Winter Work

If you choose to live in central Vermont, you've got to embrace winter. As we like to say up here, Vermont's weather is nine months of winter and three months of bad sledding. Actually, this winter other parts of the East coast are experiencing better sledding than we--and Vancouver!-- are and I know that's the understatement of the century. And when you're digging your car out of a snowbank, you tend not to think about winter sports.

You've got to get into the cozy-- fuzzy things to wear that feel like your kitty's fur, flannel blankets, rough handknit wool sweaters. There are many positive sensory advantages to winter. Nothing on earth feels like the wave of woodsy heat that comes off a blazing pile of crackling oak logs. This weekend we sat in front of such a fire, chatting with old friends and munching Asiago and crackers. Ahh, the best part of winter!

And the long months from November until April are ideal for the incubation of ideas. It's quiet, you aren't distracted by needing to work in the garden or going swimming and your daily walk is inevitably shortened by concern for frostbite and frozen digits. You have time to think.

And think I have been. I've been experiencing a veritable flood of new ideas. And now I may have the makings of a book. I'm as surprised as anyone by this turn of events, as my next goal this year was to decide where I might want to offer my beads and jewelry for sale-- be it craft shows, bead show venues or other online opportunities besides Etsy. Now my Muse seems to be pushing for a larger commitment to sharing my work than simply by way of this blog. So I'm listening to Her and making notes and thinking up a title. Stories They Tell is going to be showing up in a worldly context in several new ways in the coming months so somebody may actually think a book written by me might be a worthy venture to sponsor.

For now, I'm letting the subtle colors of winter inspire me, either to craft subdued shades in complex designs or to revolt against the subtle palette of the season with a riot of color as I put together submissions to magazines for their Fall issues. The colors of Fall are my favorite but winter is the best season for contemplation and imagination, locked away from the cold in a warm home with a sketchpad and your imagination for company.

Colorado Earrings - in my Etsy shop

Strata Earrings - in my Etsy shop

Marrakesh necklace - my submission for the Art Bead Scene challenge for November 2009

Marrakesh -- detail

New Ideas, New Techniques

One of my favorite blogs is French-- Parole de Pate. I love that they post these little tutorials-- “tutes”-- with new techniques that their readers come up with and then share with everyone. You can try them out and really take them places with a little imagination!

It helps to read French but Parole will cheerfully translate for you if you ask. And the pictures are great so you can usually figure out what's going on just by looking.

On Sunday I happened by Parole's site and saw a post about using alcohol inks on raw clay and just had to try it. I'd been experimenting with TLS (liquid polymer clay) combined with inks to create a glazed stoneware effect on polymer clay and so my attention was really focussed on those sadly-ignored little Ranger ink bottles that had been sitting there just full of potential. I recently re-discovered them while experimenting with some faux raku techniques and so I just breezed along with the latest messy fun.

A while later, my wastebasket full of ink-dabbed paper towel and I had a few sets of earrings that I'll share with you now. Oh, and that paper towel is so pretty with all those inky prints, I might just iron one out and resin it up in a bezel! Potential is everywhere-- even in your garbage can.

Metro earrings - Available in my Etsy shop

Nile earrings - Available in my Etsy shop

Twilight earrings - Available in my Etsy shop

Glaze experiments - faux stoneware

Completing the Old-- Beginning the New

Right now I have three pieces sitting on my bench awaiting final touches before I declare them complete and ready to face the world. This doesn't particularly bother me-- I have no deadline but my own for them and I've noticed that if I let these pieces sit for a bit, I usually discover some little touch that they need, design-wise. Rushing to finish them would not have given me that “moment of grace” needed to find that final note of completion that is like fitting the last perfect stem into a vase of spring flowers that transforms the whole into something sublime.

But lest you surmise that I've been simply sitting around eating the last of the holiday cookies (actually, I never got them made and a good thing too, since I've gone back to my healthy eating plan with a vengeance), I have become enamoured of blank cast brass cuffs. They are the perfect little empty canvas for all sorts of luscious experimentations and if I could only find a source for cast pewter ones, my artistic life (at least for now) would be complete! You may recall that I discontinued my line of cuffs built around aluminum blanks but I still love the cuff-- it's so easy to wear and feels good on the wrist too.

