Is it Soup Yet?

Yes, it's that time again-- 362 jewelry designers from all over the planet swapping hand-picked jewelry elements that will become fabulous swag--. Lori Anderson's largest-ever Bead Soup Blog Party!

This time I am paired with Cynthia Deis, owner of the eclectic and gloriously-stocked shop Ornamentea, where I've spent many hours perusing and marveling at the wares she's gathered. Of all the online shops I visit, I love Ornamentea the best for their inspiring and unique tutorials demonstrating ways to use the components that they sell.

The purpose of the Bead Soup Blog Party-- BSBP-- is to have fun designing with materials somebody else has chosen and to meet new jewelry enthusiasts but also to stretch our design abilities and use colors and materials we normally might not choose, to get outside our artistic comfort zone.

The stash I received from Cynthia will definitely do that. I love to work in a fairly large scale-- big, chunky beads, bold colors, multiple layers of vintage chain and substantial focals. My package from Ornamentea is all scaled-down and precious-- a glimmering handmade lampwork focal by Lisa Daly with a tree motif, miniature leaves, faceted Czech stones, tiny ceramic beads by Elaine Ray-- all woodsy-toned and neutral. An eclectic group of fibers is included-- deerskin, leather lace and golden maple silk ribbon. Cynthia's handmade steel clasp finishes the group.

 I puzzled a bit over what I would do with this. I went over to my pile of “works in progress”-- bits and pieces of experiments, earring parts and elements that are waiting for completion and/or inspiration. I found a little piece that I made a few months ago that reminds me of the wooden Indonesian screen that my sister has hanging in her living room. It's handcarved with very weathered paint.

 So my challenge is to incorporate Cynthia's supplies into my own style, using the “wooden” polymer shard as my jumping-off point. This is one of those instances where the total design just sprang into my head and my fingers had to move very fast to capture it on paper. The fibers will add in nicely and I might whip up some cord on my Diva cordmaker to pull it all together. I already have a name for my piece, which is unusual since I almost always name them after they're done. I'm calling this “Norwegian Wood”. Stop back for the big Reveal on September 17 for the blog hop.

Sharing Your Stories with the World

“Stories are attempts to share our values and beliefs. Storytelling is worthwhile when it tells what you stand for, not what you do”.

Simon Sinek, Start with Why.com

A photographer I once knew shared an amazing piece of advice. He said that all artists “run dry” occasionally and discover their well of inspiration is empty. So in good times, when ideas are coming fast and furious, write them down and stick 'em in a file, so that when you need a boost to your creative Muse, you'll have a stock of gems that you forgot about.

The name of my business, Stories They Tell, came straight out of my unconscious, a number of years ago. I hadn't even considered working in polymer and had no intention of starting a business so I stuck the title in a file and forgot about it. When I opened my Etsy store, I found that little slip of paper in the file-- it was completely serendipitous and completely perfect for what I do.

I always hope, when I create a piece of jewelry, that it expresses my values and beliefs. Nothing political but more spiritual and aesthetic, more about who I am and what my life's experiences have been, how they've shaped me and what they've taught me. My life has hardly been as full of trials as some but I have had my share of adversity and disappointment and now I feel my work can show the confidence I have in my ideas and processes. If you like my work, fine. If you don't, that's ok too. I don't need to please everybody; in fact, I don't feel I need to please anybody but myself and that doesn't come from a place of ego but a place of acceptance of my own style and imagination. I greatly admire the work of other artists but these days I don't long to create in a style like anyone's but my own.

So it's perhaps an appropriate time that a magazine I greatly admire has seen fit to acknowledge that style and feature my work in its Designer Collection article for the autumn issue this year. I'm speaking of Belle Armoire Jewelry, which will do a stunning eight-page spread to be published on September 1, 2011. I'm in great company, as some previously featured artists have been Stephanie Lee, Richard Salley and Robert Dancik. Ricë Freeman-Zachary has done an excellent job with her interview of me and captured my personality along with the facts of my artistic life and work process. And my honest and heartfelt thanks go out to Deryn Mentock, a good friend whose strong endorsement made my name known to the BAJ editor, which started my relationship with the magazine.

I worked for six weeks on the eight new pieces that I submitted, as I wanted to send them the latest and most thoughtfully considered pieces I had ever produced. It's pretty amazing what you can accomplish when you have a deadline like that-- and spending maximum time in the studio can produce results you never thought possible. When an opportunity this big comes calling, you'd better bring your “A” game! When the work was completed and I was packing it to send off, I was actually stunned to see the results of giving my imagination free rein and letting it lead me wherever! I think it's the most creative work I've ever done. A big “thank you” to my wonderful husband, Douglas, for supporting me throughout the process and for creating my fabulous new work room.

