Inspiration is everywhere - Donald Duck and the mirror earrings

The other day I really doubted myself. For years, I had had the plan to make a pair of earrings with little mirrors. My inspiration was a Donald Duck story about a Greek nymph who threw her hand mirror to the ground where it turned into a lake, and I also had the feeling that the story had been inspired by a real Greek tale.
I even started writing a blog post, but when I tried to find out more about the Greek tale, I came up empty. Next I tried to find something about the Donald story, but a site that a friend told me about didn't help me, either, because only titles were listed, no contents.
I questioned my family, but to no avail which was very disappointing ;-)

So now I had a pair of bead embroidered earrings in light blue (for the water), with small mirrors on top and sparkly crystals in the handle, and the story that inspired them didn't even exist?

It didn't even comfort me that I liked the result. Could I really be that wrong about something that had been taking up space in my brain for so long? I was sure I hadn't made that up myself.
Of course there was only one way to solve this problem, I had to look through my comic books.
I started with my "Walt Disneys Lustige Taschenbücher", translated "Walt Disney's Funny Pocketbooks", a comic book series that, other than the regular "Micky Maus", had around 250 pages and thus allowed for longer stories. They were published several times a year, not weekly like "Micky Maus", and with very few exceptions, the stories were by European artists, mostly Italian in the early years, in fact they were based on the Italian series "I Classici di Walt Disney". For economic reasons, the early books weren't fully colored, but the double pages were alternatedly black-white and colored.
The LTB as they are called here had many ups and downs regarding the quality of the stories - both the drawing and the writing - but I grew up on them; and although they can't compare with the work of Carl Barks, there are a few wonderful adventures in them.

And .... "Auf den Spuren der alten Griechen" (In the tracks of the ancient Greeks),
LTB 32 "Donald im Glück" (Donald in Luck)!
More like "Cat in Luck"! I didn't have to search as long as I had feared.
I had never looked for Greeks on the aforementioned site because I was so fixed on the mirror part or I may even have been quicker.

So, was the story based on a Greek tale?
Kind of. Actually it mixed up two Greek tales, added a detail of its own and threw in an Italian adventurer for good measure.
Tale 1: Deucalion and Pyrrha survive a flood sent by Zeus as a punishment thanks to being warned by Prometheus, Deucalion's father (they didn't take any animals, shame on them, Gundel and der Dekan said). When they ask the goddess Themis how to repopulate the world, she tells them to cover their heads and throw the bones of their mother over their shoulders, meaning Gaia, the mother of all living things, her bones being rocks. The rocks thrown by Deucalion turn into men, those thrown by Pyrrha into women. Again, it doesn't say anything about cat..., erm, animals.
Tale 2: Castalia, a nymph, tried to evade Apollo's amorous advances, and threw or transformed herself into a spring near Delphi.

In the story that Huey, Dewey, and Louie tell Scrooge and Donald, Deucalion and Pyrrha don't ask Themis for advice, but the gods in general. Next, the nymph Castalia appears. She throws her mirror to the ground and it turns into a mirror-shaped spring (not a lake, mea culpa) and advises the couple to throw Gaia's bones over their shoulders when the light of the full moon falls on the spring.
To get a free vacation to Greece, Donald convinces Scrooge to search for the spring and use it to turn stones into gold, and when they come to Greece and Donald finds an antique mirror in a shop, he sneaks it into the fire, determined to blame the mirror's age when the spell won't work.
Of course the nephews notice right away that the mirror is from glass and can't possible be as old as the tale, but Scrooge tries his luck, anyway.
Instead of being turned into gold, however, the rock gets duplicated. The nephews look the mirror up in their trusted scout guidebook and find out that Cagliostro, an Italian adventurer and "magician", invented this magic mirror.
Finally the mirror breaks and the pieces produce a crowd of Scrooge duplicates who chase after Donald, a spell that lasts for an hour.

There you go. What you never wanted to learn, I got it for you :-D
Oh yeah, and earrings.

All the Ducks belong to the Walt Disney Company. I am not affiliated with Disney in any way.