My love of faux can find perfect expression here but so many of the polymer clay veneers that I use work equally well. Faux ivory has been very successful on them and today I'm trying faux jade and the Ancient Metals technique of Laurie Prophater. I already made a nice trade of one cuff to Barbara Lewis for a marvelous bracelet/necklace she called “Hialeah”. When I wear it I can feel myself wearing a floppy straw hat, sipping an exotic drink and watching racehorses spin around a track in some tropical clime. She really has that “Margaritaville” vibe down in this piece!

But after a rich diet of large, complicated necklaces I've made in the last few months, it's nice to take a break and narrow my focus for a bit--to take one idea and push it as far in one direction as possible. Besides, as 2010 begins, I'm eager to head in some new artistic directions. These cuffs are rehearsals for some collaborative work that I've got in mind to do in the future with a very talented metalworker. He would be the dream partner-- as far as I can see, he can do anything I dream up and he likes a challenge! Also, this week my focus is writing a tutorial I've been invited to do for the Summer issue of Belle Armoire Jewelry--wire bezels for polymer clay. You may have seen some of these used in previous pieces and the idea is just too much fun to keep all to myself. I'm very excited about the opportunity to be in this publication-- it's been one of my goals since beginning my polymer clay odyssey.

Cernunnos cuff

Handmade antler, granite and decayed wood molds, polymer clay - available in my Etsy shop

Aboriginal cuff

Polymer clay faux ivory, hand-applied textures from various shop tools - available in my Etsy shop

Ancient Peoples cuff

Polymer clay faux jade, texture plate purchased from Cool Tools, cuff form handcrafted by Douglas Damm, DD Arts, from repurposed copper flashing

Relic bangle

Ancient Metals technique on polymer clay, texture plate from Victoria James - available in my Etsy shop

Antiquity cuff

Ancient Metals technique on polymer clay, texture plate from Victoria James - available in my Etsy shop

Sorcery bangle

Polymer clay faux ivory, hand-sculpted embellishment, texture from my hand-drawn Zentangle, tearaway technique

A Tale of Two Victorians

One of my favorite singer-songwriters is Loreena McKennitt. She sets well-known poems to music and her beautiful, haunting voice and inspired orchestrations bring these sometimes timeworn words to vibrant life. Her adaptation of Tennyson's poem “Lady of Shalott” was playing on Live Ireland a few weeks' ago as I was working on the Art Bead Scene's November challenge. The poem is very bittersweet and sad and the image in my mind was of the painting by J.W. Waterhouse, a Victorian artist.

"The Lady of Shalott" - J.W. Waterhouse

The painting chosen this month for the Challenge is also by a Victorian artist, though it's a world apart in execution, theme and emotional outlook. “Fairy Feller's Master Stroke” was painted by Richard Dadd, a patient at Bethleham Hospital--known popularly as Bedlam-for murdering and then dismembering his father. The director of the hospital made painting supplies available to Mr. Dadd, who had attended the prestigious London Academy of Art and had a respectable, if not stellar, reputation as a painter before he went off the rails.

I found the painting very disturbing, to say the least, for a number of reasons. Nothing is alive or growing in the woods surrounding the figures-- it is the dead, brown landscape of autumn. The Victorian loved their colors deep and rich and painters of the era were master colorists, layering tints in transparent washes over base tones to achieve startling effects of intensity and depth, even in a muted palette like that in Waterhouse's Lady of Shalott painting. The only noticeable colors used in Dadd's painting, at least in the larger reproductions I searched out on the Tate Museum's site were the primary colors of red, blue and green. The level of detail, which is what most people notice, is truly astounding; in fact, it is somewhat 3-dimensional. Apparently the Tate lights the painting from the side, so visitors can appreciate the dimensionality of its diminutive 15 X 20” size.

While researching the painting, which I always do before I start interpreting them in jewelry, I found many analyses of the work, among them that Dadd claimed it was based on Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream and portrayed a fairy kingdom. I found the characters scary and grotesque and decided to work in a different direction, recreating elements in polymer clay of the natural world that Dadd had painted so thoroughly and used so abundantly. The Victorians loved complexity in every aspect of their surroundings-- jewelry, interior décor, clothing, architecture. I made an impression in molding putty of a section of an ornate Victorian picture frame and used it to make a practice piece which was antiqued and slightly gilded.