I've seen a preview of the article and my work looks awesome. It's very gratifying to see your pieces in print, to know that your story is out there in the world. I'm also encouraged that what is presented there are my values and beliefs, not merely my process. A technique is just a technique-- it's what you do with it that really makes a difference-- in your artistic life and to the people that see it.

Since the pieces below didn't make the cut for the article, I can post them. They are a couple of my favorites and in the near future I plan to expand upon the techniques they represent.

"Poisonous"

"Poisonous" - detail

"Tuareg"

"Tuareg" - detail

Hot Summer Color

The recent heat wave was unexpected here in the cool Northeast. For most of us, "air conditioning" means opening the windows. How to deal with these awful temps? Someone I once worked with put it this way: "Do as the Europeans do-- walk slowly and smile a lot!" With a garden that is finally deciding to put out some edible produce and 30+ chickens to keep hydrated and pecking on clean grass, that's a tall order.

So we garden and do animal chores in the cool(er) early mornings and hide behind shades with our fans going in the scorching late afternoons. A perfect time to clay (if you're not doing canes and processes requiring lots of clay-handling) and think about hot colors.

I decided to make a couple of pairs of earrings that I could wear with my recent Solstice necklace. I re-visited my stringing method after wearing it, adding another strand of beads to counteract the tendency of the beads to flip around to the opposite side. I had originally put two holes in the clay pad on the back of the bead to accommodate two strands but the trick was to string the top strand first and THEN the bottom one. I use a necklace bust when I'm doing this, so I get the drape correct. I've found you just can't get it right by laying the necklace flat.

Here are the shots of the earrings before I added the earwires. You may be able to see the texture in the wire, which is the new, fabulous Whim-Z Wire from Garlan Chain Company, which comes in bronze or copper and several textures. You can see the product and buy it in bulk spools at Rio Grande. The product's distributor says it will be available in smaller quantities at retail prices soon. Check here for updates. Here I've used "Nick" in brass -- my go-to wire lately for everything from my twisty-wire embellishments to earwires. It patinates very nicely with proprietary patinas or with heat. It's very pliable but has enough oomph to hold a single loop for components or charms. And it takes gilders paste beautifully. What's not to like??

After watching a great Good Eats episode on curry, I decided to name the red ones "Masala", which means "mixture" in the Tamil language. The Kashmiri earrings have dangles ending in my new favorite stone, pyrite chips. I love that the color's a cross between gold and silver and has a nice glint to it without overwhelming the polymer.

Masala earrings

Kashmiri earrings

Jeanette Blix from ArtBliss just told me I have a new registration for my class there in September. We'll be making earrings like these and exploring many other interesting coloring techniques as well. And be sure to check out the entire lineup of fabulous instructors. For mixed media fans, ArtBliss definitely has something for everyone!

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

Color = Energy

Color is energy, the colors of sunlight, of emanations from the great Star itself, flooding our world with blues and greens and reds and yellows. Don't get me wrong-- I love my black tees but black is the color of sleep, of night, of the absence of light and energy. It's a great background for a starry display. Although it is the combination of all colors together, black subtracts light, and therefore color, from our world. A “black hole” is called exactly that for a very good reason-- it swallows light.


The colors of Vermont's landscape are vibrant now with summer but in a very subtle way. Just as the native American peoples of the far North have a hundred words for snow, there are a hundred colors of green in my backyard. Our flowers are not the riotous palette of the tropics but rather the occasional splash of bright but diminutive blossoms amid the green of grasses and meadow hay. I recall picking tiny native strawberries nestled among orange and bronze Indian Paintbrush in my uncle's field when I first visited Vermont the summer I was seven. They are still my favorite Vermont wildflower.

I usually experiment with earrings or beads when I'm trying out new color ideas. Small shapes, easily completed are just the thing to play with on a lazy summer's day. If there's more potential there, they become elements in a necklace or bracelet. Here are some of my favorites from the last few weeks' work, using colored pencil and some “garbage” cane-- bits and pieces and leftover ends-- made into a mokume gane veneer.

Sands of Mars bead - idea from the work of Rebecca Watkins

Leaves of Grass earrings

We Are the People earrings

We Are the People earrings - detail

Latitude earrings

Latitude earrings - detail

ArtBliss Update: Like Putty in My Hands

In case you were sitting on the fence about signing up for a class at ArtBliss in September, I'm going to be writing a series of blog posts relating to the class I'm teaching there. These aren't tutorials but little snippets about what we'll be doing in my class “Whimsical Blooms” and the journey that my concepts have taken to finally coalesce into a teachable format.

