I Get By With a Little Help from My Friends

Doing a collaborative project with other polymer artists is always an exercise close to my heart. Blending styles and ideas produces some amazing surprises-- the sum of the parts is always better than the individual elements.

You may recall that Rebecca Watkins, Claire Maunsell and I worked on a necklace together last October.

KatManDo necklace

We enjoyed it so much we vowed to do another, passing the stringing/designing work to Rebecca for the next round. Well, as we all know, life intervenes and the best laid plans, etc. etc. I must confess that I was definitely the sloth on this one but lest you judge me too harshly, I will soon have some interesting news to reveal about why I was M.I.A. for so long!

That said, I want to acknowledge my two incredibly patient co-artists and thank them for their forebearance with the delay of my contribution to the piece!

A planetary theme had been decided upon, which would give us a broad scope for color and offer an infinite number of interpretations for bead design. Here's what I'm sending to Rebecca today.

Little Planetary beads

The second photo shows what they might look like in a starry firmament. I took these shots with my new Nikon Coolpix, a point-and-shoot digital camera (not really as easy as they make it sound but without the advanced degree necessary to use a digital SLR). If you haven't checked these out, this new generation of cameras have all the memory necessary to shoot high resolution images that magazine submissions require. I'm doing an article for Handcrafted Jewelry this week and they told me the images I submitted were well within the standards for publication. Hooray for that! My Nikon has a large screen for use in framing the shot-- I hated the my Pentax's teensy viewfinder-- and all kinds of adjustments for low light/poor light/color correction so post-shot enhancement in a Photoshop program is minimized. In fact, it even has a “skin softening” feature for portraits, a real boon for those pesky headshots that publications always seem to want.

Watch my blog for the results-- and thanks again to Rebecca and Claire. Their Etsy shops are chock-full of delicious beads-- check out some of my favs below!

Available in Rebecca's Etsy shop

Available in Claire's  Etsy shop