Looking Backward to Look Forward

I like this idea I took from Deryn Mentock at Something Sublime (who borrowed it from Rebecca Sower at life. by hand.) to build a mosaic of recent work.

1. RAW 1/52, 2. meadowlarks, 3. Hallmark_hinge, 4. green bird, 5. Hallmark concrete earrings, 6. window 6, 7. bird cuff 2 , 8. bird enamel ring, 9. Hallmark glass box back, 10. green copper bird concrete, 11. domed bird ring, 12. blue birds, 13. Hallmark#22 front, 14. sapphire cab keyhole clasp bracelet, 15. Hallmark#6, 16. moonbird front, 17. Flock, 18. swallowtail, 19. bird ring 2, 20. window locket 5, 21. blue copperhead wren, 22. Fly, 23. retro lovebird, 24. bird and nest earrings side, 25. nightbird complete

As I ponder where to go with my work this year, looking back at an overview of the body of work is a good thing. I'm debating a poster of each year's work (from Mosaic Maker at Big Huge Labs) to put on my wall. When I get another minute, I'm going to make a mosaic of my bird journal.

Mini Moo Cards for Price Tags

At the last minute before Bead & Button, I uploaded two of my original black and white drawings to Moo, then printed a set of mini-Moo cards. I had the brainstorm to use these as hang tags for my jewelry. They would be decorative, reflective of my style, and offer my contact and pricing info all in one tiny package.


I used my multi-tasking metal clay needle tool to punch holes for the earrings or necklace clasps. The printed design made it easy to repeatedly place the holes in the appropriate place. One warning: the glossy surface doesn't like ink, so I had to use a fine tip Sharpie for pricing. Since I forgot to take sales packaging, I just slipped the card plus jewelry into a clear ziplock baggie, which looked passable on its own.



I'll be loading some of the earrings that returned home into my Etsy shop shortly.

Shopping Urges

You know those urges you get to buy supplies you can't imagine what you'll ever do with them? Over the years, I've learned that if something truly keeps calling to me I'd better add it to my collection. Invariably it's the perfect thing at some point down the road. It's as if some part of my mind recognizes the piece before it ever comes into being. How does that work?


These Australian boulder opal beads really called to me at the last Bead & Button show. I had to go back and pet them over and over. I thought it was because they were low grade (compared to the stones for setting) and thus inexpensive, relatively speaking. They are a lovely ivory color, irregularly shaped but flat to lie nicely, with azure iridescent flashes in the proper light. Now I know they were destined for a bracelet, set with Bali silver nuggets and cobalt faceted Czech glass. Details coming soon.

Earrings

These have been sitting on my work table near completion. I finally decided today to patina and photograph them. I'm experimenting with different backgrounds. I love the nest, but the earrings tend to disappear if placed in the center.


The shell lets them hang nicely, but the exposure needs to be adjusted a tad.


Since they are very three dimensional, they just don't lie nicely for photography.

Fine silver metal clay combined with sparkly green Swarovski crystals, utilizing the open lentil technique I learned from Gordon Uyehara. One earring is a bird in a tree; the other is a nest with eggs. Both use my bird photopolymer plates.

I'll have an enameled set finished tomorrow.

PISMO Bead Invitational 2009

Whoohoo!

My pieces are up on the PISMO gallery site!! Look for me at Beads -- Jewelry -- Vickie Hallmark or at Beads -- Individual -- Vickie Hallmark. I have five necklaces and five loose beads listed.


The gallery did a fabulous job! FedEx delivered the beads yesterday, and they photographed and got all ten pieces on the website in a day. And the photography is great -- the dichroic glass really sparkles! There are shots of the complete necklace, laid out painstakingly, and detail shots of the focal beads.

A girl could get to like this gallery thing!

More Finished Jewelry

Another of the pieces sent to PISMO, a double layer fish and sealife bead with dichroic glass and electroforming, strung with copper and silvered aqua triangle beads:


And a simple electroformed leaf pendant now available on Etsy:

From Beads to Jewelry

For these several years of beadmaking, whenever I wore one of my own beads, it was typically a simple focal bead on a plain sterling chain of some type. I even bought sterling "change a bead" findings that work for a wide variety of beads. I focused on the glass and thought of the rest of the necklace as background.


