great macro shots.
Jeannie Dukic of Jeannie’s Blog has been making jewelry for a very long time. Looking back at some of her beginning efforts made her realize how far she had come. It also made her realize that she no longer wanted those initial pieces of jewelry because they didn’t live up to her current standards of design or craftsmanship. She had the brainstorm to send the old jewelry out to interested designers, who would photograph the original piece, then take it apart and breathe new life into it.
Here is what Jeannie sent me.. I think this pendant was a project in Bead Style magazine. The rest is all black, with little visual interest. Hey, ‘ya gotta start somewhere. My early attempts were not this pretty at all.
So I cut it all apart and put it with a very cool, slightly edgy ceramic pendant by Yolanda’s Clay.
I scattered Jeannie’s black beads throughout the multi-strand section of the necklace. The beads in the single strand portion came from an old necklace of my aunt’s, that she no longer wanted. So I cut it apart, too. It was also all plain black and just begging for a make-over.
I chose the sterling silver clasp because it so beautifully echos the spirals on the heart.
What do you think? Did I give this a second lease on life?
This necklace is now available in my shop.
Now comes the fun part. Click on the links below and you’ll find other jewelry designers who received old jewelry from Jeannie and reworked those oldies into beautiful new pieces of jewelry that anyone would be proud to wear.
That excuse used to work for incomplete homework. Do you think it will fly for a missing blog post?
I ate it? Who me?
Yesterday was the Do Over Blog Hop, hosted by Jeannie’s Blog. I had signed up to participate in this fun challenge and then it completely got away from me. In the past two and a half weeks, I’ve had 2 jewelry shows, a painful ear infection and the end of the quarter at the University of Washington, where I supervise student teaching interns. I had to write-up detailed end-of-the quarter evaluations for each of the interns. I guess I just couldn’t keep all the balls in the air at once and I dropped this one. I feel so badly, because yesterday 104 blog hoppers visited my blog and found nothing! I apologize, (hangs head).
I knew in my mind what I wanted to do for the challenge, so last night I tried to put it together quickly. Ah, but haste makes waste and I wasn’t entirely happy with the results. I have to finish up some paperwork for my teaching interns today, and then I will rework the parts of the necklace I wasn’t satisfied with and I hope to get it posted by this evening. Please come back and take a look!
Its time for another ♥ i heart macro ♥ !
Last week’s macro shot was of raindrops, too, but I love the way rain beads up on these leaves. It looks like little jewels. This bush grows outside of our dining room window and it always looks so lovely after a rainfall.
Lori of Studio Waterstone hosts a weekly blog hop of close-up photos.
Visit Lori to get links to more great macro shots.
I missed Bead Table Wednesday and I haven’t posted any new work. I did my first Artisan Home Show and haven’t written about it. Where have I been? In bed. Sick. An ear ache that felt like someone put a knife in my ear.
Thank heavens for antibiotics. The pain is much diminished now, but I still get tired easily and I have a show tomorrow. Carry on!
If you are local, I’d like to invite you to the Olympia Artists Garage Sale at the Armory on Legion Way. I’ll be there, in booth #40 from 10:00 a.m. till 3:00 p.m. I hope you will drop by and say hi! The money earned from booth fees and the $1 entrance donation, goes to arts programs for community youth. For more details, click on this link, where I created a listing for the Artists Garage Sale.
I won a free necklace on the Words 2 Wear blog!!! Check out the Words 2 Wear blog and her cool jewelry on ArtFire. My winning quote was: “Life is too short to be small.”
What? You didn’t know there was a National Train Day? Well, neither did I, but my husband is a train buff and if it’s about trains, then he know it. Trains are to him, as beads are to me–that about sums it up! So on Saturday, May 7th, we hopped aboard an Amtrak train and headed south to Portland, Oregon.
To celebrate National Train Day, a couple of vintage trains had been brought in to the Portland depot. There were also informational booths inside the depot and hundreds and hundreds of people. Clearly my husband is not alone in his fascination with trains.
Although I don’t share his fascination with trains, I did find that there were many opportunities for cool photographs of gears, valves, springs and such. My photos took on a sort of Steampunk atmosphere. I hope you enjoy them.
Its time for another ♥ i heart macro ♥ !
I know this is the Pacific Northwest, but we’ve been getting an unusual amount of rain, even for this area. So, with a bit of a sigh, I decided that I might as well use the rain for my macro shot.
This posting is a day late, but I had an Artisan Home Show at my house on Sunday, so I didn’t have any time to get to my blog till now. I’ll post pictures from the party later this week.
Lori of Studio Waterstone hosts a weekly blog hop of close-up photos.
Visit Lori to get links to more great macro shots.
On Saturday, my husband and I took a train down to Portland, Oregon and spent a pleasant day nosing around this delightful city. It was National Train Day (more about that later), so there were some vintage trains in the depot that my husband wanted to see and photograph. Later we ate lunch at a favorite deli and then we headed over to the Portland Saturday Market. This is a huge outdoor market (like a farmers market, but just for artisans), that is open every weekend for 6 months a year. I think it says a lot that a small city like Portland, has enough support for the handmade to have kept this lively market viable for the past 34 years!
There was lots to love at the Portland Saturday Market, but here’s what I came home with, that is on my work space this Bead Table Wednesday. Aren’t these fun? The lady who makes them doesn’t have a website, so I can’t provide a link for you. Guess you’ll just have to head to Portland if you want some of these for yourself!
I encourage you to visit the BTW Flickr group and see what is happening on other bead tables.
Looking close up into the center of a tulip.
Lori of Studio Waterstone hosts a weekly blog hop of close-up photos.
Visit Lori to get links to more great macro shots.
Just stay calm. Now back away quietly. Don’t let it sense that you are afraid… Quick, slam the door and run!
That’s how I feel about this mess in my studio. But it is good mess, too. I’m preparing for two upcoming shows. I’m making lots of new jewelry and having fun with it, too.
New Ceramic Pendants From Yolanda’s ClayI received a large order of pendants from Yolanda’s Clay, this week. There is so much to love in her shop, that I had a hard time narrowing down my choices. This heart pendant turned out to be larger than I had imagined it when I saw it online — and it is cooler, too! I’ve already got some idea’s simmering in my little brain for this. You can see that I am trying out different beads with it on my bead mat.
These water-color effect pendants are really unique to Yolanda. I feel so inspired by both the colors and the painterly effect. If you want to read more about her process for making these pendants, you can click on this link to her blog, then scroll down just a little bit. The purple flower is different, again, and has a cool lace-like texture.
I love how the little heart, below, looks like it was painted and then scraped off (maybe that’s how she does it?). It’s just a very unusual effect that I really like. Birds are a hot trend right now, so I scooped up this bird silhouette. He’ll have company in my ceramics drawer, with a bird pendant I bought from Nan Emmett a couple of months ago. I need to make both birdies into necklaces so they can fly away to new homes!
I encourage you to hop over to the BTW Flickr group and see what is happening on other bead tables.
