Birdie

I am stressed and I'm anxious these days. I'm a pro at both, but this is no competition and even if it were, being the winner would be a pretty dubious honor.
Right now I'm just happy about my furnace not having gone out since Mr. Heater was here yesterday, for a slurpy kitty to one side - Gundel is the loudest groomer ever - and another one feeling like the weight of a standard sandbag on my feet which beats a weighted blanket and a hot-water bottle (no, he's not really as heavy as a sandbag, but cats manage to change gravity, I'm sure, still remembering how incredibly heavy Ponder's head on my wrist used to be).

I have two personal solutions for being stressed.
Sleeping to block out the world. Too bad if it creeps into my dreams, but usually they are just very weird and not nightmares ... snippets of the one this morning are coming back to me right now which make me wonder when I got a dog? There have been cats, from my own to huge lions and of course black panthers in my dreams, also other animals like wolves, but never a dog. Interesting.
The other one is hoping for my muse to jump in and give me not only an idea - I have enough of those - but also the energy to work on something.
If you are wondering, I know about those people who fight stress with cleaning their whole house, but I can safely say no amount of stress or worry in the world has ever managed to make me do that, despite my half-Swabian ancestry.

As my blog is mostly about crafting, I will not go into my dreams in detail, lucky you, but talk about my last piece.
This is the second bead embroidery piece that started out on my embroidery hoop. It also inspired me to write another nostalgia post, but I'm still waiting for something to finish that one, just this much, it's about shapes, as is my pendant.

Give me a drop and I will see a bird body.
It has happened before, in my paint cabochon and Cantera opal bird pin for example.

And this time it happened with a labradorite drop. This time, however, I wanted to be a bit less neutral with my colors. So I chose a light amethyst for the head, gold accents, and a bright purple as a contrast to the body.
Yeah, and then I was stuck because I put the head on differently than in the pin and couldn't decide if I wanted to add legs or not. I did some hand embroidery instead, but kept coming back to my birdie apologizing for leaving it on that hoop for so long. Then I worked on the sparkly heart and apologized to my birdie for leaving it in a drawer for so long. I'm weird, I really do talk to my WIPs and I often talk to myself while working on something because it helps me think.

When I finally got the bird back out of the drawer, we sat down for a serious talk ;-)
In order to make a decision about the legs, I first had to think about the tail. Did I want it short or long? Why did I even have to think about it, everyone knows I can't resist a fringe! Having a fringe for the tail, though, meant that dangly legs were out and Birdie needed something to perch on.

I beaded a twig and added some embellishments in form of blossoms.
As I planned to make the tail pick up the colors of the head with golden seed and matte amethyst beads, I wanted the twig to be more subdued using bronze tone flower beads topped with tiny amethysts. Birds have so many different colors and sometimes they only partially have brightly colored spots to get attention; and I wanted him to get the attention, not the twig.
Also my first idea had been berries for the twig, but again I didn't want the colors to compete with the tail.

I guess Birdie is ready to fly!

Labradorite and amethyst

About two months ago I blogged about my "jewelry burnout" and what I did instead. So far things haven't changed much. I am struggling my way through my second embroidery kit, but only touched beads once during the last month to loom a custom bracelet.

Are there sounds you like in crafting? I love the tiny pop in bead looming when pushing the beads into the space between the warps (not just the sound, but also the way it feels) and I love the sound of a needle and thread going through bead embroidery foundation - so much that I started missing them more than actually making jewelry. They have something deeply satisfying to me.
I know, it's really weird, isn't it?
However, that is what finally did the trick and made me grab a labradorite cabochon from my stash without any plan whatsoever. Just glueing the cab onto the foundation felt like a good start, even if der Dekan tried to steal the cap of the glue tube once again.

I picked some bead colors for the bezel that I thought would work well with the colors of the labradorite, a grey shimmering kind of golden, metallic silver, and - maybe a bit surprising - a kind of green-golden metallic.
After doing the bezel, which was the easy part, I was completely lost.
I would have wanted to make some unusual, playful, but all I could think of was quite classic and, to me, not very imaginative and a bit boring.
In the end, I just succumbed to the idea of a classic bead embroidery pendant. I still have some lovely frosted amethyst in my stash from years ago which actually was another color working beautifully with the stone, but this edging looked a little bland to me, so I added another layer to it with tiny silver "rays".