Occasionally, I ventured on to a slightly more detailed neckpiece, such as this simple stringing of my all time favorite bird vessel, Cactus Wren, since shattered by an unfortunate kiss with the floor. Last summer, as a last minute effort to make my new electroformed lovebird wearable, I hammered copper wire and beads into a simple chain.



Selling loose beads for others to string or just collect is the norm in the lampworking community, but that is limiting. The Pismo Bead Invitational requires finished jewelry, so that has gotten my focus recently.

Over the years, I've collected massive quantities of commercial beads, originally to embellish quilts, now to accent glass. I keep it in tackle boxes, sorted by color. In the last few years, I've been collecting larger beads, stone beads, many copper beads and findings, and anything in general that calls to me.

Today they are scattered into a blinding mess of color and texture, as I've been madly stringing and then restringing. As with any skill, practice is required for improvement. I've been practicing a lot! Doing the same pieces again and again because of some dissatisfaction. I've about got them to a place that I'm happy.

Here's the first of the finished pieces, the turquoise lovebird strung with hand-formed copper links, African turquoise, and magnesite.



Can you see how much my photography has improved?

Marketing Beads and Jewelry, pt. 2

Many thanks to Lora Hart, who posted some great advice for improvements to my brochure that I've been working on. Today I spent more time trying to implement some of those suggestions and other ideas I came up with in my sleep.


The latest version is indeed a double-sided tri-fold.

Any more helpful comments?

Marketing Beads and Jewelry, pt. 1

In preparation for shipping some beads and jewelry off to Pismo Glass, I've been working on a brochure to describe the complex process of producing my painted and electroformed beads.

So far, it's single-sided. I have an artist's statement that should go on there somewhere as well. I have too much for one page and not enough for two.

What else do I add? I visualized these as tri-folds, but maybe I should cut them down to 2/3 size and just have the double-fold.

Silver Tidings

This week I needed a couple of little gifts, so I riffed off some quick silver earrings. I rolled out silver clay 3 cards thick, added cherry blossoms with one of my favorite tear-away texture sheets, and cut out two pairs of shields with a previously used index card template. After cutting a hanging hole and adding a small flange around it, I left them overnight. The next morning I spent five minutes filing the edges smooth, then loaded all into the kiln.

As soon as they finished, I quenched them right into the tumbler water and set them to polish for an hour. A dunk in liver of sulfur and a couple of argentium silver wires beaded in a microtorch gave me two gifts with less than 30 minutes work, completed in odd moments within 24 hours. 

Alas I failed to photograph them, but I decided I needed a pair for myself and maybe even a few for my Etsy shop, so yesterday I whipped out four pair more. All the earrings I've bought for myself in the last year or so have been really long, so these follow that pattern.

I've been thinking recently about how I tend to make everything too complicated. I like to make complex, detailed work. But when I buy jewelry to wear myself, I tend to gravitate toward very simple, elegant designs. So I view this as my first step toward simplifying. That's what focus can do.

Keum Boo

Originally, I planned to take Thursday as an offsite day and wander away from Bead & Button to check out some galleries. The first day at registration I checked on Celie Fago's class that day, that I had debated with myself over. I didn't need an introductory level PMC class, but I admired her work, wanted to meet her, and it would have the advantage of the perfect set-up to learn keum boo. When there was only one place left, I decided fate thought I should do it. Thank goodness I did, because Thursday was a stormy day, not the right situation for walking shop to shop (especially since I forgot to pack an umbrella).

Keum boo is the ancient Korean art of applying gold foil to silver. When it's done with sterling, the copper part of the alloy must be removed at the surface to allow the gold to bond properly. That requires repeated heating and acid dipping to remove the copper. When keum boo is done with metal clay, it's much easier since PMC is fine silver -- 99.9% pure. The clay comes out of the kiln, the gold is cut or torn to the desired shape, and then the silver is heated on a hot plate or kiln surface to between 700 and 900 degrees. The gold is laid in place and burnished on with an agate or steel tool, and voila! Patina is added later to color the silver.

It was much easier to do than I thought it might be. I've left my piece rather blue and violet, while I decide whether to polish off the highlights.

I especially enjoyed the tear-away texture plates we used, and I'm working on making some of my own at home this week.

Talisman Bracelet

My second class at Bead & Button was with Susan Lenart Kazmer.

Away went all the metal clay tools; out came the metal-working tools. I happily snipped and sawed, pounded and riveted. What a free for all! Susan has boundless energy, needed for her freeform class. She started us out with a few demonstrations, then turned everyone loose. As students hit issues or asked questions, she would offer more demos. The class got far afield from the basic cold connections of the Talisman Bracelet and ventured into the land of forming vessels with a forming block and stakes, which was the previous day's class.