Oldies but Goodies - Inspired by other cultures

Artists and artisans have always looked for inspiration in other cultures, sometimes deliberately, sometimes maybe not so much.
This week's Jewelry Artisans Community Oldies but Goodies Challenge has so many very different entries that it was hard just to pick a few. Then I decided to highlight my favorites and invite you to click through to the rest. It's worth it because there's much more to see!

1 The Crafty Chimp
2 Jewelry Art by Dawn
3 RioRita
4 Cat's Wire
5 MC Stoneworks

Oldies but Goodies - Asian inspiration

I'll make it short today - please enjoy my selection from this week's Jewelry Artisans Community Oldies but Goodies Challenge.

1 and 6 Jewelry Art by Dawn
2 and 7 RioRita
3 and 5 Cat's Wire
4 and 7 MC Stoneworks

Inspired by a magnet

I'm sure I am not the only one to have magnets on her fridge. Some of mine are more than 20 years old. I got cats (of course), I got commercials like His Master's Voice or Pez, I got the X-Files, and I also have a few that I got at museum shops like the little Monet.

Three years ago we went to Cambridge for vacation. I loved it. We visited the Fitzwilliam Museum twice, in fact we went back for one painting. If they had had a little magnet of it at the shop, I would have gotten it for sure.
Instead I went for a sheet of small tile magnets in Art Nouveau style. These are a few of them.

Yesterday morning - early, early morning - one of them caught my eye and inspired me to make a bead looming pattern.

Here is the result. I have to say I've licked blood and am already trying to decide which one will be the next!

This pendant is available in my Zibbet shop now.

Where do I go for inspiration?

Yup, it's time for the Jewelry Artisans Community blog carnival again. Time flies, I swear!
This month's topic is inspiration and to be honest it's not as easy to answer as you might think.
Maybe if the question had been "where do I not go for inspiration" although I'm not even sure I could answer that.

The truth is that inspiration is hiding everywhere even if that sounds like a cliché, and I do not have to go anywhere, I just have to look around me. Don't think I want to brag. Being inspired doesn't mean that something comes always out of it. Some ideas don't work out, some fail because of lacking skills, materials or time.
Sometimes I think my brain is like a nest with baby birds and that one cuckoo who does its best to push them out of the nest. I don't write my inspirations down and they probably fall out of my brain and get stepped on all the time.
I don't really think that matters, though. It would take up so much time to try them all. The fun part is being inspired and feeling an idea creep into your head, and as long as some of them hold on to their nest and grow up, that's perfectly fine. Okay, my metaphor might be a little wonky here ... creeping baby birds, huh.

Inspiration comes from my cats' eyes - I don't have to go there, they follow me around and even stick to me at times as if they are glued on, the cats, not their eyes of course - the tiles in my bathroom - you would be surprised how many different things I have seen in their glazed surface before when standing there brushing my hair - clouds, the evening sky, nature in general actually, colors, movies, floors - remember my bead loomed rug and floor series? - music, faces, sounds ... take a moment, watch and listen.

I am convinced that most of the times people don't see the original inspiration in my pieces or wouldn't even suspect one even if it's there. There's the spark and maybe even a complicated train of thought behind there and often enough I forget them myself.
I'm absolutely sure it's the same for others out there and that makes the whole journey so exciting, doesn't it?

If you would like what the other JAC members have to say about that subject, have a look here. I'll add links as they come in.

Bead Sophisticate
thecraftychimp

I'd also like to hear your opinion, especially if you are an artist yourself. What inspires you?

A magic world

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.

Blackbird's singing in the dead of night ...

I have loved this song by the Beatles since I was 12 years old. That was when I got my first own cassette player, a used one from a friend, together with her Beatles cassettes that she had grown out of. My love affair with their songs began then and has not ended since.

Now this song from the White Album from 1968 inspired me to make another of my wire critters. I am not sure how the little fellow got so fat if all he gets are small worms like the one in his beak now, but maybe this is just a snack before he really digs in at Bird McDonald's or something like it? And of course he's not singing right now because it would be bad manners with his beak full.