I work a lot with found objects-- I have never called these “junk” as they are in the category of relics for me, the fascinating detritus of our civilization—past and present-- either iconic in their meaning or splendidly weathered and patinated with time and the elements and worthy of inclusion into my artwork. But they don't come in duplicates. So I make molds of them and then I have them forever, at least in shape. The part of me that enters into the mix then is in how I color these copies and antique them and arrange them into wearable art. They are transformed by what I add to their history and their story becomes part of my story.

I don't have to find each and every “found” object. People give them to me sometimes, my husband finds them on our property, a friend actually loaned me an interesting piece that he wants back eventually.

So here's the important tip: you don't have to use the whole image. You can use a mold you've made of an antique button but use a piece of polymer clay that's larger than the impression so you have a “relic”-- an irregular shape that looks like it has disintegrated somewhat in the aging process. You can flatten edges or texture them with a tool or a texture sheet. I like to thin the edges out to create the illusion of disintegration even more. Polymer is very strong so even very thin pieces are quite strong. This allows you to stack a number of layers without creating a lot of weight or depth, just a showcase for color, texture and pattern.

Little layered experiments

Solstice necklace detail

Solstice necklace detail

Solstice necklace detail

Solstice necklace

Finding Your Bliss-- ArtBliss, that is!

As summer approaches-- and yes, we actually do have what passes for summer in Vermont although it's been raining and in the 40s for a week now-- many of us are thinking about vacation. Since we have animals-- like a pony and chickens-- it's not so easy to get away. We have to find someone to feed them who is willing to come over in early evening and wait for the “girls”-- our layers-- to sashay their feathery butts up into their roost so they can be locked safely away from the numerous and hungry predators that prowl our backyard. Everything, it seems, loves chicken!

So we mainly take day trips around our own state and neighboring New Hampshire or short weekend jaunts to 18th c. re-enacting events. I'm one of those “active vacation” people-- the idea of swinging in a hammock while sipping an umbrella-topped drink and gazing out at the ocean seems boring beyond words.

With a more interesting goal in mind, in September my husband and I are trekking down to Washington, DC so I can participate as an instructor in the second year of classes at ArtBliss, an art retreat founded by my friends Cindy Wimmer and Jeanette Blix. I am really excited to be teaching again and so honored to be invited to participate with such esteemed artists as Deryn Mentock, Kerry Bogert, Richard Salley, Diane Cook, Jane Salley and Robert Dancik. Wow, what a lineup!

The class is called “Whimsical Blooms” and will teach my technique of making pendants by layering polymer clay shapes that have been textured and antiqued with various tools, paints, inks and patinas. The resulting element can be used for jewelry-making, scrapbooking or journals or even for home decoration. The possibilities are endless! We will play and create and generally have a blast while repeating my favorite art mantra: “There are no mistakes”. Any and all found objects are fodder for mold-making and texturing the clay or as pieces of the pendants themselves. Frequent readers of this blog have seen this series unfold over the past few months and as I was mulling over topics I might teach, this one just seemed perfect for students of differing levels and abilities. I know personally that I get the most out of a class when interacting with students from diverse artistic backgrounds and interests. This class will have structure and will teach technique but will leave plenty of room for creativity and experimentation and wild flights of imagination. Well, let's hope at least a few flights!

Sunburst pendant - sample for ArtBliss

Dark of a Spring Night - sample for ArtBliss

My class is offered on Sunday, September 25 from 9 am to 4 pm but check out the other class descriptions and instructor bios here at www.artbliss.com. Registration has been open about a week so far but I'm guessing that with this group of instructors the classes will fill quickly. I'm encouraging my husband to take Richard Salley's class called “Lasting Impressions Earrings and Pendants”, stamping silver-bearing solder to make jewelry elements. I love Richard's work and I think he and Douglas would get along very well. Dougie is a blacksmith and does repousse work too so the metalwork focus of the class is appropriate to his interests.

 The festivities begin on Friday, September 23 with day classes taught by Deryn Mentock and Robert Dancik, followed by the evening Meet and Greet Reception and continuing on to Sunday night, September 25. The venue is the snazzy Embassy Suites Dulles-North Loudon with special room pricing for attendees. I read glowing reviews of last year's event and this one promises to be even more fun, instructive and filled with creative activity and inspiring instructors. I would love to meet you all there!