Gifts and Play Days

Some days I love my mailbox...the days when it is not all bills and junk mail. I love it when I pull surprise packages out with beautiful necklaces like the one that Steph (vladthebat) sent to me. She makes such wonderfully smooth and colorful polymer clay beads. Check out her blog. There is always something interesting.


Another thing that is exciting to me is to get to spend the day creating with another artist. On Wednesday, I went to Silo Studio to hang out with my friend Shawn and let our imaginations have a play day. We had no agenda other than to have fun and create. The weather threatened to cancel our plans, but I was determined to go. What's a little sleet and snow, when there is creating to be done.
It took a little while to figure out what we wanted to do, but we ended up with two projects each that took shape by the end of the afternoon. Here are photos of mine:

This is a very large belt buckle. I will have to find a belt to go with it.

This is an art doll made of a vintage metal jello mold, wooden spindles, old license plate number, wooden doll coat hanger, paint brush, beads, and a dog head picture. The dog head was inspired by the fact that we were surrounded by dogs in the studio. Two were so small, you could hold them in your two hands, and one was gigantic. Shawn has three of her own dogs and is a dog foster parent, so there are usually extras there. There are always plenty of wagging tails around.
Here are Shawn's pictures that she just emailed to me:

The buckles are made with metal buckle blanks, paper, beads, a vintage earring, and resin.

Fresh Work

Here is some of my new work that is for sale along with many more today at Silo Studio's monthly Studio Thursday.

Melted Mondrian

Surrounding copper on this piece was gift from Steph (aka vladthebat)

More fused glass.

The leftovers will be posted on my Etsy

Celebrate!

I just completed my 51st trip around the sun. Woooohoooo!

Buried Dolls and Bottle Caps

I finally got to work with a couple of new things that I've been wanting to get my hands on. The first thing is a bisque doll body that was unearthed in Germany after being buried for almost a hundred years on the grounds of a doll factory. I bought the doll from my friend Julie (isthereashadow) in Australia and had first seen the dolls in the work of Nina Bagley. The history of the dolls intriqued me and I wanted to have one of my own to experiment with. I kept it around for about a month before I decided what to do with it. I had a vintage broach that reminded me of a wing, but I only had one, so as I pondered, the phrase, "a wing and a prayer" came to me. I stamped a silver rectangle with the word "prayer" and then I remembered a vintage silver plated cross that Steph (vladthebat) from Belgium had sent me, and so the piece started to come together. The parts came from all around the world and ended up in Tennesse to become this necklace.

The next new thing is that my hubby got me a doming block (did I spell that right? dome-ing) I had been wanting one for quite a while. I had seen jewelry made from domed bottle caps. I love using found objects for my art and I have a large collection of bottle caps. People save them for me and also I get many from a local country store that has a bottle opener on the door to the store with a container to catch the caps. They must think it is strange when I come in and ask to empty their caps. One day I'll have to show them what I make with them. The bracelets and necklace that inspired me were made by Ron Pascho and are seen in the Lark book: Fabulous Jewelry from Found Objects.
The book has inspired many of my pieces. I highly recommend it for technical, as well as creative inspiration. Here is my bottle cap necklace. The bottle cap pairs are tube riveted together.

Cool New Tool

I hope that everyone is having a wonderful start to the New Year. My hubby and I got to spend the evening with one of our sons and his wife, and some other family and friends. We decided to leave before midnight because it was over and hour drive and made it home by 12:05, so we had to stop on the road and kiss and say Happy New Year. Thankfully, it was a deserted country road. The dog woke me up at 8:30 this morning wanting out, so I thought I'd take advantage of the quiet time and type this post.

I have been a very bad girl for the last few weeks when it comes to keeping my blog updated. Over the holidays, we had company for about 2 weeks straight...not the same ones the whole time. First visitors were some friends of ours that do music missions at different places around the world. Their home bases are in Wales and Israel. They kept us entertained and uplifted with beautiful music while they were here. Their website is Mishkanim and you can listen to some of their music there. This video is Howie playing his bouzouki (I'm not sure if I spelled that correctly.) He would get up every morning and sit down and start playing music. The video was taken with my digital camera and not a video camera, so the sound quality leaves a lot to be desired.




The rest of the guests were our kids coming and going throughout the holiday.

I did manage to get a little artwork done. My first inspiration was a new toy/tool that I discovered. It is a small kiln that you can use to fuse glass in your microwave. Can you imagine that! I just had to buy it. It takes just two to three minutes to melt the glass. After that, the most difficult part is having the patience to wait 30 minutes to open the lid. You have to let it cool gradually with the kiln closed. The kit came with everything I needed to make jewelry right when I got it home. It is called Fuseworks. This link is for the manufacturer that sells them only wholesale, but I bought mine at Hobby Lobby. Here is a necklace that I completed using a pendant that I made.Have a happy, healthy, prosperous, peaceful, and creative New Year.