I'm sure I haven't been the only one to lie in the grass and watch the clouds drifting by, taking on funny or familiar shapes. You don't need clouds to play that game, it works with lots of things, from structured tiles to rocks ... or this cabochon.
It's a Mexican Cantera opal and it's not very big, slightly over half an inch only. Cantera opals are the Mexican equivalent to Australian Boulder opals. The opal is still in the matrix, like a window into another world which isn't hard to believe if you look at this little fellow (obviously enlarged a lot, but not color edited or anything).
Looking at it I imagine flying through a mass of clouds with the world underneath me, and is that a big lake possibly?
I don't think I have to point out I'm flying into this magic world on a dragon.
What do you see?
P.S. I "blame" Stones That Rock for my new Cantera opal addiction. Before I saw my first one there, I had not heard of them.
Lately I have been watching English crime series. Lewis, Inspector Morse, Campion, and some others. I watched them find clues, wonder over letters and mysterious notes, and it made me think about my own notes that I tend to leave lying around.
Let's take this one for example. What would you read into it or try to deduce from it? Ok, so you are at an advantage because you know I'm a jewelry artisan.
On the other hand the detectives wouldn't take long to find that out, too. I'm almost certain that the jewelry, the bead stash and the fact that I have a little loom, crochet hooks and pliers on a pillow in my bed (don't judge me) would give me away. Who knows, they might have to pry my trusted 1.65 mm crochet hook from my cold, dead hand.
It's pretty obvious that it's not a code for my safe, simply because I don't own one, but what is it?
Now let me show you what I did yesterday and today and tell you what inspired me.
Do you remember the pictures we used to do with wax crayons? First we used all colors we had, big spots, small spots, layers, stripes, and then we covered that with black crayon. Afterwards we scratched a picture into the black, making the colors come back out. I remember that in elementary school we did the deep ocean, with colorful plants and fish.
It would have been interesting to create and loom a panel in that kind of look, but while waiting for supplies (that haven't arrived yet) I went a different way.
I used bead soup on a black background. Just imagine I took off the black in circles. And here's where the note comes into action. It's the size of circle I decided on. Since I'm old and my brain can be weak and lose information while just moving from one room to the other, I wrote down the numbers of beads.
Count for yourself (don't forget you'd need to rotate the picture first, though).
For more color and a bit of fun I added a happy irregular bead soup and wooden beads fringe.
I'm not keen on experiencing this detective thing, by the way. It's just one of those train of thoughts my brain comes up with in the middle of the night or very early in the morning after only four hours of sleep (&/§%$§&/ those greedy cats). I'd rather prefer to stay alive and bead. Although I'd dig a visit by Sergeant Hathaway.
P.S. I know it's not exactly night, actually it's afternoon. Let's call it artistic freedom.
Seems I am on the fruit trip, even if not intentionally in the first place.
I buy my wire online in England, from wires.co.uk and I love their colored copper wire. I could buy the list up and down and back up again and when a parcel arrives, I sit down, hold the spools into a light and giggle like a little girl at the beautiful shine.
So it is easy to match wire and beads tone in tone and you have lots of possibilities to experiment with different color combinations as well.
This is one of my favorite colors, a beautiful metallic orange although I think the seller calls it honey.
It's a bright and happy color and was perfect for these earrings. They remind me of a puddle of orange juice that is trickling down in a spiral. What better to use as accent than a clear glass rounded cube with AB (aurora borealis) finish? I like ice cubes in my orange juice!
Recently I bought some purple and black glass beads.
I have used them with black and purple wire before on this spool knit necklace. Here I put the black beads on the purple and the purple beads on the black wire for the perfect mix.
For this pendant I wanted to go tone in tone, though. After I started I found it began to remind me of a berry, so instead of going for a plane disk I made it domed.
On the pendant I had stopped at a disk because when I decided it was a berry, it was too late to make a ball out of it, it would have been much too big. What about berries for the ears? It still is blackberry season, hmm. Thought, said out loud and done, here is the result. Yummy looking blackberries for your ears.
Let me think, what else do I need for fruit salad? One idea already came from a forum friend (thanks, Cindy!), another one is welling up in my mind just now ...