My goal was to create a piece of wearable jewelry--not mimic the painting-- so I made several large lentil beads in the same way as the sample, adding subtle gold highlights to elevate the somber tones of Dadd's very neutal palette with gilding.

I brought in the muted primary colors using two tube beads covered in clay done in a mokume gane technique with midnight blue, ocher yellow and burgundy. The pods and seeds allowed me to play with my raku technique and after I used metallic powders on them, they were glazed with a wash of Byzantia brand metallic paint and highlighted with colored pencils to bring out the primary colors.

I looked through my stash for similar-sized beads to complement the raku elements and added some yellow faux jade beads, picture jasper rounds from my local Ben Franklin variety store, and gold-painted polymer clay melon beads that I detailed with gunmetal acrylic paint—all separated by African rough bronze spacers from Objects & Elements.

A second layer of smaller elements was added to jazz up the neutrals and intensify that sense of over-the-top Victorian embellishment. I made a clasp using brass washers and some bronze wire for an s-clasp so I was able to layer the smaller strand over the larger one.


This was overall a very intense and time-consuming process but I enjoyed doing it more than any piece I've done for the challenges so far. I call the style tribal Victorian and named it "Lady of Shalott".

"Lady of Shalott"

Out in the World

I have mentioned before that if I had my wish, I'd just give my beads away-- that the real joy is in the envisioning, crafting and sharing, not in the selling. But there are electric bills to pay, supplies to buy, and a very tiny bit to Etsy, that wonderful site for all things handmade that allows me to share my work with folks all over the planet.

Writing my blog is my way of sharing the pleasure I get from creating and how it is that I do create. That's the gift I have to give and so far, I'm gratified to say that it's been well received. But in order to share the information, people have to read my blog--so publicity has its place in the grand scheme of things.

Many of my fellow artists have been more than generous in talking about my blog and my work and in this season of thanksgiving and celebration, my thanks goes out to all of you who have made this possible! And thanks to my family as well, who have supported my artistic endeavors since I first held a crayon or burned my first polymer clay bead in the toaster oven.

So now my little offerings are out in the world, in a big way--and their success is part of a collaboration with all of you in many ways.

First, I got news last week from Interweave Press that my first solo piece, a necklace, had been accepted for Stringing Magazine. With beads from Barbara Lewis and clasps by Cindy Wimmer, “Reading the Stones” will debut in the Spring 2010 issue. I can't show you a photo but I think you'll like it-- I'm proud that I stayed true to my style and found a way to use some friends' work in it as well.

Claude's Lily Garden - 3rd Place, Plastics - by Lorelei Eurto

After keeping the good news secret for months, Bead Star 2009 should be on the newsstands this week and Lorelei Eurto's necklace “Claude's Lily Garden” won 3rd place in the Plastics category with my Apocalypto beads featured as her focals. Lorelei has been a big supporter of my work since the beginning-- she used my Little Bumblebeads in her The Convertible necklace that was published in The Best of Stringing a few months ago. See more of her excellent design work on the cover and in the pages of Jane Dickerson's newly published book Chain Style.

Another person I owe a great “thank-you” to-- as much for moral support and advice as for showcasing much of my work is the generous and talented Deryn Mentock. She encouraged me early on to write a blog-- I was waiting until my retirement next year-- and through writing the blog I discovered my true purpose-- to share with others what I've learned about artistic process and manifesting your creative vision.

Vedauvoo Blooms - Deryn Mentock - beads by Stories They Tell

Serengeti Sunset - Deryn Mentock's Jewelry Challenge - 2009

So Stories They Tell is out in the world. I encourage you to celebrate with me the enormous blessing of self-expression by whatever technique you love best. This is truly the thing that we should give thanks for. And for good artist friends everywhere.

On the Fifth Day of Christmas..... FIVE Pairs of Earrings!