I thoroughly enjoyed the spontaneity of the class, but wished for more time to really develop the piece. Many students took the view of making samples of each technique, with no aim of coherency. That might have been a better approach. I tried to follow a vision of creating a planetary talisman bracelet, using all the imagery I collected when I made the planetary talisman quilts. I love the concept; I have tons of ideas for elements to make. There just was not nearly enough time.

My favorite elements were the book and the conical vessel. The book was my own concept. I would need to seal the paper next time to make it more durable. The vessel was fun because I learned how to use a forming block, and got over my fear of repeatedly annealing the copper to soften it enough to shape. Notice the green fiber tucked into bullet casings, a common element that Susan uses. Joren will be amused!

I did learn lots that I will use in the future. And I will have to think about a longer class to really get the most from this gifted artist. I did buy resin, bezels, and eyelets to work with at home. Experiments, yum!

Anniversaries

Keenan and I marked our 19th wedding anniversary by a weekend sans teen in San Antonio. I enjoyed browsing through the Fiesta Arts Fair, and acquired these fun, unmatched earrings, made by Vicki Grossman Wyrick of Ida Ida Studios (sorry, but the website is hopelessly out of date).


Titled "He Said, She Said: The Long Story," they represent how men's and women's views are always different. The manager of the Ursuline Gallery shop at the Southwest School of Art and Craft snatched up the Short Story version as I selected these, and asked Vicki about gallery representation on the spot. I wish I'd asked to take a photo of some other pieces, since the website work is so obviously not as refined as the newer. Her work was definitely a cut above much of the rest of that at the show, and that transition to gallery representation is overdue.

The female is on the right, marked by a hinged stone at the bottom representing her mouth, always moving. The stones are Australian boulder opal, and they look more blue in real life than they photographed. Lately I seem attracted to these longer earrings (these are about 2").

Another thing I really liked about this artist was the overall presentation. I paid attention to the booths at the fair, thinking about my only experiences with selling my work at the ISGB Gathering Bead Bazaar. That's coming up again in August. Since I have to carry everything on the plane, I need to refine my ideas about my half table there.

Eeeek!

I guess I'm as ready as I'm going to get for the trunk show tomorrow -- wish me luck!

More Jewelry

A couple more necklaces to show. The caramel bird is my favorite -- copper links, pearls and hand-dyed ribbon. I have been reading Nina Bagley's blog Ornamental lately, and looking at her jewelry which is fabulous. I tried my hand at "Nina Knots" with the copper wire over the pearls.

Gratitude

Front and Back

Thanksgiving kicks off a season of stress for most of us, and I've certainly felt that increasingly over the past few years. Somehow, this middle age thing brings more commitments, more work, more family responsibilities, more "musts."

This year, as I move forward into the holidays, I'm vowing to try to keep a bit more focused on feeling grateful...

Grateful mostly for little things, the tiny shifts in perception that can change the stress into peace, beauty and even fun. I can't necessarily choose all the commitments I have this season, but I can choose the attitude that I bring to them. So, as I find myself tending toward panic today, I'm trying to proceed calmly, with gratitude.

Since I missed a message while I was gone to Chicago, I've only agreed at the last minute to participate in a trunk show next Sunday (less than a week!!!) at Blue Moon Glassworks . Well, yes, I found out before Thanksgiving, but today is the first day that I can really work on preparation.

Advised that jewelry might be a better seller for the holidays, I'm working slowly on converting some of my beads into wearable pieces. This is an interesting mental shift, which I'm certain will have a good effect on my beads and vessels. Overwhelmed by wondering what shoppers might desire, I've decided that I can only think about making jewelry that I myself would find appealing. I'm also viewing it as a learning opportunity, where I may indeed not reap a reasonable wage, but where I will gain valuable knowledge for future endeavors.

Etsy listings should follow soon.

Birdhouses

After my affection for birdhouse and bird beads, it was no surprise that the article about making PMC (precious metal clay) birdhouses in the latest Belle Amoire Jewelry magazine caught my eye. I had to give it a try.

Catherine Witherell's instructions were perfect, and I added a tiny glass bird bead. This was a great project to test out my kiln and get up to speed on PMC. Now I'll have to try a project of my own design.