This pendant developed over a few days which is pretty slow for me, but the heat and a hurting thumb joint didn't help and there were quite a few breaks.
So I'm still not sure if it has been enough to give me a good kick in the butt, so I will finally be tackling my list of ideas again (without forgetting about my embroidery which came to a stop due to heat and a mistake which means there will have to be some ripping out, argh). We will see, I guess ;-)

Oldies but goodies - Amethyst again

This post is for my Latin teacher. He didn't like the color purple. He detested it. He said purple was not a color, but a catastrophe.
Too bad that one of my friends loved purple and didn't hesitate to wear it no matter what remarks she got from him. A small group of our class decided we had to give him something purple. It started out with a cake in purple and pink (which was good, no doubt, because said friend's father used to be a baker and passed the talent on to her) and turned into a tradition on Christmas and at the end of the school year. Purple ties, socks, flowers, plates, mugs, I can't even remember everything. When we were out of school, I kept up the tradition for quite a few years. To this day I think "oh, that would be a good one" if I see something purple. For me the color will be connected to him forever.

Of course the topic "Amethyst" wasn't chosen for the Jewelry Artisans Community Oldies but Goodies Challenge because of my Latin teacher, though. Amethyst is the birthstone for February and of course it was still February when the challenge started.
Please enjoy some of our members' beautiful entries.

1 MC Stoneworks
2 Jewelry Art by Dawn
3 Cat's Wire
4 RioRita
5 Violetmoon's Corner

Oldies but goodies - Amethyst colors

This week the JAC Oldies but Goodies Challenge was about amethysts. Not everyone of us works with stones like that, but our rules are not that strict, so we changed that to colors of the amethyst.
English Wikipedia tells me that "according to surveys in Europe and the U.S., purple is the color most often associated with royalty, magic, mystery and piety".
It also tells me that the name amethyst comes from the Greek meaning "not intoxicated" which reminded me of the story our Latin teacher told us about amethyst embellished goblets being used in the olden days because people thought that way they wouldn't get drunk from wine.
I don't drink wine myself, but somehow I have the feeling that doesn't really work ;-)

Judge yourself about what these entries remind you of and make sure to check out the original thread for more pictures!

 
1 Studio 9665
2 Violetmoon's Corner
3 Cat's Wire
4 MC Stoneworks
5 Jewelry Art by Dawn
6 The Crafty Chimp

On a ring trip

From time to time I go through my stash of beads together with my muse. She points out beads that I had forgotten or some that I don't have many left of. Sometimes she will even find a half-forgotten WIP.
Perfect projects for those occasions are rings. They are fun to make because you can always choose a new combination of wire and beads.

This is what she came up with this weekend.
First of all she found a WIP I had made quite a while ago, then "lost" underneath something else. I hadn't decided yet if I wanted it to be a pendant, a collier or a ring. My first attempt at a ring had failed on a day when I was very impatient, so off into the box it went.
What I had so far, was a crocheted dome of sterling silver wire with faceted little moonstones. Too pretty to hang out in a WIP box with their blue flashes and sparkle.
I got stubborn and finally did it. One down, only one million to go. Yesss!


Then my muse (I wonder if she needs a name, time for another poll? Let me know what you think!) gave me some lovely frosted 4 mm amethyst beads that had been left after making the Winter Berries necklace.
Perfect for this ring in fine silver wire, don't you think?


I have only tried to spool knit brass wire once. It was not a success because it doesn't bend the way copper does. So I still had this ugly necklace lying around. It's always hard for me to throw something away, but there was no chance I could have saved it. Snip, snip, snip - welcome back, little jasper cubes.
I find they look much better on this ring (what you can't see in this picture that on this ring the wire is crocheted in a different direction than the others, I can be soooo innovative at times :-P).


When I wanted to take the pictures to list the rings, I found ... or rather, I didn't find (it was a very negative feeling) no charged batteries. Ten batteries and all of them dead? That delayed the listing a little, but I hope they'll be in one of my shops soon. The rings, not the batteries ;-)