I think earrings are sometimes treated as an afterthought by the jewelry world. They don't get their own tutorials in beading magazines, they are sidelined as addenda to larger projects like necklaces, they are portrayed as beginner's fodder—simple, quick and easy.

They can be and should be considered perfect little artworks on their own. Tiny, yet powerful, they hang close to our faces, enhancing our smiles, flirting with our hair or staking claim to the attention of everyone we speak to. More than merely ear adornment, they are powerful indicators of our mood, our style, our color preferences or our point of view. Whether we feel whimsical or centered, extravagant or tailored-- earrings deserve our design consideration and attention to detail just as much as any other piece of jewelry.

Often my earrings begin as leftover pieces of clay that I can't bear just to chuck into the scrap pile, since most of my mokume gane is very labor-intensive. I usually piece the scraps into mosaic-- another example of a technique born of accident and opportunity-- and the size usually dictates the use so-- voila! we have earrings! Mine tend to be larger and longish, providing more space for the mokume patterns to be seen. But then how to embellish without adding more length?

Found objects frequently come to my rescue, those precious little bits of flotsam and jetsam that I repurpose for ornamentation. One of my best finds was a length of ornate stamped brass molding that probably trimmed the metal ceiling in a turn-of-the-century bar in New York City. Flattened, cut into pieces, cleaned up and sanded, I've dangled and glued many a piece to a pair of earrings. All these bits and bobs tell a story and—after all-- that's what I'm about! Many pieces of my old earrings have been reborn into a new life as a completely redesigned pair. I like to think that whatever I spent on them was well worth it-- first, to be worn as a favorite for so many years and now to grace the lobes of a stranger who picked those particular ones out of hundreds of choices available to buyers. Kismet, as they say.

As the season of Yule is upon us, celebrate the power of small artwork by making a pair of earrings for someone special! Really take some time to make them unique, hunt down some unusual findings or some tiny bit of bling, dig through your old issues of beading magazines for inspiration and your boxes of old jewelry for supplies. You might find yourself, as I did, spending an enjoyable afternoon making--just earrings.

Serengeti Earrings - Available in my Etsy shop

November Skies Earrings - Available in my Etsy shop


Hapshepsut's Earrings - Available in my Etsy shop


Pagoda Earrings - Available in my Etsy shop

Mykonos Earrings - Available in my Etsy shop

Kyoto Earrings - also beads, all available in my Etsy shop

Writer's Block

I finally posted a blog earlier this week after about a month's inactivity. I was active but the activity was more mental than physical and blogging about it wasn't all that interesting. Besides, blogging is such a visual medium, at least for artists, and I wanted to wait until I had something to show.

I was in a thinking and reflecting mode-- taking a new class, visiting with my sister, discussing new directions, doing some new collaborations and trying some new techniques. Actually, my writer's block is more of a “maker's block”-- I have too many ideas and nothing seems to get created! Some of my readers may be rolling their eyes and thinking, “That's a problem?” Well, it is when you can't seem to settle down on one thing and complete it. Too many balls in the air!

One thing I've been working on are beads for a few new collaborations with Cindy Wimmer of Sweetbead Studio. Cindy is so easy and fun to work with and I really respect her design ability and artistic flair. She makes my beads look good! We can't show you the results right now but hint-hint--they will show up in publications in the future. Here are the beads.

Washed Ashore focal bead

Fallen to Earth beads - for sale in my Etsy shop

Some conversations she and I had while working together resulted in my experimenting with a fun product called micaceous iron oxide, a type of paint known among polymer clay artists as “raku sauce”. It gives a finish to a smooth surface that you would expect from traditional raku, a Japanese technique using a rough clay body that is fired quickly and develops some very interesting metallic glaze effects. So I set out to mimic some of those colors using quirky tube bead shapes, metallic paints and powders. I liked the result so much that I included the tube beads in my Hallowe'en Tribal necklace (see post on Nov. 2) and one I put together this morning, drawing on one of Lorelei Eurto's pieces in Jane Dickerson's book Chain Style for inspiration. There are quite a few fresh and unusual takes on stringing and chain in this new book so I consider my purchase to be money well spent.

Japanese beetle beads - available in my Etsy shop

Metallica Necklace